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Fake like US

Boston Tea Party Currier Public Domain wikimedia
Some of the white men who dumped the cargo of ships in the 1773 Boston Tea Party disguised themselves as Native Americans. (c) Wikimedia

In North America, headlines exposing ethnic and racial fakes are a trend. A viral twitter thread last December revealed the ethnic confidence game perpetrated by Hilaria Baldwin, a Massachusetts-born yoga instructor who purported to have been born in Mallorca, Spain. In early January, Prism reporter Tina Vásquez revealed that human rights attorney Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan has “spent more than a decade pretending to be Latina.” In a seemingly ironic twist, Bannan has been an outspoken proponent for the decolonization of Puerto Rico.

Imposters who strategically cultivate the illusion that they belong to racially or ethnically minoritized groups are chameleon-like confidence artists. They deceive victims, convincing them of a false origin story, often through the use of sartorial signifiers, personal grooming, personal narrative, speech patterns, and strategic elision. Imposters play these confidence games for the sake of material and symbolic benefits. Bannan profited from her claimed ethnic identity, receiving scholarships, fellowships and prestigious titles. She was elected to the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights and became the National Lawyer Guild’s “first Latina president.” After Rachel Dolezal’s now notorious grift was exposed, she was offered a book deal and public speaking engagements.

With each grifter exposed comes the stream of speculation about the psycho-social motives of such confidence artists. The impostors often address these concerns, giving various justifications for their grifts. Dolezal told reporters that she is a “transracial” person, thereby suggesting that she should be able to inhabit any racial identity that she chooses. Bannan attempted to “clarify” her grift by issuing a statement that subtly echoes Dolezal’s excuse: “I have identified as Latina for decades…[this] identity has been my most authentic expression of who I am.” Scholar Jessica Krug, a white woman from Kansas who appropriated combined Black and Latina identities, self-published a nonpology that attributed her grift to disability: “Mental health issues likely explain why I assumed a false identity.” Krug’s ableist excuse-making stinks but her nonapology offers a historical clue: “My continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is…wrong — unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial.

“When the whitest faces are continually made the representative faces of Latinidad, grifters use the opportunity to insinuate themselves into community and usurp benefits”

It should be noted that colorism within Latin American diasporic communities has made this type of confidence game especially easy for non-Latinos to perpetrate in the United States. When the whitest faces are continually made the representative faces of Latinidad, grifters use the opportunity to insinuate themselves into community and usurp benefits for themselves.

Settler-colonialism

Racial and ethnic confidence artists perpetuate settler-colonialism, debunking the notion of post-colonialism. These grifters continue the European project of settlement and colonization and their confidence tricks belong to a well-documented tradition that has been practiced in the Americas for centuries.

“These grifters continue the European project of settlement and colonization”

In the Thirteen Colonies, the impersonation of racial and ethnic “others,” Indigenous others in particular, signaled white privilege and resulted in the proliferation of pretendians, non-Natives pretending to be Natives. This pernicious form of masquerading continues to serve as a paradoxical expression of American identity rooted in white nationalism. The Boston Tea party, a riot led by aggrieved settlers who believed they were suffering fiscal abuse under the British, serves as an early model of this practice.

In 1773, a group of about 200 pissed-off white men clumsily disguised themselves as Natives and set out to besiege three tea ships docked at Boston Harbor. The pretendians dumped the ships’ cargo into the sea and one mob participant, George Hewes, chronicled the collective masquerade: “I...dressed myself in the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which I and my associates denominated the tomahawk…after having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin's wharf…When I first appeared in the street after being thus disguised, I fell in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was.”

Hewes and his fellow pretendians intended to deceive witnesses, hoping to scapegoat Natives for the destruction they caused. This scapegoating parallels some responses to Bannan’s unmasking. Victims harmed by Bannan’s deceptive behavior, many of whom are members of Latin American diasporic communities, are being re-framed by Bannan and her supporters as offenders. This role reversal occurred when instead of holding Bannan accountable, Bannan’s defenders accused the Latina reporter who broke the story of, in an absurdly oxymoronic twist, being the true fraud. The reporter, Tina Vásquez, is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant father and a white American mother. Vásquez rightly asserts that unlike Bannan, she isn’t “culturally” Latina. She is Latina.

While most Americans are likely unfamiliar with Brannan’s story, they would probably recognize Jacob Chansley, one of the many white revanchists, and pretendians, who stormed the U.S. Capitol. Some accounts have described Chansley’s costume as Viking-inspired, but Chansley told an interviewer that he’d donned buffalo horns and face paint because they represented “Native American” traditions. He explained that he appropriated coyote skin because “according to the Navajo, the [animal] is like a trickster.”

Trickster figures exist in many mythologies, Nordic mythologies included, but Chansley made a racialized choice by choosing coyote. His rebellion and law-breaking, thus, become associated with, and can be blamed upon, an exoticized alter ego.

Chansley features heavily in one of the most terrifying artifacts to emerge from the Capitol siege, a video in which he stands at the Senate balcony thumping a stick against the floor. He grotesquely mimics Native song and his performance conjures the memory of Boston’s 18th century pretendians. The spectacle is a reminder that settler-colonialism isn’t over. It is ongoing and violent.

“It is a settler-colonial privilege to be able to engage in aspirational otherness, to want to inhabit the selfhood of the very people one aims to displace.”

Commenting on the Capitol siege, Rafia Zakaria writes that “the denial of white terror has not been fostered and fed by President Donald J. Trump alone: it goes further back.” Like the cargo destroyed by the rioters at the Boston Tea Party, the myth of innate white goodness is also a settler-colonial import, an ideological one upon which Krug, Bannan and the other imposters rely. None of them identify as offenders or perpetrators. All hide behind justifications that position them as victims of some sort, more often than not, the victims of an ungrateful or intolerant mob. This positioning fortifies their innocence, placing them beyond accountability’s reach. This positioning obscures a basic racial tenet: dependence on scapegoats is a hallmark of white supremacy.

It is a settler-colonial privilege to be able to engage in aspirational otherness, to want to inhabit the selfhood of the very people one aims to displace. Racial and ethnic fakes continue to walk among us, and once such frauds are exposed, many people would rather forget the harms they committed, especially when the grifter is someone broadly admired. When it comes to recent fakes, it seems that the National Lawyers Guild is moving to hold Bannan responsible for her grift, in part by requiring her to acknowledge that as long as she continues to “identify as Latinx, she is engaging in cultural appropriation and causing harm.”

Long-term accountability for such grifts is rare. Decades of pretending to be Native American didn’t prevent Elizabeth Warren, who usurped opportunities intended for racially minoritized people, from becoming a serious presidential contender. And why would engaging in such a confidence game close off her chances? Faking ancestry is a settler-colonial tradition that’s as American as Dutch apple pie.

*Editor's note



More articles by Category: Disability, Race/Ethnicity, WMC Loreen Arbus Journalism Program
More articles by Tag: Tina Vásquez, Rachel Dolezal, Natasha Bannan, Jessica Krug, Identity, Latina, Latinx, colonial, Boston Tea party, pretendians, Jacob Chansley
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