By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS) — We live in an era in which fashionable opinion holds it to be an unquestioned truth that biological gender must be considered fluid and changeable, but racial and ethnic identity is not. That’s more a function of ideology than science. Yet the ideas that are the foundation of these complicated and sometimes illogical notions are a formula for a social architecture that prizes one thing above all: victim status.
That’s the best way to understand the peculiar phenomenon of individuals who choose to adopt the identity of a group other than the one they were born into, so as to acquire the much-prized modern privilege that goes with victimhood.
The most famous of these was Rachel Dolezal, a white woman of European heritage who masqueraded as an African American, taught African-American studies on the college level and even was chosen as the president of the Spokane, Kansas chapter of the NAACP before her fraud was exposed in 2015.
Another, less celebrated, racial impersonator was Jessica Krug, a radical ideologue who was a tenured professor of history at George Washington University. She pretended to be a black and Hispanic woman from “El Barrio” in New York City’s Bronx, but was really a middle-class, white, Jewish woman who grew up in suburban Kansas City and attended a day school.
And now there’s a new addition to this bizarre list of racial impersonators: Hannah Gann.
Gann is a Philadelphia high-school teacher who claims, at times, to be of Palestinian and Tunisian heritage and sometimes also to be black. In this guise, she became a leading local advocate for the anti-Israel cause, organizing an event at public schools alleging that the Jewish state was committing “scholasticide” against Palestinians and speaking up as a member of the “Philly Palestine Coalition” and “Parents for Palestine.”
She gained local notoriety for her efforts on behalf of a colleague and longtime friend, Keziah Ridgeway, who was suspended for making threats against Jewish parents who complained about her inserting anti-Israel propaganda into the classroom.
As the Canary Mission website noted on a page devoted to her activities, Gann has celebrated Hamas terrorism, glorified violence and spread hatred of Israel, America and the police on her now-deleted Instagram page. She was a participant at a December 2023 “Flood Philly for Palestine” rally (a reference to the Hamas name for the Oct. 7 attacks that they dubbed the “Al Aqsa flood”), at which she not only praised the mass slaughter of Jews and joined in chants calling for Jewish genocide and terrorism against Jews, but also demonstrated against a Jewish-owned restaurant in the city.
So prominent was she in the effort to demonize the Jewish state and its Jewish supporters, that the Accuracy in Media group, once parked a mobile billboard outside her school calling her “Philadelphia’s Leading Antisemite.”
But, like Dolezal and Krug, Gann was a con artist, not a “person of color” or a Palestinian. She was, in fact—as she subsequently admitted in a groveling on-line apology—“a white woman of significant privilege and wealth.”
And if that was not enough to outrage her former allies, it turns out that she’s also Jewish with family living in Israel.
As with Dolezal and Krug, Gann’s deceptions, which might have included financial fraud, are being angrily denounced as a form of “black face” and for damaging the “pro-Palestine” movement and harming the black students she taught.
The appeal of victimhood is rooted in woke notions that see the world divided into two eternally warring and impermeable classes of persons. On the one side are people of color who are always victims and always in the right no matter what they do. On the other are the white oppressors who are always in the wrong, regardless of their conduct or the context of events.
The toxic ideologues of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism have adopted this skewed way of looking at the world and indoctrinated a generation of Americans to view everything through the lens of racial conflict. Believers in this secular religion not only dismiss the enormous progress made toward racial equality made in the United States over the last 70 years. Its supporters also actively oppose the vision of a color-blind society articulated by Martin Luther King Jr., who famously said he had a dream “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
In a society where such terrible and destructive ideas are treated as universal truth, by the lights of this belief system, some find themselves locked into an identity that marks them as permanent villains. While the majority seeks atonement for its “whiteness” and “privilege” by activism aimed at bringing down a falsely perceived oppressor class, others, like Dolezal, Krug and Gann, go further and adopt the identity of one of the oppressed, thus transforming into an exotic, fashionable persona with real privilege in the world of leftist ideology.
But what makes Gann’s masquerade particularly objectionable is that while she and the “pro-Palestine” crowd pose as virtuous victims, their cause itself is a fraud and one that actively engages in hatred of their own people.