AUW-Madison graduate student apologized and resigned from a teaching position at the university after falsely claiming to be a person of color.
CV Vitolo-Haddad, a graduate student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication who uses they/them pronouns, said they identify as Southern Italian/Sicilian. But in a series of apologies issued over the past week, they said they have distorted their ancestry, failed to correct others’ assumptions about their ethnic origins and relied on their parents’ “conflicting stories” of their heritage.
“I have let guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove,” Vitolo-Haddad wrote in an apology posted Sunday on the blogging platform Medium. “I have let people make assumptions when I should have corrected them.”
In a second apology posted Tuesday, Vitolo-Haddad wrote that when asked if they identify as Black on three separate occasions, they did not say no.
“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. … All of those actions were deeply misguided and have caused an incredible amount of hurt for the Madison community, those I organize with, and everyone who has been exposed to this public reckoning. It was my choice and error to identify any differently.”... (Read more)
Submitted 1288 days ago
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