Kelly Kean Sharp resigned last week from her assistant professorship at Furman University following accusations that she pretended to be non-white.
An anonymous person outed the African American history scholar through a Medium post.
The anonymous writer said that he or she “distantly” knew Sharp when Sharp was in graduate school at the University of California, Davis, and that Sharp only recently began identifying as Chicana.
The anonymous essay, posted under the username "Producingwhiteness" Tuesday night, included screenshots of Sharp's Twitter bio showing "#Chicana Asst professor" and tweets that said Sharp's grandmother, referenced in the screenshots as her "abuela," immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico during World War II.
The anonymous blogger claimed to have researched Sharp's genealogical records and said that all of Sharp's grandparents were born in the U.S. and none had Hispanic names.
By Wednesday, Sharp's Twitter account had been deleted.
The anonymous blogger identified themselves as an acquaintance of Sharp's when she attended the University of California Davis. The post said others who knew Sharp while at UC Davis wanted the user to publicize "her fabrication and strategic use of a Chicana identity."
This year, several white academics have been outed as masquerading as people of color, including BethAnn McLaughlin, Jessica Krug, C. V. Vitolo-Haddad, and Craig Chapman.
In the summer of 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a blonde from Montana, shot to notoriety when it was discovered that she had lied for years about her race and had changed her appearance to look African American. She had snagged a leadership position in the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) but was forced to resign after her false claims of black heritage and of hate crimes committed against her came to light.