Over the past several weeks, leftist organizing and academic communities in places like New York, Madison, and Indianapolis have been dealing with the aftermath of revelations that some of the loudest and ‘wokest’ members of their communities, Jessica Krug, CV Vitolo, and Satchuel Cole were actually white people masquerading as black. This type of racial or ethnic fraud is, unfortunately, not new. Many made connections to earlier revelations from 2015 about the Spokane NAACP’s former director, Rachel Dolezal’s similar antiblack race fakery and UC-Riverside Professor and radical feminist Andrea Smith’s false claim to Cherokee heritage, a claim she still makes despite being asked not to by the Cherokee nation. What’s up with these frauds?

Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) is Associate Professor at Stony Brook University. He is author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor (SUNY Press, 2019).

Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Latino &Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University and a member of Black Latinas Know. Her research focuses on understanding how the urban built environment mediates race, class, and social inequality.

Follow this week’s guests on Twitter:
Joseph M. Pierce @pepepierce
Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores @zairedinzey

Catch Up on the Issue
Shocking Details Emerge on Indy Activist Who Faked Life as a Black Woman.

White US professor Jessica Krug admits she has pretended to be Black for years.

Additional Resources
Open letter to Elizabeth Warren from Cherokee citizens
Indigenous woman scholars join in open letter to denounce Andrea Smith.
Essay By Joseph M. Pierce: “In Search of an Authentic Indian: Notes on the Self” 
Article By Joseph M. Pierce: “Adopted: Trace, Blood, and Native Authenticity.” 
A Third Step (The CV Dossier)
TBV Statement on Persons Engaging in False Racial Representation