Judge People On Merit And You Won't Have All These Race Grifters Popping Up
There's yet another case of a white person exposed passing for "of color." An anonymous writer has posted at Medium:

I have watched the unmasking of CV Vitolo and Jessica Krug from afar. But when an old friend pointed me to the twitter bio of Dr. Kelly Kean Sharp, currently an Assistant Professor at Furman University, I now had a similar example on the edges of my own circles. I had distantly known Kelly while she was a PhD student at University of California, Davis, and was more than surprised to find out that she was now describing herself as Chicana.

This discovery led to multiple conversations and a flurry of research on the part of people who had known Kelly at UC Davis. They approached me to help publicize her fabrication and strategic use of a Chicana identity. Though it remains unknown exactly when she took on this persona and how much she has used it professionally, many who previously knew her are quite confused. She had only ever identified as a non-Hispanic white woman as far as they knew.

Allegedly, when some colleagues asked about her newfound identity she claimed that her paternal grandmother had been from Mexico. Okay, fine, we know that identity can be quite fluid and many of us did not want to embark on a project of gatekeeping that would not allow Kelly to celebrate her grandmother. Perhaps this grandmother had just never been a topic that she felt comfortable bringing up in the numerous conversations she had with friends and colleagues about her family and upbringing.

But when some of us looked into genealogical records, we found that Kelly had no grandparents who were born outside of the United States or had Hispanic names. This is much more in line with how Kelly identified at UC Davis. The maternal grandmother who she claimed was from Mexico, was born in LA to white parents and was residing in the US during all the census records of her upbringing. This grandmother was the daughter of a wealthy, white lawyer from Iowa. A servant was even employed and living at the home according to census records. After that question was settled, we wanted to know to what extent she had claimed Chicana heritage since leaving UC Davis. This research has only brought new questions:

She described herself as a #Chicana Asst Prof in her Twitter bio. This was later changed to #Chicana at the end of the intro. Then, it was ultimately removed after a faculty member from the UC Davis History Department allegedly spoke with her due to numerous complaints from former graduate students. She has now made her twitter channel private.

She has made numerous tweets further implying Chicana identity, attaching various hashtags to communicate this identity, like #Chicana, #Chicanapride, and #Chingonasunite. Were these hashtags meant to further promote this claimed identity as a Chicana Assistant Professor? Even more, in one tweet Dr. Kean Sharp referenced the cooking habits of her "abuela" and in another she claimed this "abuela" came to the United States during WWII and "worked hard" to make Kelly's career possible.

Considering all these inconsistencies, we are left to wonder, how much did Dr. Kean Sharp benefit from such claims? What we do know is that Kelly immediately found a tenure-track job after graduating, a rare commodity in academia today, especially in the field of U.S. history, which produces, by far, the most PhDs out of all fields of history. Part of the reason for her quick success was that she astutely applied for a job in African American history (there are many less PhDs in this field).

She managed to immediately move into a tenure-track professorship in that field, working dually in the Africana Studies and History departments at Luther College. This job was made possible by a Mellon Faculty Diversity Fellowship from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. This Mellon promises to provide tenure track positions to those "whose backgrounds and life experiences will enhance diversity on the ACM campuses".

Perhaps she won the job simply because she investigated the role of slave women in shaping consumption and markets in the antebellum South. But is it possible that the complex identity provided by her imagined Mexican immigrant grandmother helped her to secure this diversity hire?

The end of the piece is this:

Why are so many departments and hiring committees falling prey to this sort of manipulation? Why, we must ask, are privileged upper middle-class white women so successful in taking advantage of diversity programs? I call on the broader academic community to learn from these repeated stories instead of treating them as unusual peculiarities.

As long as "diversity" gives people a pass to leapfrog over others of merit, this shortcut will continue to be taken.

This commenter at Medium gets it:

Yoana Saldana

One thing the "broader academic community" might learn from this is that the more you credentialize scholars and teachers based on their name or genetics, the more you'll get people people like Sharp. The easiest solution to this is to actually hire people based on their teaching and scholarship, which necessarily would include demonstrated mastery of the subject matter. Do that and you'll actually get most of the demographic diversity you claim to want.