Whatever You Can Get Away With
by Steve Sailer
August 30, 2023
Theoretically, you could become a professor of ethnic studies without being the ethnicity you study, just as you can be a gerontologist without being old or a botanist without being a plant.
Still, and while I don’t often offer career advice, trust me on this: Don’t try it.
The pervasiveness of ethnic discrimination in college hiring is one reason for the amusing pattern that has emerged in recent years: The highest proportion of whites caught pretending to be some other more legally privileged race or ethnicity have tended to be academics, especially woke ethnic studies professors.
A classic example is Andrea “Andy” Smith, the chair of the UC Riverside ethnic studies department, whom supporters, such as her dissertation adviser Angela Davis, laud as “one of the greatest Indigenous feminist intellectuals of our time.” This month, however, after a decade and a half of controversy over her race, she finally agreed to retire next year because she had misrepresented herself as an American Indian.
How did Smith, the very white daughter of a nuclear physicist, succeed in pretending for decades to be a Native American? Her main shtick appears to have been (a) squinching up her eyes so that she looks a little Asian or Amerindian; and (b) confidently asserting, over and over, that she is an Indian.
