We covered Blackfishing in a recent article, now let’s talk about an even more extreme and alarming artifice: The rise of white people flat out pretending to be Black or other minorities in recent years.
In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, who was the then head of the Spokane, Washington NAACP chapter stepped down after being exposed as a white woman after posing as Black for years. Dolezal altered her hair and skin to appear African American but claimed that her passing herself off as a different race wasn’t deceptive because she “identified” as Black. According to CNN, Dolezal felt she couldn’t take off her new identity anymore. Her claims are ignorant and insulting to people of color who actually know what it’s like living permanently in their ethnic features, skin pigmentation, hair texture and more, meanwhile a white person posing as Black can simply stop or limit the extent of tanning, stop using makeup to mimic other races’ features, stop getting injections, or take their perm out.
Wanna Thompson, a Black freelance writer, expressed frustration over this in a statement to Artefact Magazine, “Black culture is influential. People think they can participate because a lot of people… have made it welcoming for all to participate. While people want to participate… they never want the responsibility and suffering that comes with being Black. To put it simply, they want our rhythm, but not our blues.”
Thompson’s point is extremely important, as well as historically correct. Black people have been persecuted for many things, including features, for centuries. In the 19th century, Sarah Baartman was caged and put on display for her features as a Black woman. Other Black women have been discriminated against for their hair and chastised for prominent lips and other physical features, yet white women today profit off of these same features. Black people are still being penalized today for these features at the same time that white people are able to benefit from manipulated versions of the same thing.
This year the Dolezal scandal resurfaced online as multiple white professors were exposed for taking on Black identities that were not theirs to take. On September 3rd, Jessica A. Krug, an associate professor of African & Latin American studies at George Washington University, released a statement revealing that she had posed as Black for years and built a completely false identity. Unlike Dolezal, she admitted that her identity theft was a form of “Anti-Black Violence,” but another associate professor of Global Diaspora from Michigan State University, announced that Krug only revealed the truth because she was approached with questioning around her identity by two senior Black Latina scholars after one Black Latina junior scholar raised concerns about Krug’s legitimacy. For this reason, it appears to many that she would not have otherwise come forward and that she only did not want to have to deal with the aftermath of others outing her. Another aspect of Krug’s situation that sparked outrage was the flourishing language of her statement that failed to address how exactly she would ever attempt to right her wrongs.
The extent to which Krug developed her lie is truly astonishing. According to CNN, in addition to attempting to make her hair and skin look more ethnic, Krug made up conflicting stories about coming from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and the Bronx and referred to her ancestors as being a part of Angola culture. She went so far as to claim certain cultural foods had importance to her from her heritage; she used racial slurs and portrayed herself as being immersed in Black Caribbean identity. The layers to her misconduct and lies leave targeted communities feeling outraged and taken advantage of yet again.
In the aftermath of Krug’s scandal additional alarming cases have come to light. On September 6th, Vitolo-Haddad, a graduate student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, issued an apology for falsified identity, after being outed by an anonymous Medium post. Unlike Dolezal and Krug, Vitolo-Haddad did not excessively alter their appearance as part of the stint, but still managed to pass in some spaces. They resigned from their title of co-president of the Teaching Assistants’ Association of their university and like Krug, admitted that they should not have intruded on spaces designed to be safe for people of color. The fact that the apology came after the expose leaves many frustrated and disappointed once again. Vitolo-Haddad uses the pronouns they/them.
The latest of the exposures came on October 27 when white assistant professor Kelly Kean Sharp, who was studying African American history, swiftly resigned after being exposed by an anonymous Medium post. According to Inside Higher Ed, the professor self-identified as Chicana and allegedly created stories of her grandmother coming to the U.S. from Mexico during World War 2, which were found to be falsified when the claims were looked into. Since the unmasking, Sharp’s Twitter was made private, her faculty biography was deleted, and she resigned.
Academica individuals have not only been found portraying false identities in-person. Craig Chapman, a white assistant chemistry professor at the University of Hampshire was put on administrative leave after posing as a woman of color on twitter and using the fake account to attack the Black Lives Matter movement, feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. While Chapman did not take on a different identity in the classroom, his online persona was used to leverage hateful words towards groups and even spread revenge porn of a democratic representative.
All of the above examples highlight a serious problem within our society and an equally alarming theme in the academic community. Higher education is supposed to be a place of learning and gaining tools for career advancement and studies, yet in all these cases it was used as a means of thievery. These instances can leave people of color feeling anxious, distrustful, and cheated in their academic experiences and sets efforts for diversity in the academic community backwards.
In order to move towards true progress for allyship, equality, and diversity in academics, the spreading of false stories and identities must stop and the real experiences and words of people of color need to be heard and uplifted. Misconduct regarding racial misrepresentation like these need to be addressed, taken seriously, and safeguards from this being repeated need to be put in place.