Hannah Gann’s racial misrepresentation was a product of the lies we tell ourselves about identity

Let’s start with the easy part: Philadelphia teacher Hannah Gann should not have pretended to be Black and Palestinian. I cannot — and will not — excuse that.

But I think I can explain it.

Gann seems to have believed the biggest myth of modern America: that identity is destiny. Your race and ethnicity determine how you think and act. So your membership in a given group gives you a special kind of insight that outsiders can never share.

That echoes the fallacy of white racists, the original practitioners of American identity politics. You can find traces of it in Vice President JD Vance’s tributes to “Heritage Americans,” or in the recent rants against Black and brown football fans by a Texas political candidate. We got here first, the argument goes, and our experiences make us more legitimately American than anyone else.

Never mind that Native Americans lived on these shores for centuries before any white person arrived. Our race is our truth, the white-identity crowd says. You are not us, so you cannot contest it.

We hear the same claims from people of every background now. Whether you’re Black or Asian — or Jewish or Muslim — you claim a special understanding of your own group. It’s your identity, after all.

That also means people outside the group can’t really understand it. So much for the ancient ideal that “nothing human is alien to me,” as the Roman playwright Terence wrote in 163 B.C. Identity politics imagines the opposite: Everyone is alien to you except people like you.

Most of all, they can’t comprehend any oppression or harm you have faced. And “marginalization becomes a form of social currency,” as one observer posted about the Gann saga. The highest status goes to the group that has suffered the most.

» READ MORE: Hannah Gann’s deceit makes the work of Black and brown justice activists harder | Opinion

That’s probably why Gann — a white Jewish woman — disguised her background. A teacher in Philadelphia public schools and a vocal anti-Israel activist, she thought she would gain more credibility — and more clicks — if she presented as Black or Palestinian.

And that’s on us. We like to think we evaluate people based on their behavior, not their race. But Gann knew better. By altering her skin tone with fake tans and makeup, she got more people to rally behind her.

Those people are now like jilted lovers who crave revenge. Blasting Gann on social media, critics noted she taught “predominantly Black youth” and “gained the trust of young people on the basis of a sense of shared oppression.” They also called on the school district to “hold Hannah accountable for the harm she caused.”

Meanwhile, Gann released a proof-of-life-style video expressing “shame and sorrow and regret” for her deceptions about race. But here’s what she didn’t say: Race itself is a deception. It tricks us into thinking that our differences are immutable, and that some Americans have more insight into them because of a shared identity.

That condescends to people, all in the guise of elevating them. I once heard a prominent Black historian of African American politics say he resented the idea that his race gave him more understanding of his topic. Just like any other scholar, he painstakingly gathered pieces of evidence and wove them together. His identity had nothing to do with it.

Sadly, Gann isn’t the only white educator who has faked her race in recent years. In 2020, historian Jessica Krug — who, like Gann, is white and Jewish — admitted that she had pretended to be North African, Caribbean, and Afro-Latina. And in 2023, anthropologist Elizabeth Hoover — a scholar of Native American culture — acknowledged that she had falsely identified as Native American herself.

Race itself is a deception. It tricks us into thinking that our differences are immutable.

In each case, social media exploded with vitriol. Both women were frauds, the critics said, and their scholarship wasn’t any good.

But their work received loads of praise before their identity hoax was uncovered. Put simply, we evaluated them more highly when we believed they weren’t white. Remember the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover”? We judged their books by the authors’ colors.

That kind of distortion is inevitable when we prize identity over everything else. To repeat, Gann should not have lied about her race. But we should not have given her more attention — and more trust — because we believed the lie. We exposed her racial fraud. And she exposed ours.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Our Democracy,” which will be published in the spring by the American Philosophical Society Press.