Passing for Brown

America, the left insists, is inveterately white supremacist. In fact, the nation that we all used to know as the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave is so systemically racist, we’re told, that only a good long marination in Marxism can restore some semblance of justice to our benighted land, which of course we stole from the Native Americans anyway.

In this cultural climate, what’s a white leftist American to do? Pass himself or herself as something else, of course. The Daily Mail reported Wednesday that “a woke activist who branded herself as a black Palestinian crusader has apologized after being exposed as a white Jewish woman. Hannah Gann, 34, a teacher with the Philadelphia School District, rose to prominence as an outspoken Palestinian-American activist who campaigned in the aftermath of the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel.”

Gann went all-in on the charade: “She allegedly used makeup to darken her skin, appeared to alter her accent, and donned keffiyeh scarves at protests as she railed against racism and Zionism in demonstrations across Philadelphia.” But the Racial Justice Organizing Committee and Philly Educators for Palestine got wind of her real identity and “questioned her about her background”; Gann “finally admitted” that she was a “white woman of Jewish heritage and an Israeli settler family.”

Before Gann, there was Andrea Smith, a Native American professor at the University of California, Riverside, who turned out to be as white as Hannah Gann. The superstar Marxist agitator Angela Davis once called Smith “one of the greatest indigenous feminist intellectuals of our time,” but oh, how the oppressed have fallen. The Times of London reported in September 2023 that Smith “has agreed to resign from the university “after complaints from colleagues” over her “fraudulently claiming to be of Native American heritage.” Now why would someone who enjoys all the benefits of white privilege squander them and voluntarily turn in her white card? It’s a mystery!

We’ve come full circle. Back in the old South during the Jim Crow days of institutionalized racial discrimination, some light-skinned blacks tried to pass for white in an attempt to avoid the discrimination and harassment that came to blacks all too often in those days. The old folk song “Delia” mentions “men in Atlanta, tryin’ to pass for white.” Way back in the 1980s, a documentary about jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton noted, in tones of high indignation, “But he denied his blackness.” Obviously, the producers of the documentary believed that, even in the Jim Crow era, this was a moral failing on Morton’s part. He should have been true to himself. He should have been proud. The same thing could be said today about all these white leftists who fool people into thinking they’re “brown,” or a member of the victim group du jour.

Besides Hilaria Baldwin, the Bostonian who fakes a Spanish accent. There was the white Jewish professor Jessica Krug, who passed as black for years. So did Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP official who famously turned out not to be a CP at all. Still at it is Shaun King, aka Talcum X, who strenuously insists that he isn’t white despite photographic evidence of his being a light-haired white child before he was woke.

No list of this kind would be complete, of course, without mention of Elizabeth Warren (D-Cherokee Nation), who for years passed as Native American for social approval and career advancement. Despite being as white a woman as you’ll ever find, she was even hailed as the first “woman of color” on Harvard’s faculty.

Muslim “feminist” activist Linda Sarsour is also passing: in a Vox video published in January 2017, she revealed: “When I wasn’t wearing hijab I was just some ordinary white girl from New York City.” But in an April 2017 interview, Sarsour referred to “people of color like me.” All it took was a hijab to enable Sarsour to change races.

Gann, Smith, Baldwin, Krug, Warren, Dolezal, King, and Sarsour are the vanguard of the society the Left is working hard to create — a society in which being white carries so much of a social stigma that it results in job discrimination and more, and those who are clever and audacious enough to pull it off avoid this opprobrium by passing as being a “person of color.” Or a person from Spain, if you’re Hilaria Baldwin.

Today, as far as the left is concerned, to be white is to be evil. No wonder an increasing number of white people want to escape the stigma.