A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) resigned from a teaching position after falsely claiming to be a person of color, according to CNN on Thursday.
CV Vitolo-Haddad admitted to this act and apologized last Sunday (September 6) via the website Medium. They also announced that they will be leaving their position as the co-president of UWM's Teaching Assistants' Association (TAA).
This all comes after another Medium post accused the grad student of misleading people about their racial and ethnic origin.
"I have let guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn't prove. I have let people make assumptions when I should have corrected them," Vitolo-Haddad wrote in their first apology.
The grad student then published another Medium post on September 11, where they said they were of Southern Italian and Sicilian heritage.
"When asked if I identify as Black, my answer should have always been 'No.' There were three separate instances I said otherwise," Vitolo-Haddad wrote. "I should have never entered Black organizing spaces."
They also claimed they took "lies about Cuban roots at face value."
TAA confirmed in a statement that Vitolo-Haddad resigned and will discontinue events they were involved in, CNN reported.
"We condemn CV Vitolo-Haddad's appropriation of Black and Brown identities in no uncertain terms," the union said in its statement.
Vitolo-Haddad was also offered a conditional tenure-track position at California State University in Fresno, but university spokeswoman Patti Waid told CNN that the grad student "will not be a faculty member at Fresno State."
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