A human rights attorney who claimed to be “Latinx” has admitted that she is, in fact, white, the latest in a string of people to be exposed for pretending to be Latino or Black.
Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, the National Lawyers Guild’s first “Latina” president, spent years claiming to be of Puerto Rican and Columbian descent, according to a report from the nonprofit news outlet Prism.
“Unbeknownst to many in the Latinx communities she worked alongside and claimed as her own, Bannan is a white woman who grew up in Georgia. Since at least 2006, she has accepted opportunities expressly intended for Latinas and other people of color,” the outlet reported.
Prism added that Bannan, 43, was at the time of its reporting the senior counsel at LatinoJustice Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund. She claimed for years to be of Latino descent, yet her origin story changed over time.
She once told a Spanish-language newspaper that she was “a little bit Spanish, a little bit Colombian, and a Sephardic Jew,” but denied to the Prism that she ever identified as Spanish, claiming she told the reporter of the newspaper that there was a misprint. It was only a few years ago when she started claiming to be partially Puerto Rican, when she told Voice Latina that she was a “cultural mix of Puerto Rican, Colombian, Italian, and some other.”
Human Rights Attorney Latest To Be Called Out For Pretending To Be Non-White | The Daily Wire: