A nonbinary white graduate student admitted to not being black or Latino after years of saying otherwise.
“When asked if I identify as black, my answer should have always been ‘No,’” CV Vitolo-Haddad wrote on Sept. 8 in a Medium post. “There were three separate instances I said otherwise.”
Vitolo-Haddad, who is actually of Southern Italian and Sicilian heritage, resigned from a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after the admission.
“I have let guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove,” Vitolo-Haddad previously said in another apology published on Medium. “I have let people make assumptions when I should have corrected them.”
CV Vitolo-Haddad, an academic at @UWMadison & an antifa activist, has apologized after being outed as someone pretending to be a person of color.
I debated CV last year on a podcast. She became extremely irate when I discussed how common hate hoaxes are. https://t.co/XYa4RA3pBD pic.twitter.com/qahhwz97Sd
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) September 17, 2020
Vitolo-Haddad also specifically apologized for letting others assume the graduate student had Cuban heritage.
“I want to apologize for ever taking lies about Cuban roots at face value, and for subsequently attaching myself to people’s perceptions of me as though it would provide answers where there are none.”
The admission follows an apology this summer from a former George Washington University professor who lied about being black.
“For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” 38-year-old professor Jessica Krug wrote in a September Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.”
“To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness,” she said. “I have built my life on a violent anti-Black lie, and I have lied in every breath I have taken.”
Krug resigned from her position at George Washington University following the admission.
