I’ve been warning people for more than a year not to trust CV Vitolo-Haddad because so much of how they presented themselves was hypocritical and deeply conflicting, but I’m just as shocked as everyone else by their racefaking and blackfacing. I’m gonna do a messy thread...

... over the course of the day, to try and turn this fucked up shit into some kind of useful advice. I do have a fair amount of experience in racefaking exposure campaigns dating back to Peter Coffin’s fake Japanese girlfriend days.

The first issue: when it comes to racially ambiguous people, the ethical principle is that it’s always better to err by trusting than to err by distrusting. Racefaking is rare, intrusive race policing is much more common and when done by white people, reinforces white supremacy.

This is a code that the long term racefakers manipulate! They know the language better than most people because they’ve studied it, they’ve internalized it.

The first red flag I ever had about CV Vitolo-Haddad was that they were a debate team coach and extremely proud of that. That’s not bad in itself, but it showed that they had a deep investment in establishing power over people through language games.

I think I understand why they did what they did, how they did it, and finally why they took it too far and ultimately fucked over their own highly academically successful racefaking project. I’ll try to type this up later today.

OK back. First of all, the why. In order to do this, I have to get into CV's head a little, which makes me seem sympathetic to them. I am NOT sympathetic. None of this is intended as an excuse, just a reason. That disclaimer aside: so CV grew up in a rich Italian family in Miami.

I haven't researched to the point where I know whether their family was North or South Italian, because there's a fairly big difference. But South Italians are ambiguously white. That doesn't mean they aren't white, just that they're right at the line where whiteness is drawn.

Race is experienced as complicated, but its application is very simple: it is always applied onto a person from the outside. In the case of racially ambiguous people on that line of whiteness, nationality and ethnicity and religion and language play into the equation.

The MENA region heavily overlaps with Southern Europe and a lot of the people are physiologically indistinguishable across the regions. But 100 years ago, the US drew a line and decided that if you came from one side of the line and your name was "Annunzio", you were white...

... and if you came from another side and your name was Mohammed, and you weren't Black, then you probably weren't white either. None of this makes sense in itself, but it didn't need to make sense in order to support core white supremacy and antiblackness.

CV grew up attending a rich private school and almost certainly got made fun of by rich white people for having some features that weren't WASP. They also may have melasma, as several selfies suggest. Melasma is the opposite of vitiligo and results in patches of pigmented skin.

Some people have been saying that they have heard conflicting stories about this, including CV's vague and contradictory references to a "skin bleaching accident". This allowed CV to insinuate that they used to have darker skin and their lighter skin was the "unnatural" color.

This version of events has the obvious benefit of allowing CV to claim sympathy for suffering from internalized racism and internalized colorism, and creates the obvious harm of mocking the many real victims of colorism and skin bleaching.

Growing up in the environment that CV grew up in probably produced a lot of anxiety about identity & appearance. Many people with their background go on to form a healthy identity and establish solidarity with people of color in an equally healthy way. That was not CV's path.

They chose to lie to everyone else and also lie to themselves. They believed they were entitled to a "vague and contradictory" identity. They manipulated and took advantage of the basic ethical code that it's better to err by trusting than err by mistrusting.

They are very skilled with language and language games - that debate background again - and knew how to threaten people and make them back off when the questions came up. Not with violent threats (usually) but by threatening them socially and ethically.

I never questioned their stated POC status, although I was very suspicious that they seemed to let other people mistake them for Black. I assumed they were half Sicilian half MENA. But I did question them in other areas:

I noticed that they inhabited very different personas and resisted any attempt to integrate those personas. But there was always one common element: a kind of muted sadistic glee in being able to switch categories and inhabit different personas while pinning other people down.

One persona was the more-radical-than-thou insurrectionary anarchist persona: IWW activism, prisoner support, riot medic, accountability processes. Like all of CV's lies, this persona was based on a kernel of truth. I'm sure they did SOME real activism.

But they did so many inconsistent things with that persona. Tthey supported Samantha Kutner and Jade Parker, people who if they had their choice of jobs right now would be working for the FBI and CIA. They joined in brigading with tankies who support the destruction of Rojava.

One of their most hilarious hypocritical inconsistencies was saying that any antifascist who RTed the SPLC even for a simple resource post was compromised, while at the same time supporting Light Upon Light. The SPLC does a mix of good and problematic work: LUL is wholly corrupt.

They also had an academic gatekeeper persona, which I'm not going to get into because I'm not really an academia person. But if the more-radical-than-thou persona wasn't working, they'd switch to that. "My papers! My research! My record! You lack rigor! Amateur!"

And then there was the fash whisperer persona. This one is so disgusting I really can't bear to talk about it much. This is the persona that bragged about doing cocaine with the Proud Boys. That invited Matt Parrott over for dinner.

They would switch on a dime from fash whisperer to more-radical-than-thou and if anyone (like me) commented on it: "I am vast! I contain multitudes! How dare you criticize me?" Because I'm determinedly anonymous, they could never mount a successful campaign against me...

... but they went after a lot of other people for fucked up reasons, mainly jealousy and narcissism. A lot of people are coming forward now with stories about that, many of them most certainly not white cis males (CV always claimed it was the white cis males out to get them).

So now we're getting to the end. CV's whole contrarian shtick was an antifascist was to argue against deplatforming and for coddling and "debating" fash more. Ironically enough, their "debate" with Eric Striker was a meeting of two fake Italians...

Eric Striker/Joseph Jordan is a Nazi propagandist deeply ashamed of his Latinx background and known for claiming to be Italian, not Latinx. And CV Vitolo-Haddad, ashamed of being Italian to the point that they faked being Black, debated him. Isn't that some shit?

Anyway, I never listened to their debate with Striker or their debate with Ngo because debating fash is pointless. CV kept putting out their contrarian viewpoint, and but they never had any successes or wins with it. And then they fell in with a small weird tankie crew...

... who happened to align with CV in terms of "let's attack 'white antifa' at all costs". Many (not all) of these crew members are Black, and they're who CV was referring to when they said they were "invited into Black spaces".

I don't agree with the ideology or approach of this crew. But they are also victims of CV, probably more than any of us. CV wanted to fit in with them and started adopting a newer Blacker persona.

Before, CV would just fail to correct people who assumed they were Black. But now they started actively searching for a new vocabulary for a Black persona. This is when the infamous "Italo Habesha" was coined

Ultimately they went too far too fast. They forgot they had a Facebook and people who knew them and their family IRL. And of course they had Black colleagues in Wisconsin.... Black colleagues who couldn't get a simple answer to a simple question: "Are you Black?"

I'm gonna wrap this up now with some advice. First, while we all admire people who are good with words that make us feel certain ways, we need to interrogate that admiration a little. Being good with words is not the same as being a good person.

Second, don't use this as an excuse to racially police. Racefaking is rare because manipulative narcissists are rare, thank goodness. There are a lot of perfectly ethical racially ambiguous people out there and it's not their fault that they produce this kind of confusion.

Third, don't get hung up on guilt. Guilt is useless unless it spurs change: white guilt is especially solipsistic and helps one. If you look at CV's posts "I" and "me" and "my" and "mine" are so overrepresented, even when they're claiming to decenter themselves!

This graphic by @barnor_hesse is a great and very accessible approach to looking at the issue. Using it as a diagnosis card for CV's case, they got to level 5 (White Confessional), faked being level 8, but had actually regressed to level 2.

Lastly, if you were taken in by CV? That's not on you, it's on them. But if you were consequently manipulated into brigading or attacking one of their enemies, that was a failure in judgement, and you should do some self-examination and consider public apologies.

That's it. If this thread gets Ngo-bombed, I'll probably mute notifications, so if you see any hostile commenters leaving death threats, misgendering, etc., please Twitter report them. I'll leave you with some Malatesta: