The rise of the race-faking academic

Grad student admits lying about being black, resigns teaching position https://t.co/IvB2NU05iV pic.twitter.com/v28CJevPhY

— New York Post (@nypost) September 16, 2020

CV Vitolo-Haddad resigned last week from a teaching job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In a Medium post, Vitolo-Haddad confesses to actually having Italian Sicilian roots and apologises for an ‘overeager identification’ with people of colour.

‘When asked if I identify as black, my answer should have always been “No”. There were three separate instances I said otherwise. I should not have adopted any identity outside of what I know’, Vitolo-Haddad writes, apologising for entering ‘black organising spaces I didn’t belong to’.

This confession comes just two weeks after Jessica Krug, an associate professor at George Washington University, admitted that she had lied about her race. Krug – another white woman pretending to be black – specialised in African studies and was popular among students for being adept at ‘dismantling whiteness’.

Back in 2015, there was the infamous case of Rachel Dolezal. Dolezal, a professor of Africana Studies, not only managed to fool her university into thinking that she was black – she also managed to lead a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

These race fakers are just the more extreme manifestations of an intellectual culture that thinks whiteness is evil and oppression is holy.

Picture by: YouTube.