White grad student pretending to be black apologizes and resigns from teaching position

A white graduate student has resigned from their teaching position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after falsely claiming to be a person of colour.

As first reported by the Wisconsin State Journal, CV Vitolo-Haddad, whose non-binary pronouns are “they” and “them,” admitted to misrepresenting their race. The academic is Southern Italian and Sicilian, not black or Latino as they've previously purported.

"In trying to make sense of my experiences with race, I grossly misstepped," Vitolo-Haddad wrote in a September 8 article on the blogging platform Medium. "I went along with however people saw me. I over-identified with unreliable and unproven family history and latched onto anything I remembered growing up."

Vitolo-Haddad acknowledged that their actions were "deeply misguided" and "caused an incredible amount of hurt for the Madison community" as well as "everyone who has been exposed to this public reckoning."

Expressing deep regret to those "I deceived by inserting myself into Black organizing spaces I didn’t belong in," Vitolo-Haddad called the deception "parasitic and harmful."

They went on to realise that "perception is not reality" and "[r]ace is not flat" but a "social construct rife with contradictions."

“I have let guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove,” Vitolo-Haddad stated in a prior confession. “I have let people make assumptions when I should have corrected them.”

To remedy the "betrayal," Vitolo-Haddad announced their resignation as co-president of the Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA) and associate professorship at UW-Madison.

"I can’t redress harm while in a position of organizational power," they asserted. "Education is build on a foundation of trust and accountability, and until I repair that I should not be teaching."

According to Inside Higher Ed, Vitolo-Haddad clarified via email that they never applied for scholarships, fellowships, or awards exclusively for ethnic minorities.

UW-Madison spokesperson Meredith Mcglone stated that the university “expects that people represent themselves authentically and accurately in all aspects of their academic work,” confirming that Vitolo-Haddad is “not currently employed as a teaching assistant.”

Their confession comes a week after an anonymous post exposed their white lies as "another academic racial fraud."

Vitolo-Haddad reportedly "lived an economically privileged life" with their white, affluent Italian American family, growing up in a $1.5 million home in Florida and attending an expensive private high school.

The Ph.D. candidate in journalism and mass communication has regurgitated critical race theory talking points on their YouTube vlog.

Last year on a political podcast, The Post Millennial's editor-at-large Andy Ngo debated Vitolo-Haddad. The black imposter reportedly became "extremely irate" when Ngo pointed out the common occurrence of hate hoaxes.

Vitolo-Haddad's downfall followed another high-profile scholar's self-cancellation and career termination. Jessica Krug, a former professor of African American history at George Washington University and a UW-Madison doctoral alumna, outed herself earlier this month for publicly identifying as an Afro-Caribbean woman when she is, in actuality, of Jewish descent. Vitolo-Haddad reportedly called Krug a “Kansas cracker” who received a Ph.D. in “performing blackface," describing the “transraciality” as “violence.”