A professor admits she faked her racial identity

[financeguy]

We need a rating system from least to most oppressed group so job hunters deciding what to "identify" as have some practical guidance. I would personally rather identify as employed than not so if that involves a "race fluid" identity, so be it.

[Diogenes]

I don't know the answer, but I'll pose this. Is it possible for a black man to sing country music? A Japanese person to play 'the World Is Waiting for the Sunrise' on the banjo? I've seen both, and they were as authentic as it gets. I thought the idea of education was you could master that which has been 'foreign' to you. If you've mastered it, why couldn't you convey it?

I would call that just cultural exchange. A black person playing country music isn't faking anything, and not to mention country is the white man's blues and is deeply rooted in black music (including the African instrument: the banjo)

She could have built a honest career doing the same thing without faking her identity. Darius Rucker doesn't pretend to be white.

[Wahoo Redux]

Huh.  Anyone see her picture online?  How did she pull this off? 

I wouldn't mind hitting the job market one more time (now that things are very, very bad) but there's no way my skin tone can pass for anything other than whitey white white.

Sigh. "She pulled if off," because race, while very real, is a social, not a biological or phenotypical, category. The classic example is Walter White, who was a black man, and head of the NAACP, but had pale skin and blue eyes. There are lots of people, who identify as black, have parents who both identify as black, but who if you took them out of their social context, would not be indentifiable as black. As Para shows, it can work the other way too.

Okay sure, I get this concept.  "Performativity" I think is the fancy intellectualized term.  She appropriated style, attitudes, and customs of a minority group to make an identity.

But there's also the biological reality.  It's only a couple of microns of pigment and maybe some facial morphology, but still.

The same question persists about Dolezal.  If you've seen the documentary about her, at least one of her colleagues looked at her and thought "How come she looks so white?" or something to that effect, but Dolezal managed to persist until she was outed by a journalist.  I'm just surprised when we are so hyper-attuned to these sorts of differences between us in America.


Maybe we are just super willing and/or eager to see race and ethnicity?

[Caracal]

Huh.  Anyone see her picture online?  How did she pull this off? 

I wouldn't mind hitting the job market one more time (now that things are very, very bad) but there's no way my skin tone can pass for anything other than whitey white white.

Sigh. "She pulled if off," because race, while very real, is a social, not a biological or phenotypical, category. The classic example is Walter White, who was a black man, and head of the NAACP, but had pale skin and blue eyes. There are lots of people, who identify as black, have parents who both identify as black, but who if you took them out of their social context, would not be indentifiable as black. As Para shows, it can work the other way too.

Okay sure, I get this concept.  "Performativity" I think is the fancy intellectualized term.  She appropriated style, attitudes, and customs of a minority group to make an identity.

But there's also the biological reality.  It's only a couple of microns of pigment and maybe some facial morphology, but still.

But that's the thing. Race doesn't correspond to any biological reality. I think people get mixed up about this because so much of the ideology around race is built on the idea that it can be defined by appearance or biology. However, it really can't. Most black people in the United States have substantial amounts of European ancestry. The average is probably around 25 percent, but that means that in many Black Americans, it is substantially higher. There are a pretty large number of people who identify as black who have majority European ancestry. Plenty of those people could pass as white if they wanted to, that's why there is a whole literature and scholarship around "passing." So, given that context, it isn't strange at all that people wouldn't question someone's racial self identification.

[polly_mer]

This is the second professor at GWU this year to have turned out to be living a racial lie: https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-novelist-hg-carrillo-dies-coronavirus-cuban-heritage-a-fiction-20200525-eri3ltxxc5dspgekbdax3w2ebu-story.html

[dismalist]

This is the second professor at GWU this year to have turned out to be living a racial lie: https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-novelist-hg-carrillo-dies-coronavirus-cuban-heritage-a-fiction-20200525-eri3ltxxc5dspgekbdax3w2ebu-story.html

Lying on a resume, including about one's race, is not illegal and probably shouldn't be, though falsifying underlying documents, such as a birth certificate is. What is raised is the question of the trustworthiness of the individual. And in that context, the last couple of sentences of the article are scary:

"I think that in any other century, there were storytellers, like jesters, and in African culture, and in First Nations cultures, and when they told stories, people never expected the truth to be the reality, you know? There was another truth there. And I think that speaks to Hache," he said.

So, how many truths are there about a person? Truth about a person doesn't seem to matter to the interviewee. The perpetrators of the deceit used to be called imposters. Wow, just wow.

[mahagonny]

Lying on a resume, including about one's race, is not illegal and probably shouldn't be, though falsifying underlying documents, such as a birth certificate is.

That's an interesting point, and might make sense as it calls to mind that colleges are routinely lying to the public (by omission) about who's doing the teaching. Thus, you have assistant professors, associate professors, full professors, whose ongoing relationship with the institution is an elaborate, regimented affair,  and then just 'professors.' Unranked, adjunct professors who get called 'professor' and have the job of going out there in front of the classroom cast as imposters, and whose ongoing relationship with the institution is an indifferent coincidence, commonly unbeknownst to the student.
(But let's not get into a hijack. that wouldn't be proper.)

[Wahoo Redux]

Huh.  Anyone see her picture online?  How did she pull this off? 

I wouldn't mind hitting the job market one more time (now that things are very, very bad) but there's no way my skin tone can pass for anything other than whitey white white.

Sigh. "She pulled if off," because race, while very real, is a social, not a biological or phenotypical, category. The classic example is Walter White, who was a black man, and head of the NAACP, but had pale skin and blue eyes. There are lots of people, who identify as black, have parents who both identify as black, but who if you took them out of their social context, would not be indentifiable as black. As Para shows, it can work the other way too.

Okay sure, I get this concept.  "Performativity" I think is the fancy intellectualized term.  She appropriated style, attitudes, and customs of a minority group to make an identity.

But there's also the biological reality.  It's only a couple of microns of pigment and maybe some facial morphology, but still.

But that's the thing. Race doesn't correspond to any biological reality. I think people get mixed up about this because so much of the ideology around race is built on the idea that it can be defined by appearance or biology. However, it really can't. Most black people in the United States have substantial amounts of European ancestry. The average is probably around 25 percent, but that means that in many Black Americans, it is substantially higher. There are a pretty large number of people who identify as black who have majority European ancestry. Plenty of those people could pass as white if they wanted to, that's why there is a whole literature and scholarship around "passing." So, given that context, it isn't strange at all that people wouldn't question someone's racial self identification.

Nella Larson wrote a novel called "Passing."

[bento]

It's a very sad case in so many ways.  Both this person and Dolezal seemed to need a stronger sense of group belonging than just being another white majority member.  This one cycled through different Black identities like a carousel.  No matter what happens to her at GWU, her prospects of a reputable come-back are non-existent.  If she has any friends, I hope someone is watching over her.

I wonder what her colleagues thought about her being Caribbean one week, African the next?  And her parents and family?  What a lost soul - what a world.

[adel9216]

In this Medium post.

The Washington Post has a piece on it.

It's something of a doozy, she works in Africana studies and had claimed to be black. She was apparently a diversity hire, so essentially took a post that could have gone to a scholar of color.

I feel very upset about this. It makes me sick to my stomach but I won't go and harass her on social media like a lot of people are doing. I tried avoiding the topic but as a WOC, I'm not surprised, but speechless and upset. That's all I have to say about it. I'll go back to pretending I have never head of this story, it,s better for my MH.

[kaysixteen]

Obviously lying is wrong, but am I missing something, or is it also explicitly illegal in this country to ask someone about their racial or ethnic heritage, in a job appl?

[financeguy]

eh... "legal" isn't that relevant if it isn't enforced. Take a scholarship at Columbia University about 20 years ago that had been endowed decades in the past for a student from the same state as the grantor of the trust that also specified the recipient must be white. Courts have routinely reversed these conditions, either removing the restriction or allowing the trust corpus to revert to the estate of the decedent after dissolution, depending on what state and how it was drafted. The former happened in this instance.

When I applied to a graduate program after 9/11, I was admitted and told the NY-based department had no "general fellowships" that year but several specialized ones that I should look at and they'd try to nominate me. Nearly every single one of them specified that the recipient must be a member of a specific gender, racial group or both. If you take out other non-race/gender requirements (a specific undergraduate GPA, state of origin, outside interest, etc) I wasn't eligible to be considered for any of them. This was even at a state institution. To my knowledge, NY courts that overturned the Columbia scholarship trust conditions have not been overrun with similar requests to remove restrictions from this institutions endowed fellowships that do not allow white (or in some instance other) applicants.

I have been a minority in the literal definition of the word in all three major cities I've lived in as an adult. I guarantee that if I am ever "underrepresented" based on population percentage  for any opportunity and affirmative action were ever used by an institution to advantage me or other whites, you can take it to the bank that any courts view on the legality of AA practices or nonsense arguments such as "one of many factors" will change immediately.

[Caracal]

eh... "legal" isn't that relevant if it isn't enforced. Take a scholarship at Columbia University about 20 years ago that had been endowed decades in the past for a student from the same state as the grantor of the trust that also specified the recipient must be white. Courts have routinely reversed these conditions, either removing the restriction or allowing the trust corpus to revert to the estate of the decedent after dissolution, depending on what state and how it was drafted. The former happened in this instance.

When I applied to a graduate program after 9/11, I was admitted and told the NY-based department had no "general fellowships" that year but several specialized ones that I should look at and they'd try to nominate me. Nearly every single one of them specified that the recipient must be a member of a specific gender, racial group or both. If you take out other non-race/gender requirements (a specific undergraduate GPA, state of origin, outside interest, etc) I wasn't eligible to be considered for any of them. This was even at a state institution. To my knowledge, NY courts that overturned the Columbia scholarship trust conditions have not been overrun with similar requests to remove restrictions from this institutions endowed fellowships that do not allow white (or in some instance other) applicants.

I have been a minority in the literal definition of the word in all three major cities I've lived in as an adult. I guarantee that if I am ever "underrepresented" based on population percentage  for any opportunity and affirmative action were ever used by an institution to advantage me or other whites, you can take it to the bank that any courts view on the legality of AA practices or nonsense arguments such as "one of many factors" will change immediately.

Yes, life has obviously been difficult and hard for you as a white man.

[mahagonny]

eh... "legal" isn't that relevant if it isn't enforced. Take a scholarship at Columbia University about 20 years ago that had been endowed decades in the past for a student from the same state as the grantor of the trust that also specified the recipient must be white. Courts have routinely reversed these conditions, either removing the restriction or allowing the trust corpus to revert to the estate of the decedent after dissolution, depending on what state and how it was drafted. The former happened in this instance.

When I applied to a graduate program after 9/11, I was admitted and told the NY-based department had no "general fellowships" that year but several specialized ones that I should look at and they'd try to nominate me. Nearly every single one of them specified that the recipient must be a member of a specific gender, racial group or both. If you take out other non-race/gender requirements (a specific undergraduate GPA, state of origin, outside interest, etc) I wasn't eligible to be considered for any of them. This was even at a state institution. To my knowledge, NY courts that overturned the Columbia scholarship trust conditions have not been overrun with similar requests to remove restrictions from this institutions endowed fellowships that do not allow white (or in some instance other) applicants.

I have been a minority in the literal definition of the word in all three major cities I've lived in as an adult. I guarantee that if I am ever "underrepresented" based on population percentage  for any opportunity and affirmative action were ever used by an institution to advantage me or other whites, you can take it to the bank that any courts view on the legality of AA practices or nonsense arguments such as "one of many factors" will change immediately.

Yes, life has obviously been difficult and hard for you as a white man.

Ding! Outing the guy who doesn't know his privilege. Give yourself a hearty pat on the back. Snappy woke rejoinder #1 from the catalog.

[end sarcasm] There must be hundreds of accounts by now on this forum and the old one about how difficult  academic life can be that are responded to with sympathy. Regular occurrence. But now and then people forget to insert race into the discussion.

[apl68]

Question.  Not trying to troll here, I'm honestly curious.  Is it possible in practical terms for a white person (who's honest about it) to get a position in Africana studies and be accepted?  I really don't know.

Yes, totally. And there are men in women's studies departments, too.

Thank you.