A black former UPenn classmate of “Palestinian Rachel Dolezal,” Hannah Gann, said the fraudster cares more about her “personal gain” than helping the cause, after the self-proclaimed African and Palestinian activist was outed as a white, Jewish woman.
The former associate, who said she knew the 35-year-old Gann before she started living a lie, accused her of trying to “take advantage of vulnerable communities” when she spoke to The Post on Wednesday.
“The moment you start lying and perpetrating as if you’re somebody else, is when your whole point, your whole message, starts to fall flat,” said the former student, who asked not to be identified.
“If you truly care about the cause more so than about personal gain, then that’s just what it is,” she said of high school teacher Gann, whose activism was so rabid she was once branded “Philadelphia’s Leading Antisemite” by the group Accuracy in Media (AIM).
The former classmate remembers Gann through their shared involvement in urban studies and public-service programs at UPenn.
“She definitely wasn’t black,” she said. “There were a lot of Jewish students at Penn during my time and even in my program that looked like her — light skin, curly dark hair.”
The UPenn graduate added that she worked at the Black Cultural Center at the college so she “built strong relationships” with other black students.
“And I don’t remember her being there or being a part of that at all,” she said.
Gann was forced to issue a groveling apology in recent days on Instagram, in which she admitted to lying to her comrades for years about her identity after being confronted by fellow activists.
Gann’s former allies have severed all ties with her after she admitted to not only having no black or Palestinian ancestry, but also to being a white Israeli with living relatives in the West Bank.
The revelations make her previous staunch remarks, including defending Hamas as “martyrs” and calling for violence on American streets in support of the cause, all the more baffling.
“I can’t speak to her motivation. But it seems like she just tried to take advantage of vulnerable communities because she got involved and couldn’t fully engage in the ways that she wanted based on her identity,” Gann’s former classmate said.
“There’s this cultural blackwashing that happens when [people] meet certain cultures and they want to be involved, and they end up wanting the benefits of being of another race without the drawbacks of it, and that’s part of what makes it even more corrupt,” she added.
Gann, a 10th-grade history teacher at a West Philly high school, has been branded the “Palestinian Rachel Dolezal” on social media, in reference to the former Idaho NAACP chapter leader who fooled fellow activists for years by pretending to be black.
The school district has not indicated what, if any fallout will happen as a result of the revelations.
