When Victimhood Becomes Social Currency
There is something remarkable about an age supposedly dominated by "white privilege" producing people who pretend not to be white. The latest extraordinary example comes from Philadelphia. Hannah Gann, a public-school teacher and pro-Palestinian activist, has admitted that she falsely presented herself as Palestinian and Black when she was, in her own subsequent description, "a white woman of significant privilege and wealth." According to reporting by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the deception went well beyond an ambiguous family story. Gann presented invented accounts of her ancestry and background while becoming active in racial-justice and Palestinian causes.
The people she deceived eventually discovered the problem themselves. Activists associated with the Racial Justice Organizing Committee and Philly Educators for Palestine confronted her about her identity, after which the organisations publicly distanced themselves from her. That point deserves emphasis. Whatever criticism can be directed at the political culture surrounding identity, the activists themselves did not shrug when the deception was uncovered. They regarded it as a serious betrayal.
The case is nevertheless fascinating because Gann is hardly the first person to cross an identity boundary in this direction.
Rachel Dolezal became internationally famous after it emerged that the Spokane NAACP official who identified as Black had been born to white parents. Jessica Krug went considerably further. The George Washington University academic admitted in 2020 that she was a white Jewish woman who had spent years presenting herself through various Black identities. Krug herself described what she had done as a sustained deception.
These cases deserve attention precisely because they run against the traditional understanding of racial "passing."
Historically, passing usually meant somebody from a disadvantaged racial group presenting himself as a member of the dominant group. In a society structured by racial discrimination, the incentive was obvious. A light-skinned Black American might pass as white to escape segregation, discrimination or social exclusion. Whatever moral complexities surrounded the decision, its practical logic was easy to understand.
But what are we to make of people moving in the opposite direction?
Nobody should pretend that three or four spectacular cases prove that whites generally suffer racial disadvantage. They plainly do not establish that proposition. Nor do they prove that people across Western society now wish to escape being white. Anecdotes cannot carry that statistical load.
They do, however, reveal something interesting about particular cultural environments. Human beings respond to incentives, and incentives are not exclusively financial. Status is an incentive. Authority is an incentive. Attention is an incentive. The ability to speak with presumed authenticity about a political question can itself become a valuable social asset.
In some activist and academic environments, identity can supply precisely this kind of authority. A person is not merely someone who holds an opinion about racism, colonialism or the Middle East. Personal identity can become part of the argument. "Lived experience" can confer an authority that someone outside the relevant group is presumed not to possess.
Once that principle becomes sufficiently important, a peculiar incentive has been created. If identity determines who may speak with authority, possessing the right identity becomes valuable.
That does not mean everybody will lie about it. Almost nobody will. But fraud often reveals incentives more clearly than ordinary behaviour does. Nobody counterfeits something that has no value.
That is what makes the Gann affair more interesting than another story about an activist behaving badly. If the allegations reported about her self-presentation are accurate, and her own admission establishes the central deception, she apparently believed that identities she did not possess were sufficiently valuable to manufacture.
Jessica Krug provides an even clearer example because she eventually admitted what she had done. Her assumed identities operated within an academic world in which race, colonialism and oppression were central intellectual concerns. Her deception therefore gave her something more important than a different description on a form. It positioned her differently within the very subjects about which she wrote and taught.
The irony is considerable. Progressive identity politics generally begins with the claim that historically marginalised identities carry social disadvantages. At the level of society as a whole, considerable evidence supports the existence of both historical and continuing forms of racial disadvantage.
Yet an identity can be disadvantaged in one context and prestigious in another. There is no contradiction in saying that a racial minority can experience discrimination in society generally while membership of that same minority can confer credibility or status inside a particular activist, academic or institutional environment. That distinction helps explain why these strange cases keep appearing.
The lesson is not that racism has somehow reversed everywhere or that being white has become a general social disability. Those claims require evidence these cases cannot provide. The more interesting possibility is that an ideological culture built around ranking voices according to identity inadvertently creates incentives for identity entrepreneurship. Once we begin asking who you are before asking whether what you say is true, identity inevitably acquires value.
There is another irony in Gann's case. The people who exposed her were participants in precisely the political movements that critics might blame for creating those incentives. They apparently understood immediately that something important had been violated. If identity is supposed to represent genuine history and lived experience, manufacturing it is not harmless theatre. It appropriates the authority attached to somebody else's experience. That response deserves credit.
But it should also provoke some reflection about the underlying system. Perhaps political arguments should depend less upon the ancestry of the speaker in the first place. A proposition about Israel, Palestine, racism, policing or immigration does not become true because its advocate possesses the approved genealogy. Nor does it become false because its advocate does not. Evidence remains evidence regardless of pigmentation.
There will always be people prepared to embellish résumés, invent heroic pasts and manufacture personal stories. Human vanity considerably predates modern identity politics. But when several people discover that adopting a supposedly disadvantaged identity can increase their standing within particular institutions, it is reasonable to ask what those institutions are rewarding.
The safest answer is also the most radical one: reward arguments rather than ancestry. If someone has something intelligent to say about Palestine, listen to the argument. If someone writes about racism, examine the evidence. If someone claims special authority because of personal experience, that experience may be relevant, but it should never substitute for proof. That would remove much of the incentive for the strangest form of modern passing.
For generations, racial passing meant concealing an identity because society had made that identity costly. Gann, Krug and Dolezal present us with the opposite phenomenon: adopting an identity because, in particular circumstances, it apparently possessed value.
That does not prove that the West has ceased to have racial problems. It proves something narrower and perhaps more interesting. When identity becomes social currency, eventually somebody will counterfeit it.
