Muslim activist Raquel Saraswati allegedly lied about being South Asian, Arab, and Latin. Her mother said she's 'white as the driven snow.'
- Muslim activist Raquel Saraswati was exposed for lying about being of South Asian, Arab, and Latin descent, The Intercept reported.
- Other white people, like Rachel Dolezal, have similarly tried to misrepresent themselves as people of color.
In February, Raquel Evita Saraswati, a Muslim activist, was exposed for posing as a woman of color, The Intercept reported. Saraswati claimed to be of Arab, South Asian, and Latin descent, and was the chief equity, inclusion, and culture officer of the American Friends Service Committee, a peace and social justice organization.
But, according to her friends and family, Saraswati was actually born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel, a woman of British, German, and Italian descent.
"I'm as white as the driven snow and so is she," her mother told the Intercept.
Saraswati landed the prominent diversity position at the AFSC because "it seemed that there was an element of lived experience and understanding of the lived experience" of a "queer, Muslim, multiethnic woman," a human resources professional involved in hiring her told the Intercept.
AFSC members published an anonymous letter on February 10, raising concerns about Saraswati's background and how her alleged misrepresentations hurt marginalized people.
"There have been attempts since 2015 to call for accountability in light of Saraswati's cultural vulturism," the letter read.
Saraswati resigned from the AFSC on Tuesday, the Daily Beast reported. She did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.
Saraswati isn't the only person to have faked her race. In fact, she's been dubbed the "Rachel Dolezal" of the Muslim community after the woman who falsely claimed Black and Native American ancestry for years. Dolezal was the chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and later resigned amid the controversy in 2015.
A history of race faking
There's no shortage of other examples of people who have misrepresented their race or ethnicity: Hilaria Baldwin, Alec Baldwin's wife, attracted controversy over allegations that she misled people into believing she was Spanish in 2020. That same year, actress and filmmaker Michelle Latimer was found to have falsely claimed Indigenous ancestry. And, in 2021, British influencer Oli London claimed they had "transitioned" races from white to Korean.
In September 2020, Jessica Krug, a historian and former tenured professor at George Washington University, was embroiled in a similar scandal after she lied about being Black her entire career. Krug had written articles in Essence and the race-exploring website RaceBaitR, as well as a book on African American history and Latin America. She also received fellowships and financial support for her research on Black culture.
In a Medium post published under her name, Krug was revealed to be white, and had been living "under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim," at times having claimed to be of North African or Caribbean descent, and from the Bronx.
"I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech," Krug wrote.
A reversal of 'white passing'
People of color have historically had to pass as white in order to survive or get ahead. Famed actress Merle Oberon hid her South Asian and Maori heritage to avoid prejudice, while sex symbol Raquel Welch grew up with a father who tried to assimilate at all costs, even banning Spanish at home.
"It was told to me that if I wanted to be typecast, I would play into that," Welch told the New York Times in 2002. "You just couldn't be too different. My first big breakthrough part in 'One Million Years B.C.' they dyed my hair blond."
For people of color, passing was about survival, affording them privileges, resources, and opportunities that are typically available only to those who were white, according to Whitney Pirtle, associate professor of sociology at University of California Merced.
A white person passing as another race is fundamentally different because it misunderstands the way race and racism work in the United States, experts told Insider.
"People like Rachel Dolezal and Raquel Saraswati didn't experience the structural barriers that women of color experienced. Yet when they 'become' women of color, they're able to get certain jobs and become leaders of movements because they had a different path," Pirtle said.
There are potential reasons why someone who is white would want to pose as a person of color, from family trauma to a desire to evade "responsibility for white oppression of other racial groups," according to Maryann Erigha, associate professor of sociology at the University of Georgia.
Playing up racial ambiguity — as some celebrities like Ariana Grande, Iggy Azalea, and Kim Kardashian have been criticized for — can also be a means of commercializing "Otherness," Jonathan Rosa, associate professor of race and ethnicity at Stanford, told Insider.
The dangers of 'costuming' racial identities
Racial misrepresentation not only takes up a space meant for actual people of color — just as Saraswati had when she took the diversity role in AFSC — but also undermines real efforts to provide representation and resources to communities, Erigha said.
"Costuming" also facilitates a misunderstanding of the concept of race as a social construct, which denotes how racial categories have shifted depending on the historical, political, social, and economic contexts of a particular time. Pretending to be a person of color wholly ignores the historical trauma and discrimination that marginalized communities have experienced in what Pirtle called an "amplification of white privilege."
"A costume is not something you are; it's something you put on and can then take off," Pirtle said. "It's harmful for those people who don't have that identity as a costume. Are you making a caricature of me, of my people? Are you gaining the resource that you need at this time, but not dealing with the ramifications of what it means to truly live in our shoes?"