For my father
I write this letter after 5 days of constant harassment from an anonymous account called MistressSnowPhD with a sizable following across social media, but that is not where this story starts. I never thought I would have to write this account to academia, because I never felt that academia deserved to consume my private life. I have been open about my identity as someone of Roma and Jewish heritage, and sometimes I’ve told academics that I’ve trusted and were close to more of the nuances of these identities, particularly my Roma heritage coming from my father’s side, but I never wanted to center myself in the work that I do. I’ve never taken diversity fellowships or scholarships, I’ve tried really hard for years to grapple with and speak to my position as a white passing person, but I never thought I owed academia my complex family story- a story I only know fragments of.
On November 14th, Snow posted a screenshot of a tweet in which I described an antisemitic encounter I faced a few years ago in Seattle, replying to it with “sit your goy ass down.” She then proceeded to claim that I was antisemitic based on false allegations that I claimed “Jews have economic privilege” (something I’ve never said) and that I was faking Jewish heritage based on an older tweet of mine making a joke in the context of Yom Kippur. I responded to these allegations to shut them down, and also responded that, based on trusted sources, I was able to find her real name as a means of stopping the harassment.
Instead of stopping, and without further engagement from me, Snow proceeded to lay out my family documents from my father’s side to try to prove that I was faking Jewish and Roma heritage. These reports were not only invasive but reductive. She posted an obituary of my grandmother and an article about a white supremacist cousin of mine who was stabbed to death. Despite removing myself from Twitter and refusing to engage, Snow shows no signs of stopping this narrative. I provide my own story, a story I feel I never owed anyone, as a means of setting the record straight from my perspective:
If you reach out to some living family members on my father’s side, chances are they will tell you they identify as white. They pass as white, like me, and navigate the world as any white person would. My father, however, did not have that luxury, and perhaps that’s where my story begins.
I grew up near Seattle, WA, with my father, mother, and brother. From an early age, I grew to understand that many of the other families in my community treated my family as different from the majority of all-white families. My father was visibly brown, something my grandmother, his mother, would publicly explain as being “very dark Czechs.” As a child, I thought that Czechoslovakia was a country full of brown people like my father. I was proud of the culture in my grandmother’s home and the food she would cook for us to celebrate that heritage. It wasn’t until I was older that I heard family members describe our family as “Gypsies.”
My father was proud to identify with America, but America did not identify with him. My father, as you can imagine seeing pictures of him, was no stranger to color-based racism. Even though most people he encountered had no idea what his ethnicity was, they read my father through a multitude of non-white racial identities. I witnessed my father being called racial slurs, overheard conversations between him and my mother about the comments he received at work, and even became used to my own childhood friends’ responses to my father’s brownness. I witnessed my father face a distinctly different world than the one my mother navigated, and it left an impact on me that I can feel to this day. One memory that sticks out in my head so vividly is being in my father’s car driving to run some errands when a man who perceived my father to have “cut [him] off” followed us in the parking lot of our destination. My father warned me to not get out of the car as he locked the doors, the man coming up to my father’s window in a fit of rage. He slammed his hands on the windows and screamed racial slurs I came to know, some I had not heard yet. What I remember so clearly was my father’s tight grip on the steering wheel and calm demeanor, as I sat there crying loudly at the man’s violent display. I realized then that this was not the first time my father faced such hatred, and that his calmness, his stillness was a practiced response in how to handle the situation.
I lost my father to cancer when I was a child, and recognized that my day to day experiences were no longer colored by the way the world responded to him. We moved away to my mother’s home state of Texas, and the only time people ever responded to my father’s racial difference, usually in surprise, was when they came over to my house and saw pictures of my father hanging on the wall.
For years as a teenager, I did not know how to grapple with my father’s brownness. I went to the internet to do more research on “Gypsies” and found more on the history of Romani diaspora and saw people that looked like my father coming from places in Central and Eastern Europe. When I was ready, I talked to my mother about this and my father’s experiences with racism in America. She told me all she knew, which were indeed sometimes fragments and fuzzy memories themselves, and encouraged me to embrace who my father was. I learned that my father was aware that his family tried very hard to pass as white Americans, including many family members dying their hair blonde and using the line “very dark Czechs” or “Czech people just tan this dark” as a way to evade racist inquiries. I learned my father understood that he was, and would always be, read as non-white by fellow Americans, but did not have a community outside his family to talk to about this phenomenon. I learned that the racial abuse my father faced as an adult had started as a child, and followed him everywhere, including his long career in the Navy.
I tried to talk to some family about this in my late teens and early 20s, and often ended up with dead ends. At this point, I did not have a close relationship with my father’s family, and lived too far away from them (without the money) to visit. My grandmother didn’t really want to talk about it, and when I asked her if we had family left in The Czech Republic or Slovakia she gave me a hard no and refused to elaborate. When I asked her to tell me more about my father’s biological father, who other family members said was as dark as my dad, she gave me conflicting answers. I didn’t push because I didn’t know how to grapple with any of this. A cousin of mine confirmed that she also remembers family members telling her of our “Gypsy” background, but she did not know how to go about it or identify with it. Other family stuck with the story of very dark Czechs and did not have a way to answer me when I said “Czech people actually don’t get this dark…” I was left with conflicting narratives, conflicting timelines, conflicting answers in who my father was, with my mother’s account of my father being the only one that had any rationality to it. My grandmother passed away in 2015, and I knew that her death meant that I perhaps would never get all the answers I desired.
Through the internet, I was able to make connections with other Romani people, many of whom shared similarities of passing and non-passing family members, fuzzy family narratives that came with diaspora, and a desire to have a language to talk about these experiences. For the first time, it felt like a home for all these feelings I had bottled up inside of me, and it was also an eye-opener: I learned that Romani people in Europe still faced systemic racism.
I highlight my father’s struggles with racism not to portray him as a victim, because despite all of the hardships he had to face, he was a man filled with warmth, joy, laughter, and fierce love for my family. He provided me and my brother with as good a life as he possibly could, and my brother and I both identify as Romani to honor him and the sacrifices he’s made for us. My determination to be open and vocal about Romani issues and rights came from a desire to help build a world my father could thrive in, to possibly raise awareness to what Romani people still faced in Europe.
I know my family story is one filled with more questions than answers, questions that often cannot be answered by a simple ancestry.com research review of immigration documents. When I mistakenly claimed my family left in the 1930s due to the rise of Nazism, it was based on fuzzy family narratives and a mistake about who — my great grandmother or my great great grandmother — was the first to immigrate to the country. I was not purposefully trying to misrepresent myself, but was trying to understand my family’s narrative and their determination to hide their racial difference when they got to America. At the time, this was when I was 20–21, I could not find my great grandmother Irene’s birth records, so I was not aware she was born in the US. A month before this campaign against me began, a historian friend of mine found the documents of my great great grandmother’s immigration papers from the 1910s, for which I was thankful. After that, I did not double down on the narrative I thought to be true at the time, and even discussed with friends and loved ones having deep feelings of remorse for getting the facts incorrect before. I absolutely understand that people have really strong feelings about this, but I want to emphasize that this was a misunderstanding of family history that I am sorry about.
When I was finishing up my undergraduate degree, I found out my cousin, the son of my father’s half-sister, had been stabbed to death. From there I learned that he was involved with a white supremacist gang, which shocked and hurt my immediate family. We couldn’t understand how my cousin could be a part of such a group when my father was a target of racism, and part of me will probably never understand. It’s taken me years to come to terms with this, even though I hadn’t seen or spoken to my cousin since I was 11 years old. Those closest to me, including other critical race academics, know about this part of my family history and about the fact that I have family members who identify as white, and met me with compassion and understanding. Through talking with many people whose opinions I trusted, I came to the conclusion that I did not need to reveal these parts of me publicly to be taken seriously as an academic or to have the way I identify taken seriously. As many of my colleagues have noted to me, marginalized people can be in white supremacist groups, but most importantly, why am I being asked to answer for what my cousin, who I was estranged from, has done? What does this have to do with me, or my academic work?
As for my Jewish heritage, it comes from my mother’s side (who identifies racially as white) and I’ve never used it as a way to “build a career” or distance myself from whiteness — nor has it ever factored into me being an academic at all. While I can anticipate that Snow will probably do another ancestry research review on my mother to try to disprove this, it’s something my mother has grown up knowing and I have no reason to distrust her or her sources, whatever may be the case in the archives. The use of immigration documents and archives to try to disprove someone’s racial identity, especially in the case of Roma and Jewish identity, is fraught at best and reveals a clear lack of understanding of race. It’s an extremely American approach to identities that have not been formed in an American context. You cannot base identities solely off of last names, and people, particularly marginalized communities, have historically often changed last names.
It’s weird to see someone who has never met me try to build a case against me for how I identify. She knows nothing about me as a real person, as is the case with most of the people rallying behind her campaign. In her attempt to destroy my non-existent academic career (I had already decided to leave academia long before this campaign started), she ignores any evidence that would stand firmly against the narrative she is determined to spin, namely the pictures I have of my father, where any rational person can see that my father is not white.
I don’t claim to have all the answers on my family’s heritage, but what I can say is all I ever wanted was to be proud of who I am and who I come from. My father was adopted when he was a child by his stepfather, and due to abuse, did not have a relationship with his biological father, so I only know very little about that man. If I were to be completely frank, identifying as white would be, politically, much more valuable in my life than identifying with what I know to be the truth, what I know to be how my father understood himself as a brown man. I could identify as white, hide who my father is and what he looked like, and I had done that in the past. It always felt like I had a limb stuck between a rock or a trap, and the only way to free myself was to cut that limb off. I feared that, if I told people who my father was, I would be subject to the same treatment he was. I know that those entering in this conversation now do not know the years of questioning, conversations, and soul searching it took for me to have the courage to say, “I don’t care if I’m stuck in the trap forever, I won’t cut him off.”
To see this decision now turned into a narrative where I am a white person using identities to “build a career” is, as you can imagine, extremely hurtful. It erases the complexities of the issues, and also makes my identity one for public consumption and judgement. If I knew that one day this would happen because a stranger felt “vindictive” and “bored” (her words, not mine) I would have rather kept my identities private, because they mean more to me than academia, more to me than many of the people reading this drama could understand. Everyone who I’ve spoken to about this mess has confirmed that when I started my project on early modern “Gypsies,” I was extremely hesitant, and did not actually want to pursue it because I thought it would put too much emphasis on my identity, which I wanted to keep as a strictly personal part of me. It was the encouragement of so many wonderful scholars that I felt empowered to start the project, and while it has not been easy, I am extremely proud of the impact I’ve made to encourage people to understand anti-Romani racism and how it manifests in literature and culture.
Diversity grants and scholarships? I’ve never received any, nor am I keen to take any. I do believe that visibly brown Romani people, especially those coming from Europe, absolutely deserve to be seen as eligible for diversity funding, but I have never felt like I should be the recipient of said funding. As a precarious academic with no institutional support or funding, I have received funding of $400 from Race Before Race to fly into Phoenix to attend a conference, and I am extremely thankful for that funding. Likewise, I am honored to receive an ERIAC (European Roma Institute of Arts and Culture) Grant of 4,000 euros to produce the Romani Canon Project, with much of that funding going to paying the contributors to the project and the purchasing of material rights for the digital publication. I recently have seen my McNair Scholar status brought into question, but I received that award due to my economic status as an impoverished college student. My family struggled with poverty after my father died under the weight of cancer medical bills, with my mother juggling multiple low-paying jobs while putting herself into nursing school for her LVN. All throughout college I also juggled multiple jobs, including working at a Waffle House for 5 years, just to help make ends meet. I am always thankful for the McNair Scholars Program for being a source of economic relief so I could pursue graduate school.
The thing is, no amount of internet smear campaigns, ancestry research on family names and immigration dates, or obsessive tweeting is going to stop me relating to my parents the way they understand themselves. It’s not going to take away things I’m proud of, it’s not going to destroy anything that matters to me. I am no longer in academia, and while these accusers claim I have built a career on this identity, I want to ask where? Their tweets do not take away the years of memories of my father, what he struggled with, and how beautiful and brilliant a man he was. They don’t destroy years of work on grappling with the complexities of identity. They don’t smash the way people who truly know me perceive me. It’s very clear to me that Snow perceives identity to be based on political or academic clout rather than something personal, meaningful, and private. I don’t expect everyone reading this to fully understand the complexities of my family history and relationship with race, but I ask people to respect it. It’s not coming out of nowhere, and it certainly wasn’t a decision made just to game a system or distance myself from a privilege I’ve tried very hard to own in my professional and personal worlds.
Regarding the concerns of doxxing: in my tweet about reporting her behavior, I worded that clumsily, and for that I apologise. I was, quite frankly, frightened not just for my own privacy, but for the privacy of my family, too. I have not contacted Snow’s department out of respect for her privacy, nor do I plan to do so, despite the increasing concern I have not only for my own safety, but for the safety of my family. I will, however, not rule out pursuing legal action if she escalates any further. Despite constantly being accused of whorephobia, I do, despite attempts to paint me otherwise, support the rights of sex workers and will state this clearly: I do not want to do this. This would be an absolute last resort on my part. I simply want this to go away, and carry on living my life, and for Snow to carry on living hers.
I’d like to consider this matter closed. There’s been a lot of enmity over Twitter the past few days, and I’d like to see the community move on from this. I’ve owned up to my mistakes and, in this letter, exposed parts of myself and my family history I would have preferred to keep private.
There is no campaign against MistressSnowPhD. There is a digital record that no one has a campaign to harass her, and I have not orchestrated a campaign to harass her nor have any of my colleagues. In fact, I urged colleagues and friends to not engage multiple times. No one is attacking her or her followers to the best of my knowledge, and many people are on lockdown and have blocked her and her followers because they would like to move on.
I know I can be loud and vocal about my convictions. I’ve been this way since I can remember, and for a few years, I’ve been trying to find a middle ground to meet people in a more palatable way, to foster conversation, nuance, and exchange. While some people who may have witnessed me, a white-passing person, speak passionately about racism and chalk it up to trying to gain clout, these convictions are formed out of my relationship to my father and my own emotions towards witnessing him face a world that would not see him for the wonderful person he was. Simply put, my father means more to me than anything academia could ever give me.