![Rachel Dolezal, Today Show](https://akns-images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/2015516/rs_1024x759-150616070630-1024.Rachel-Dolezal-Today-Show-1JR-61615_copy.jpg?fit=around%7C1024:759&output-quality=90&crop=1024:759;center,top)
There was still a burning question that Rachel Dolezal had yet to answer when she sat down with NBC News' Amber Payne.
"How do you do your hair? Is it a perm, is it a weave? Everybody's asking," the managing editor of NBCBLK.com asked the now former president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the NAACP, who has been accused of repeatedly lying about being part African-American.
"This right here? You're just gonna out me like that?" Dolezal laughed, pointing to her bouncy curls.
"But everybody wants to know, Rachel," Payne insisted, smiling.
"Well, because you're you," Dolezal offered, "and I'm here, I'll tell you...Like I said, if I'm at the grocery store or anywhere else, I'd be like, 'It's none of your business, back off.'
"But yeah, so this is a weave and, you know, I do it myself...But I do threads, I do braids--you know, not just my hair but, actually, most of the time I've been doing this because," she laughed, "I've had time recently to change."
By time she was presumably referring to her new in-between jobs status, Dolezal having resigned her NAACP post after word got out that she had been dishonest about her heritage.
But as for how she feels within, that hasn't changed one bit despite the backlash.
"I identify as black," Dolezal told Matt Lauer earlier Tuesday on Today.
"The timing of it was a shock. I mean, wow," she admitted when asked whether she thought questions about her race would ever kick up such controversy—and whether she ultimately expected to face questions about her race. "The timing was completely unexpected. As to the second question, I did feel that at some point I would need to address the complexity of my identity."
"I don't really see why they're in a rush to whitewash some of the work that I have done and who I am and how I've identified," Dolezal also said. "This goes back to a very early age with myself identification with the black experience, as a very young child."
In an interview with Savannah Guthrie, airing tonight on NBC Nightly News, Dolezal says, "I definitely am not white. Nothing about being white describes who I am. The closest thing that I can come to is if—if you're black or white, I'm black. I'm more black than I am white."