Why do white women pretend to be Black and Brown?
Facing emotions they do not understand, white women are “hitting eject” on the complicated and personal nature of white guilt and collective accountability through blackface and delusion.
We’ve all heard about Rachel Dolezal who in 2015 was outed as a white woman — she got a Netflix documentary out of it. You’ve also likely heard of Jessica Krug, who this year was outed as a white woman pretending to be an Afro-Latina from the Bronx. Just days after Krug another woman, CV Vitolo-Haddad (her second surname comes from an ex marriage) was outed as another white woman and PhD Candidate pretending first to be Latina and then Black. Then again in October, Kelly Kean Sharp was outed as another white academic taking the label of Chicana and pretending to have Mexican ancestry.
These four women have remarkably similar stories. They are all white, from the USA, who are ostensibly anti-racist, leftist, post/decolonial scholars who teach African history. They all rise to the top of their fields, becoming published scholars — Krug published a book and runs a scholarship, Dolezal was the president of her local NAACP chapter, Sharp received a tenured professorship right out of her PhD, and Vitolo-Haddad likewise had a job offer for when she finished her PhD. All four reached those zeniths by invading spaces not their own with fraudulent and delusion identities.
This is the result of the psychology of white guilt playing through the many institutionalised structures of white supremacy that make up our society. I’ve outlined a theory on what leads white academics (namely women) to pretend to be black/brown:
- White Guilt — these women are uncomfortable with the negative things associated with whiteness
- White Gaze — they invent identities based on what white people think it means to be a Woman of Colour (WOC)
- Colourism — they game the internalised racism of People of Colour (POC) communities and rise to the top
- White Power and Academia — faced with the same factors that lead individuals to want to reject whiteness, the academy finds reformist ways to open space for POC scholars but ultimtely reward the whitest and least challenging scholars.
White Guilt
The rise of Indigenous, Black, and other POC’s salience in public discourse has brought a cultural reckoning amongst white people and their collective relationship to white supremacy and racism. I’d hesitate to call this “power” since it is not systemic, but it has nevertheless made an impact on the cultural psyche of the USA and the media it produces — white people are becoming more and more aware that they are white and thus racialised beings.
Because white people have such low tolerance for racial stress, having to view themselves as a racialised white person as opposed to just a “person,” and because the USA is a deeply individualist as opposed to collectivist society, all the factors related to the the way race is discussed are then applied to themselves as individuals. Western narratives around race are often very binary, good/bad, white/black, racist/antiracist, the association of whiteness psychologically becomes linked with racist, and thus bad. Thus, being called “white” feels like an affront to those unused to discussing race in an antiracist and crticial manner. No one likes to think of themselves as a bad person, no one likes to think of themselves as a racist and so being white and associated with racism brings feelings of guilt.
People react to guilt in many ways. Some lash out, others deny it exists, others, as we have seen try to escape it through fantasy. They imagine ways in which they are not white at all. They may seem it, but did you know their abuela was Mexican? Or that they have a North African great grandmother? Maybe they claim Indigenous ancestry and identity like Elizabeth Warren, despite Indigenous people not claiming them?
White Gaze
Feeling guilt and choosing to deal with guilt through fantasy, these women start to create their new identity as “insert whatever racially ambiguous identity they can concoct” by replaying the narratives, performances, and impressions of Black, Indigenous and other non-white people they have at their disposal.
The first is obvious, they get a tan, fake or not, and then they accentuate their curls, put on darker foundation, etc. It’s all pretty easy, Ariana Grande and Kylie Jenner show how you can make your skin so dark with products others will routinely confuse you as Latin American or Middle Eastern.
Then these white women begin to feel pleasure at being confused for non-white or being racially ambiguous ( Vitolo-Haddad’s references this in her apology), this after all escapes their association with whiteness the source of their guilt.
Like a drug, this drives individuals to consume anti-racist, post-colonial and decolonial literature and all the contributions these communities have created so as to be a part of this movement and belong. They consume the work of critical race theorists, they enter organising circles, and watch how on twitter Black, Indigenous, and POC are always angry. They’re always ranting about the racism they individually experience. Unfortunately, because of the way Twitter and news media functions, this is often the only part of our experience as BIPOC that gets published/seen. We rarely get to tell our own stories without sharing some kind of trauma.
For many, and especially for most of the POC who have skin as fair as the skin these women darken themselves to have, direct discrimination it’s not actually that frequent an experience because white passing privilege necessarily shields us from the colourism our darker siblings experience. Certainly not as frequent as CV Vitolo-Haddad’s twitter would have you believe. These women who engage in blackface nevertheless are inspired by the loudest voices, who so often are only given a platform by white supremacy because the sensationalism of injustice will sell news stories and will get higher engagement on social media and thus more exposure because of the way the algorithms work.
White people consume this distorted perception of what identity means to us as BIPOC because they don’t usually hold many real relationships with us.
If you have followed these cases as closely as I have you will notice all four of these women are always talking about identity from a place of lacking. They think being a POC means you’re in some kind of deficit. They are always victim, they are facing micro aggressions constantly, being told they’re not Black enough, or being discriminated against at airports/restaurants/townhall meetings for being too Black, etcetera, etcetera.
That’s not what we base our ethnic and racial identities upon. We are not victims, and our racial and ethnic identities are not defined by “deficit.”
My identity as a Venezuelan man is founded upon the deep bonds I share with other people, my family, my friends, my community — it is as much about who claims me as whom I claim to be. It is rooted in the the music I listen to, the songs my mother would sing to me as a child, the food I cook and share with friends, the movies I watch, the books I read, the parties I go to and the jokes I tell — It’s my way of being. It is not my experience navigating an airport and being held up again and again, or being called a drug dealer or whatever nonsense White people think being Latin American means you go through. Those experiences, while certainly impactful and traumatic are not where we derive our identities from, my venezolanidad or “venezuelaness” is not based on deficit, just as I am sure Blackness is not derived from deficit or victimhood.
We are not victims and the implication of how these women create their identities exposes what they truly think of us and thus their racism.
The paucity of these women’s knowledge and understanding of what it is to be us means that they necessarily can’t know how to construct a public persona with that information. So, they do it through complaints since that’s all BIPOC do according to their experience.
They build an identity based on a racist caricature of who we are.
Colourism
White women game our own spaces by playing on our very own communities’ biases against dark skinned individuals.
Colourism is the way in which racism is progressively experienced more forcefully the darker your skin is. Darker skinned individuals pass less and less for white, and vice versa, and so within our very own communities and spaces, the lighter skinned you are the more likely you are to rise to the top. People of Colour also grow up within white supremacy, we also internalise these harmful biases and beliefs about ourselves, and we certainly also weaponise them against ourselves and also members of our community.
What these women are weaponising is the colourism within our own communities. We take on face value that they are not frauds, and we respect, if not admire their capacity to emulate whiteness. We respect their command of English, no iffy accent here. We respect the ease with which they calm white people and navigate those relationships without being threatening. All skills we don’t hold because we do not culturally grow up within such systems of being.
What ways of being do you ask? Here’s an example, I can’t tell you how many times until literally the year I turned 29, I was confused when a white person would say “I’m sorry.” Every time puzzled I would want to say “it’s not your fault?” in return. I eventually learnt “I’m sorry,” is just the idiom, that it represents that they feel “sorrowful” over what you’ve just told them, and they are not in fact admitting guilt — mind, blown. How many times over my life had I misinterpreted the intention of white people and their words? How many times had I been misinterpreted by white people for my intent with my words? How many times did people think I was being aggressive, or dismissive because they didn’t catch my idioms? I can’t know — white supremacy necessarily makes BIPOC ignorant of how these tiny yet consequential details work. We may piece some of these things together, but never all of them.
When these frauds enter our space, we grant them leadership positions within our spaces because they are clearly effective communicators, they get results, but they do this because they navigate whiteness in a way we never could. They grow up within whiteness and innately hold the cultural knowledge and ways of being necessary to navigate a white professional world. We do this while holding back and discriminating against our darker siblings.
Because we are so unwilling to question the people we let into our spaces, maybe because we also recognise to a degree that pain that comes with your in-group thinking you do not belong, we do not push that button out of courtesy. We’re more worried about this in fact than the colourism we perpetuate against darker skinned people.
Worryingly, reading these cases (read into Krug and Vitolo-Haddad) it seems that when that button is pushed the reaction is so huge and angry, people have taken it on face value that the reaction was real. Our bad, we seem to have underestimated the fear of getting caught.
White Power and Academia
Academia is a deeply colonial and white space. All the epistemologies of academia, including the post-colonial ones, come from colonial understandings of the world. There is no denying that there is a deeply liberal, white, and imperialist legacy in the DNA of anthropology, sociology, film studies and well, all the sciences and humanities. White supremacy has permeated every aspect of the academy.
The academy thus suffers culturally from the same white guilt that white people collectively and individually feel. All the elements I have referenced above are occurring just the same with the people who currently hold power in these spaces. They may not be racing to Sephora to buy darker makeup, but they are nevertheless navigating these feelings of guilt and making assumptions of POC scholars through the white gaze and then importantly, acting on that schema.
As such and like all industries, academia is trying to find ways to assuage their guilt in ways that does not fundamentally alter the status quo or threaten their power. The academy opens tiny, generally insignificant spaces for BIPOC to own and excel within. Because of their white gaze, they get an understanding of what a BIPOC academic is like through the highly distorted currents of social media and news media they consume and then they select individuals who are most like them — the lightest skinned ones, the ones that navigate whiteness as whitely as possible, whilst also having all the hallmarks of what a BIPOC academic should be — angry, sassy, etc. They grant these individuals jobs, scholarships, awards, and positions of leadership and power within these tiny ultimately insignificant sandboxes designed to contain, not revolutionise the academy.
The result is that BIPOC scholars are left to fight over the scraps of white supremacy and to battle for the crumbs that the system deigns to drop for us — and as the system intends it is the whitest of us that are allowed to win.
There is much more to be said on this phenomenon that I do not yet understand or have a theory for. Many questions are still unanswered, for instance why does this seem to exclusively (at least until now) be something that only white women do*? Is it because of the way makeup is gendered and thus women have more opportunities to discover ways to become racially ambiguous? Or has it something to do with the way white supremacy and patriarchy work together to provide power to white women over Black women and men through performances of victimhood? Does toxic masculinity disincentivise white men from seeking the kinds of power these frauds have gained from victimhood?
For now, at least, one thing is certain: white people do not yet have healthy narratives to follow that will help them explore the guilt they feel over white supremacy and racism. Until they can let go of individualist beliefs around racism and white supremacy, they will continue to centre themselves in discussions about race and feel personally attacked when the notion of whiteness or racism is brought up. For as long as that continues, we will keep having to unmask fraud after fraud of deluded individual who couldn’t find a healthier way to deal with their guilt.
*there was the curious case of a white man pretending to be a Black scientist woman on Twitter, but I have not included his case since he used that platform to post racist, sexist and transphobic remarks and used the identity of a Woman of Colour to dodge accountability for those positions.
