The NYT article says she began portraying herself as black after "the family" adopted four children with dark skin. Does the family mean her parents? If so, maybe she had some kind of sibling jealousy over the attention their skin color brought? It also says she's estranged from her parents. The MSN article says she portrayed her dark-skinned "adopted brother" as her son.

If her parents adopted African American kids during the time she was going that Identity-vs-Role Confusion stage, maybe she adopted an African American persona. If my uninformed guess is true, it's a sad personification of our culture's focus on racial grouping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erikson%27...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/rac...

I think she is a sociopath. but that is an uninformed opinion. non-expert hunch

Okay. It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin' on the porch with my family, singin' and dancin' down in Mississippi...

I am reminded of a Steve Martin movie...

This sentence sounds like a joke: "Dolezal also lied about growing up in a teepee, hunting for her own food with bows and arrows".