An Indiana community activist named Satchuel Cole admitted this week she lied about her race and apologized for misleading people.
“I have taken up space as a Black person while knowing I am white,” she wrote in a Facebook post under the name Satch Paige, according to the Indianapolis Star.
Cole is known for her work with Indy10 Black Lives Matter and Indy SURJ, the newspaper said.
She continued:
Friends, I need to take accountability for my actions and the harm that I have done. My deception and lies have hurt those I care most about. I have taken up space as a Black person while knowing I am white. I have used Blackness when it was not mine to use. I have asked for support and energy as a Black person. I have caused harm to the city, friends and the work that I held so dear.
I will do the work to take responsibility for my actions and try to reduce the harm that I have already caused. If there are ways to repair the harm, I will do the work that is required to do so. I will continue to seek the help necessary to heal myself. I am sorry for the harm I have caused. I am sorry for the hurt and betrayal. I will do what I can to show that I want to be a better person.
The activist’s apology followed an exposé on her family that was published on BlackIndyLIVE.com, according to the Star.
“Laron Anderson, the website’s editor-in-chief, said it was the culmination of long-standing questions he and others had about whether Cole really was Black. Cole had based their racial identity, Anderson said, on a claim that their father was Black,” the report stated.
In a similar instance September 2, George Washington University professor Jessica Krug, also known as Jess Lam Bombera, admitted she was not really black, according to Breitbart News.
“To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim,” Krug wrote in a Medium blog post.
“First North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness,” she continued.
Despite a national scandal in 2015, Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who claimed she was black for at least a decade, still views herself as a black woman.
“Racially I identify as human, but culturally I identify as black,” she said in July, adding, “I do hope that we can rework the vocabulary. That’s part of challenging the race world view.”