Another Day, Another Dolezal: UW-Madison Student Admits They've Been Pulling a Krug and Apologizes for Faking Blackness

*DJ Khaled voice* AND ANOTHER ONE!!!

Can you imagine the full-throated cackles you would get if you told Black people 50 years ago that by the year 2020, white people would be losing their jobs, credibility, social circles and self respect by pretending to be niggas?

A white person who is not Rachel Dolezal or Jessica Krug has become the latest star of the ongoing saga: White People Who Want to be Oppressed So Badly They Decided to be Black.

University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student CV Vitolo-Haddad—who uses non-binary they/them pronouns—issued an apology Monday after they spent years “posturing as a person of color while working as a teaching assistant and acting as co-president of UW-Madison’s chapter of the Teaching Assistants’ Association graduate student worker’s union,” the Daily Cardinal reports.

From the Cardinal:

Vitolo-Haddad, who worked at UW-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, actually identifies as Southern Italian/Sicilian. However when certain individuals made assumptions about their race, they failed to correct people who identified them as Black and relied on their parent’s “conflicting stories” of their heritage, the Wisconsin State Journal reported.

Last Sunday, Vitolo-Haddad released their first apology on the blogging website Medium, announcing their resignation as teaching assistant and co-president of the TAA.

“The harm I caused is a result of my lack of courage, a preference for being vague and contradictory, uncertain and insecure. I want to make amends for every ounce of heartbreak and betrayal,” reads Vitolo-Haddad’s first post.

Vitolo-Haddad issued a second apology on Sept. 8, titled “A Second Step,” which intended to provide a clearer statement of their identity and what they did wrong.

“What I know now is that perception is not reality. Race is not flat, it is a social construct rife with contradictions,” Vitolo-Haddad writes. “Fighting racism never required dissociating myself from whiteness. In fact, it derailed the cause by centering my experience.”

I mean... I suppose if I was feeling very, very, extremely mother fucking DELUSIONAL generous, I might buy that people who saw Vitolo-Haddad as racially ambiguous might have taken a wild shot in the dark (pun intended) and guessed, of all things, that they were Black. Sure, why not? And as far as them relying on their parent’s “conflicting stories” of their heritage, what white person doesn’t take it at face value when their drunk uncle tells them they’re 1/36th Cherokeee on their great, great, great, great grandfather’s favorite slave’s aunty’s side?

Vitolo-Haddad admits that they benefited “socially” from posing as a person of color (they also didn’t correct people who thought they were Latino, according to the New York Post), but they said they never identified as non-white on paper or applied for any scholarships or awards designated for people of color.

Of course, the TAA released a statement apologizing for facilitating Vitolo-Haddad’s ruse saying that they “have unknowingly rewarded the toxic opportunism of performing Blackness.”

I guess you can give Vitolo-Haddad that they’re not quite as bad as Krug—who received her doctorate in history from UW-Madison, according to the New Yorker—only because Krug explictly claimed a Black identity, championed herself as a Black activist, and even went so far as to borrow a Great Value blaccent from whoever sold Iggy Azalea hers. It’s also widely believed that Krug had to be outed by a someone else as the second coming of Dolezal before she made the decision to publish that weak-ass mea culpa and resign from her position as a professor at George Washington University.

There’s just one thing about Dolezal, Krug, Vitolo-Haddad and all the others we all know are out there that continues to truly baffle me: They all appear to have forgotten how much easier it is to just be white in America.