Unlike Rachel Dolezal, whose fumbled response paved her path to infamy, Hallberg does not deny whiteness when asked. The left, she writes, “was taken 2 years ago right before summer with barely any makeup and my hair straightened,” while the right was captured “in July right after I came home from a vacation, with makeup.” Another diptych shows photos of her father and brother who “as you can see,” says Hallberg, “also tan very easily.” Their smiling faces, indeed, look tan, but only in the way that many white people look tan. In one image, Hallberg annotates the viral “before & after” diptych. “I get a deep tan naturally from the sun.” Wednesday, on Good Morning America, she reiterated the message, saying, “I haven’t done anything to make myself look darker.” Her Instagram page features an Insta Story called “ LET ME EXPLAIN,” a more elaborate defense of her online appearance. “ I do not see myself as anything else than white,” she told BuzzFeed earlier this month. Though she hasn’t seemed to care much about clearing up assumptions in the past-even when accounts dedicated to black beauty have reposted her images-she now states herself clearly. But unlike Dolezal, whose fumbled response (not her wig) paved her path to infamy, Hallberg does not deny her whiteness when asked.
The juxtaposition recalls another viral sensation who was similarly exposed by a photo from her past: Rachel Dolezal.
In the “ after” photo, she appears tanner, with large gold hoop earrings, wavier hair, and a thick coat of gloss accentuating her lips. Though Hallberg was far from the only user named, she has become the face of what the media has more palatably called “blackfishing.” Hallberg’s “ before” image shows her smiling at the camera in a white top and black jacket, tan but not bronze, her face slightly ruddy in the sun. Earlier this month on Twitter, Toronto writer Wanna Thompson initiated a crowdsourced list of “ the white girls cosplaying as black women on Instagram.” Contributors to the thread posted compilations of newer and older photos of various Instagram users with high (sometimes 100,000-plus) follower counts, letting the contrasts speak for themselves: In the “before,” a pale, mousy brunette in the “after,” brown skin, 3c curls (or dreadlocks or box braids or Bantu knots or a wet and wavy wig), and hood fashions to match. By “others like her,” I don’t mean influencers at large, but a much-but not too much-narrower coterie of online personalities who’ve recently been collected under the term niggerfishing (a play on catfishing). That same tan now makes Hallberg and others like her conspicuous.
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