White privilege is everywhere.

By now we all know that there is no greater asset than having melanin-deficient skin. The color is magical, which is why Americans routinely avoid any exposure to the sun lest they lose job opportunities and get treated with contempt by their peers.

Racism is so awful in academia that Ivy League school Princeton declared itself systemically racist. President Trump rightfully tried to deny Princeton any federal funding–after all, it violates federal law to discriminate based on race–but the systemically racist Biden Administration reversed the decision and proved once again that racism is at the core of America.

Shameful stuff. I wept for America the day Biden rewarded Princeton for its White Supremacist practices.

Wait, I thought only white people had "privilege," so why do so many people claim to be some minority in order to get ahead in our "white supremacist" society? https://t.co/o3mqvwyjdc

— Fuzzy Slippers (@fuzislippers) August 2, 2023

Still, for some unknown reason, we keep hearing about members of our elite institutions falsely claiming to be members of systemically oppressed classes of people.

It is a mystery.

For instance, not one, not two, but three professors at the University of Kansas have been unmasked as “pretendians,” falsely appropriating the oppression of others.

Perhaps it is a sense of racial guilt? A desire to show solidarity with their oppressed brothers and sisters (is it systemically racist to use those terms, given that Black people have used them to describe their racial confreres?)?

It is a mystery. But there it is. There must be some explanation, and I am sure that it is a perfectly admirable one.

The Kansas City Star reported on these professors. Apparently they all claimed Native American ancestry (it is good to see White people who so strongly want to show solidarity with oppressed people!), and some Native Americans are unaccountably upset that they are embracing the fight against White Supremacy.

Why? it’s a mystery.

I would think that anybody of an oppressed group would welcome virtuous White people to their cause.

Blansett was hired in 2020 through KU’s Langston Hughes professorship, a program the university touts as bringing “a prominent or emerging minority scholar to the university.” His bio as an associate professor of Indigenous studies and history states he has Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Shawnee and Potawatomi ancestry, descended from three prominent Native families: Panther, Blanket and Smith.

“Despite coming of age in the Jim Crow south, my dad persevered against overwhelming obstacles as an Indigenous man,” Blansett wrote in the introduction to one of his books. “… From my earliest memory, he made certain to instill value and pride in our Cherokee ways.” Blansett is among three KU professors to have allegations publicly raised about their claimed lineage by Native American individuals and groups that frequently challenge people claiming Native identity. None of the men is enrolled in a tribe. Some Native grassroots groups and researchers allege Raymond Pierotti in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology and Jay Johnson in the department of geography and atmospheric science are also “pretendians” – slang to designate someone faking Native American heritage.

They say, based on independent research of the men’s family trees, that the professors are white, and white only, and that they’ve built careers and profits off of a lie. Neither Johnson nor Blansett responded to multiple requests for comment, including messages on their cell phones, letters left at their homes and emails sent to their university addresses. Pierotti provided written statements to The Star for this story defending his career, but declined a phone interview. “Imagine that someone has plagiarized your work. But more than plagiarized your work, they have stolen your ancestors. They’ve stolen your life story. They’ve stolen the story of your entire culture,” Chief Ben Barnes, of the Shawnee Tribe in eastern Kansas, said of Blansett. “This is way beyond a misunderstanding.”

Read more at: https://www.kansascity.com/news/article277464123.html/#storylink=cpy

The College Fix reached out to both the tribal members who have exposed the pretendians, as well as the pretendians themselves. I find it all so confusing. Rejecting White Supremacy would seem to be the goal everybody involved is striving toward, yet the pretendians seem ashamed and the Native Americans seem angry.

It is a mystery.

The Fix reached out to the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, a grassroots whistle-blower association comprising citizens of federally recognized tribes and allies and dedicated to “expos[ing] ethnic frauds,” to ask for information regarding the accusations against Blansett, Pierotti (pictured, center) or Johnson (pictured, right).

“Those KU professors you mentioned are indeed ethnic frauds pretending to be American Indians,” director and co-founder Lianna Costantino said via email. “They are not. Their genealogy is up on our website.”

The Fix reached out to University of Kansas media relations as well as Blansett, Johnson, and Pierotti by email asking for comment on the accusations. Neither KU, Johnson nor Blansett responded.

Pierotti responded July 25 with a statement defending his work at KU.

“I am proud of the record I have accomplished, none of which depends on any of the accusations made,” Pierotti wrote.

“The FakeIndians blog’s sources seem to assume that any scholar who works with Indigenous people has been hired solely on the basis of ‘Indian identity,’” Pierotti continued. “This is both insulting and incorrect.”

It seems as if academia–as Princeton acknowledged–is still shot through with White Supremacists, otherwise there would be no reason for everybody to be upset about this. At least I can’t think of one.

After all, it is a miracle these professors even got hired, given the oppressive nature of the institutions! As we know, systemically racist institutions such as colleges and universities are notoriously hostile to people of color.

Academic institutions, I am afraid, at simply too far gone, rooted as they are in White Supremacy. Perhaps it is time to simply scrap all of these schools and begin again. It’s a shame, but it must be done for the sake of equity.