An anonymous Medium post yesterday:
I have watched the unmasking of CV Vitolo and Jessica Krug from afar. But when an old friend pointed me to the twitter bio of Dr. Kelly Kean Sharp, currently an Assistant Professor at Furman University, I now had a similar example on the edges of my own circles. I had distantly known Kelly while she was a PhD student at University of California, Davis, and was more than surprised to find out that she was now describing herself as Chicana.
This discovery led to multiple conversations and a flurry of research on the part of people who had known Kelly at UC Davis. They approached me to help publicize her fabrication and strategic use of a Chicana identity.
Note the word “fabrication.” It’s interesting that we’re still allowed to see it as “fabrication” when people pretend to be Black or Chicana but not when men pretend to be women. You’d think that if anything the physical sexed body would be more difficult to deny rather than less – but that’s not the world we currently live in.
She had only ever identified as a non-Hispanic white woman as far as they knew. Allegedly, when some colleagues asked about her newfound identity she claimed that her paternal grandmother had been from Mexico. Okay, fine, we know that identity can be quite fluid and many of us did not want to embark on a project of gatekeeping that would not allow Kelly to celebrate her grandmother.
There it is! There’s the jargon. Gatekeeping bad; idenniny fluid. But still, there is a limit.
But when some of us looked into genealogical records, we found that Kelly had no grandparents who were born outside of the United States or had Hispanic names. This is much more in line with how Kelly identified at UC Davis. The maternal grandmother who she claimed was from Mexico, was born in LA to white parents and was residing in the US during all the census records of her upbringing. A servant was even employed and living at the home according to census records. This grandmother eventually married a wealthy, white lawyer from Iowa.
Ok ok ok but she wore a sombrero when she cut the roses, all right? Satisfied?
Considering all these inconsistencies, we are left to wonder, how much did Dr. Kean Sharp benefit from such claims? What we do know is that Kelly immediately found a tenure-track job after graduating, a rare commodity in academia today, especially in the field of U.S. history, which produces, by far, the most PhDs out of all fields of history. Part of the reason for her quick success was that she astutely applied for a job in African American history (there are many less PhDs in this field). She managed to immediately move into a tenure-track professorship in that field, working dually in the Africana Studies and History departments at Luther College. This job was made possible by a Mellon Faculty Diversity Fellowship from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. This Mellon promises to provide tenure track positions to those “whose backgrounds and life experiences will enhance diversity on the ACM campuses”.
This reminds me of “Rachel” McKinnon, who got tenure so amazingly quickly when other PhDs languish as adjuncts for years.
We also must ask, how could this sort of position, meant to encourage diversity on campuses in this region, go to a wealthy white woman who had suddenly decided she was a specialist in African American history?
That’s a good question. We ask similar questions when we wonder why positions on all-women shortlists, and awards, and jobs, and titles intended for women are given to men who “identify as” women. We see those questions as exactly the same kind of question as “why give a position meant to encourage diversity to a rich white person?” and we can never quite understand why we’re called harsh names for asking them.
[I]n another article about the club’s events for Hispanic Heritage Month in 2019, Kelly spoke of the importance of such a celebration, “it is important for us because it’s an intentional time to slow down and claim our history as part of the American story.” The “us” and “our” is impossible to ignore in this interview. To colleagues who knew her at U.C. Davis, we are left wondering how Dr. Kean Sharp presented herself to the Luther campus and the students of Latines Unides. Did she fully claim an “us” that inserted herself into a Latinx space based on lies?
Right?? This is what we keep saying. That “us” and “our” coming from men talking over and instead of women – we know it so well and yes, it pisses us off. If it’s easy to understand with this branch of identity, why isn’t it easy to understand with the even more built-in and inescapable branch of identity that is sex? Why is it bad to try to appropriate Latinx or Black identity but stunning and brave to succeed in appropriating female identity?
Perhaps hiding behind a vague Mexican heritage helped her feel more secure as she entered her new academic field of African American history. Certainly by using such an identity, she might not have to come to terms with her systemic white privileges.
It certainly works for men who identify as women. They not only don’t have to come to terms with their systemic male privileges, they get to attack us and call us names and do their level best to get us thrown out of all our jobs and groups and circles of friends. Men who identify as women get to destroy the lives of women who fail to agree that those men are women.
Why? Why does it work one way for women and the opposite way for all other subordinated groups? WHY?
Inside Higher Ed reports that Sharp has now resigned from Furman.
Furman’s history department, where Sharp began working in July, referred requests for comment to the university. Tom Evelyn, a Furman spokesperson, said the university was investigating the allegations against Sharp early Tuesday. He later said that Sharp had resigned, effective immediately. Sharp did not return a request for comment.
Prior to the resignation, Evelyn said Furman was “disappointed” to learn of Sharp’s alleged actions, and that it expects “members of our community to be honest in the way they represent themselves to others.”
Unless they’re men who identify as women.
