Another White Academic Has Admitted To Lying About Being Black
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Mere weeks after former George Washington University professor Jessica Krug was pressured into coming forward and admitting that she had been pretending to be Black for the entirety of her professional career, another white academic has been outed for lying about their racial identity. CV Vitolo-Haddad, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has resigned from a teaching position at the college after an anonymous Medium post led them to admit that they had lied about being a person of color.
The Medium post, which provides a detailed and well-researched account of the anonymous author’s reasons for questioning Vitolo-Haddad’s racial identity, starts off their account by explaining that the outing of Jessica Krug as white was actually the catalyst for them taking a closer look into Vitolo-Haddad. In different contexts, Vitolo-Haddad had referred to themselves as Cuban, claimed to have an Afro-Latinx grandparent, alluded to themselves as Latinx, claimed to have Ethiopian ancestry, and identified with Blackness by referring to themselves as “lightskin.” The anonymous author, who identifies themselves as a non-Black person of color, also discusses that one of the reasons they chose to share their concerns was because of Vitolo-Haddad’s presence in Black organizing spaces on the Wisconsin-Madison campus.
“For years, I have doubted my intuition, questioned whether anyone would believe me, and rationalized that CV might, despite all of the inconsistencies in their story, somehow be telling the truth. Race, after all, is slippery and racialization is not just about what is immediately visible, a fact I now believe CV has taken advantage of as they slide themselves further into spaces of Black identity and political organizing that do not belong to them.”
After the accusations surfaced, Vitolo-Haddad posted two apologies on Medium, shared several days apart. In the first, entitled “A First Step” Vitolo-Haddad offered apologies to their “friends, loved ones, and organizing comrades,” but failed to actually use the words “race,” “ethnicity,” or even to directly name what they were apologizing for, preferring to remain vague. The closest their post comes to addressing the reason for the apology was with a vague mention of their ancestry: