A CONSERVATIVE-bashing graduate student has “admitted they’ve been lying about being black” and has since resigned from their teaching job.
CV Vitolo-Haddad, who attends the University of Wisconsin-Madison, apologized last week for pretending to be a person of color – when they are not.
Last week, Vitolo-Haddad, who goes by the pronouns “they” and “them,” wrote in two different blog posts: “When asked if I identify as black, my answer should have always been ‘No.’”
“There were three separate instances I said otherwise,” Vitolo-Haddad wrote, as noted by the Wisconsin State Journal, explaining that their background is Southern Italian and Sicilian.
“I have let guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove,” they wrote in another post.
“I have let people make assumptions when I should have corrected them,” they said. “I take full responsibility for spreading these lies and am deeply sorry.”
“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.”
Vitolo-Haddad, who according to the New York Post has previously bashed conservatives, continued: “I went along with however people saw me.
“All of those actions were deeply misguided and have caused an incredible amount of hurt for the Madison community, those I organize with, and everyone who has been exposed to this public reckoning.
“It was my choice and error to identify any differently.”
Vitolo-Haddad declined an interview with the Journal, but texted a reporter: “I repeated things I heard growing up from my family that I now know to be lies.
“I am so sorry. I take full responsibility for spreading these lies and am deeply sorry.”
They have since resigned from their teaching position and as co-president of the school’s chapter of the Teaching Assistants’ Association, a graduate student union.
Vitolo-Haddad’s admission comes weeks after Jessica Krug, a white person who worked as a professor at George Washington University, confessed that she was lying about being black.
Krug, 38, “canceled” herself in a blog post and wrote that she has pretended to be black for years – as she taught African history courses.
“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. Not just any lies,” Krug wrote.
“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 continued: “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”
Krug attributed her false identity claims to “mental health demons,” but said that does not excuse her actions.
She was suspended by George Washington after she published her post, and the university said she would not teach classes this semester as it investigates the incidents.
Colleagues alleged that Krug only came clean because she had been found out.
A family friend claimed that Krug even skipped out on her own mother’s funeral to avoid being found out.
Years before Krug was found out, a woman named Rachel Dolezal was revealed to be white after spending her life pretending to be black.
She’s said that she grew up in Montana, with religious parents and that she began to change her perspective as a teenager after her parents adopted four black children.
Dolezal decided to become publicly black years later, after a divorce.
The ruse worked until 2015, when her parents, with whom she has long feuded, told reporters that their daughter was born white but was presenting herself as a black activist in the Spokane, Washington, region.
The story became an international sensation, and she was fired as head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP and also lost her job teaching African studies at Eastern Washington University.
