A doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison issued a public apology this week after accusations emerged online that they were presenting as a person of color despite being mostly of Italian ancestry.
CV Vitolo-Haddad — who uses they/them pronouns — wrote in a Medium post Sunday that they resigned from a teaching position and stepped down as co-president of UW-Madison’s chapter of the Teaching Assistants’ Association graduate workers’ union. Vitolo-Haddad was also at one point director of the school’s speech and debate team.
“I am Southern Italian/Sicilian. In trying to make sense of my experiences with race, I grossly misstepped and placed myself in positions to be trusted on false premises,” Vitolo-Haddad wrote. “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.”
…”For years, I have doubted my intuition, questioned whether anyone would believe me, and rationalized that CV might, despite all of the inconsistencies in their story, somehow be telling the truth,” the author of the post exposing Vitolo-Haddad wrote. “Race, after all, is slippery and racialization is not just about what is immediately visible, a fact I now believe CV has taken advantage of as they slide themselves further into spaces of Black identity and political organizing that do not belong to them.”
UW-Madison spokeswoman Meredith McGlone confirmed that Vitolo-Haddad, a student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is not currently a teaching assistant at the university.
“UW-Madison expects that people represent themselves authentically and accurately in all aspects of their academic work,” McGlone said.
The graduate workers’ union issued a statement condemning the cultural appropriation “in no uncertain terms.”
“The TAA enabled this harm by electing them to a position of power in our union: we have unknowingly rewarded the toxic opportunism of performing Blackness,” the statement reads. “We intend to immediately begin the work of repairing this harm.”
The union will host a town hall on race Monday to allow members to discuss the revelation and to determine how the group can move forward.
The graduate student in question is CV Vitolo-Haddad, a Ph.D. candidate in journalism and mass communication. They (Vitolo-Haddad’s preferred pronoun) were outed last week via an anonymous post on Medium and subsequently wrote two posts of their own on the platform.
Vitolo-Haddad described their own actions as letting “guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove” and allowing people to “make assumptions when I should have corrected them.”
“I am so deeply sorry for the ways you are hurting right now because of me,” Vitolo-Haddad wrote in their first public apology. “You have expressed confusion, shock, betrayal, anger, and mistrust. All of those things are a consequence of how I have navigated our relationships and the spaces we share.”
In the second, edited apology, Vitolo-Haddad described themself as “Southern Italian/Sicilian.” In trying to make sense of their experiences with race, “I grossly misstepped and placed myself in positions to be trusted on false premises. I went along with however people saw me.”
On social media, spanning years, however, Vitolo-Haddad has described themself as other than white — in various ways.
This summer, for instance, Vitolo-Haddad described themself as “italo habesha,” meaning of Italian and Eritrean or Ethiopian descent, and “lightskin,” according to screenshots included in the anonymous post outing them.
Several posts are also in Spanish, and allude to Latinx and/or Afro-Latinx ancestry. Tweeting about Krug just last week, they said that their mother described them as Cuban and that the “colorism we uphold and lean into to distance ourselves is actually why no one trusts.” Ironically, in retrospect, they called Krug a “Kansas cracker” who got a Ph.D. in “performing blackface.” They also described “transraciality” as “violence.”
In another 2017 post, Vitolo-Haddad wrote that their mother faulted them for not having enough burning sage to keep their dog “safe from los espíritus malignos,” or evil spirits. The post also seems to say that their mother is a “bruja,” or witch.
Other posts refer to their family’s history of being “colonized.”
The anonymous author of the Medium post says that Vitolo-Haddad is from a white, affluent Italian American family that lives in Florida. Haddad, according to the post, is a name Vitolo-Haddad kept from their past marriage. The author — described only as an affiliate of Madison — notes that Krug also described herself as having different nonwhite backgrounds, including North African and Afro-Latinx.
“Though their claim to a POC identity was vague, the one consistency was their insistence that they were a constant target of acts of racism and that they came from some kind of nonwhite background,” the anonymous author wrote, accusing Vitolo-Haddad of changing their appearance over time to appear nonwhite. “They referenced it frequently on social media and in interpersonal conversations. Their behavior was reminiscent of the way people who knew Krug have described her: perpetually in a victim status, but also perpetually shifting in terms of the specifics. Their stories lacked coherence, but they intimated an insider status that made (and makes) people hesitant to question them.”
Vitolo-Haddad’s initial apology said that they were stepping down from all positions of organizational power at Madison, including their co-presidency of the Teaching Assistants’ Association and their teaching position.
Vitolo-Haddad did not agree to an interview request. Asked via email whether they would remain at Madison as a student only, with no teaching responsibilities, they said, “Those I harmed will be the ones to determine the consequences.”….
What about Vitolo-Haddad? They said Wednesday via email that while they benefited “socially” in certain ways from the situation, they never applied for scholarships, fellowships or awards for people of color or identified as Black on any forms asking about their identification. They also said they’d never represented themself as Black in their published scholarship, which includes work on the rhetorical strategies of far-right groups.
Vitolo-Haddad directed further questions to the second apology post, which says there were “three separate instances,” otherwise unspecified, when they were asked if they were Black but did not say no. They apologized for entering Black organizing spaces and for “failing to correct varied misconceptions about my identity over the years, and for everything I did to aid or advance those ideas.”
In particular, they said, “I want to apologize for ever taking lies about Cuban roots at face value,” though it’s unclear to what they are referring. “Additionally, I want to apologize for how my failure to own up to these harmful decisions publicly made every conversation on social media about the varied ways I’ve been racialized a source of confusion and deception.”
…Meredith Mcglone, spokesperson for Madison, said that the university “expects that people represent themselves authentically and accurately in all aspects of their academic work.” She confirmed that Vitolo-Haddad is “not currently employed as a teaching assistant.”
Vitolo-Haddad in the second confession post said, “What I know now is that perception is not reality. Race is not flat, it is a social construct rife with contradictions. Fighting racism never required dissociating myself from whiteness. In fact, it derailed the cause by centering my experience.”
While “most of the trust I destroyed cannot be rebuilt,” they said, they seek “redress that is appropriate for each individual I’ve harmed.” This will be a “long-term and ongoing process, prioritizing those most directly impacted. I won’t pretend to know what that looks like, but I am committed to being part of it until the end.”
