After three prominent individuals made headlines in September alone for falsely identifying as Black, a fourth has now joined the lineup:
Craig Chapman, a white male University of New Hampshire professor who was called out for being fake after posing as a Black woman on Twitter.
Calling himself “the Science Femme, Woman in STEM,” Chapman hid behind his false identity as “an immigrant woman of color who grew up in poverty” while bragging about how he shut down an effort by his department to issue a statement denouncing racism and white supremacy.
After Twitter users noticed an uncanny resemblance between tweets from the Science Femme and Chapman’s personal account, an
internal email from UNH’s chemistry chair, Glen Miller, confirmed that “the fake Twitter account was in fact set up and run by” Chapman.
“There were a large number of things written by Craig that ranged from unfortunate to hurtful to deeply offensive. These statements do not represent me, nor the collegial, collaborative, accepting department in which I have had the privilege to work for the past 25 years… I reject those statements and their intent, wholeheartedly. But even so, I do not reject Craig. I am not giving up on Craig,” wrote Miller, who added he was “hoping” the scandal wouldn’t end Chapman’s academic career.
Chapman’s curious behavior echoes that of many before him — including, most recently,
Jessica Krug, an activist and George Washington University professor of African American history who, like
Rachel Dolezal, passed as Black for years;
Satchuel Paigelyn Cole (aka Jennifer Benton), a prominent member of Indiana’s “Activists of Color” who falsely identified as Black; and
CV Vitolo-Haddad, a University of Madison-Wisconsin graduate student and teacher who passed as Black, eventually apologizing and resigning as an instructor.
As for Chapman’s stunt, that “was about getting one over on the feminists,” sociologist and professor
Jessie Daniels, author of “
White Lies and Cyber Racism,” tells Yahoo Life. She compares it to trolling and the right-wing concept of “
owning the libs,” calling it “pathological,” “stupid” and “asinine.”
But she also explains that this sort of “
identity tourism” is “very old in terms of the internet phenomenon.”
In her 2002 book
Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, University of Michigan professor Lisa Nakamura described online “theatrical and discursive spaces where identity is performed, swapped, bought, and sold in both textual and graphic media,” thus creating the “opportunity” for “identity tourism” to arise, noting that “tourists operate from a position of privilege and entitlement,” as they “possess mobility, access, and the capital to satisfy curiosities about ‘native’ life.”
