My name is Sarah Varene and I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine,

and also a professor of creative nonfiction.

You may have heard me a few weeks ago introducing a previous story I wrote for the magazine,

The Accusation. It was about a time when my family and I were caught up in a series of terrifying

accusations, all because of a coveted job at a university. My latest story for the magazine also

deals with the world of academia and deception. I look at what some people call ethnic fraud or racial

grifty. In the last year there have been a series of news stories about academics and activists

who falsely claim they were black or Latinx or Native American. I was interested in the stories

themselves, but also in the way they were covered in the news and how they were read and talked about

by the rest of us. I wanted to look deeper at the structures and systems and people that

allow this particular form of deception to persist and how we might begin to deal with it.

So here's my story, The Native Scholar Who Wasn't, read by Julia Whalen.

It was a Thursday morning last September and J. K. Howlani Kaua Newi had just woken up.

She was reading a story on her phone in bed, a confession written by a woman named Jessica Kruege,

when, quite suddenly, it yanked her into the past. To an escalating degree over my adult life,

I have asthued my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City,

wrote Kruege, a history professor who had for years identified and published as a black and

Latina scholar. I have thought about ending these lies many times over the years, she continued,

but my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics.

Kaua Newi checked the time. The confession was posted only minutes earlier,

but already six friends had forwarded her the link. It was that kind of story, the kind that

spreads so fast and so far it soon seems that everyone has read it and everyone has had a reaction,

...