Rachel Dolezal never surprised me in the slightest. A white woman who masqueraded as Black while leading a N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Washington State about 12 years ago, she was an almost inevitable sign of our times. So Hannah Gann needn’t surprise us either. Gann is a 34-year-old public-school teacher and activist in Philadelphia who grew up white, Jewish and affluent but for years has falsely claimed to be of Black (Tunisian) and Palestinian descent. She was a prominent advocate of the Palestinian cause, so forceful as to have been accused of antisemitism. Fellow activists outed her last month and she has acknowledged lying.
Gann is an ideological descendant of Dolezal, who grew up white in Montana in the 1980s and ’90s and started “identifying” as Black some years after completing a master’s degree at Howard University, a historically Black school. Wearing her hair in Black American styles and sporting a spray tan or using bronzer — the one thing besides membership in Homo sapiens that she shares with Donald Trump — she claimed to have a Black father. Her parents outed her as white in 2015, but she dug in her heels. She now goes by the name Nkechi Diallo and has said that she is “not white” but “transracial.”
There have been other such cases between Dolezal’s outing and Gann’s. Remember Jessica Krug, the white woman from Kansas passing as a Blacktina from the Bronx? Krug taught history at George Washington University, studied Blackness and published a well-reviewed book. She called herself “Jess la Bombalera” on social media, affecting a New York Latino accent in posts defending her indigent Bronx “brothers and sisters.” She resigned from George Washington in 2020 after admitting her deception. There was also Satchuel Paigelyn Cole, a white social justice activist who confessed in 2020 that she had posed as Black. And there was CV Vitolo-Haddad, a white grad student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who resigned from a teaching post in 2020 after admitting to have pretended to be a person of color.
These cases suggest a subtype of modern white identity. For this person, the commitment to contesting the evil of whiteness is all-consuming, an ideological North Star that orients her entire worldview. It is an extreme expression of the outlook that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called “Woke 1,” in which the world is always neatly divided into wicked white oppressors and virtuous nonwhite victims. For a white person with these beliefs, it is a short step to wanting not to be white, to escape the original sin of that privilege. To be the victim is to be not just innocent but also more interesting. It also can provide a sense of meaning in a modern world that no longer gives ready answers to the question of life’s purpose. “Who am I? What am I for? I’m … Black!” The decision may be eccentric — skin darkening as part of your morning routine? — but it is hardly counterintuitive.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing