CHANGING PLACES
The white academics who falsely adopt Black identities, plus French serial killer author revealed as serial liar
FUGITIVE IDENTITIES
Jessica A Krug, an activist and associate professor at Washington DC’s George Washington University, has admitted to having adopted a pretended Black Latina identity for several years, despite actually having a white background. Dr Krug is attached to GWU’s Department of History, where she taught world history, African history, the Black Atlantic and the African Diaspora. Her departmental profile describes her areas of expertise as Africa, Latin America, African American history, the Early Modern world, and imperialism and colonialism.
She received financial assistance from cultural institutions such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to support her writing of her first book, Fugitive Modernities (2018), about resistance during the transatlantic slave trade, specifically focused on Angola, Brazil and Colombia. Dr Krug dedicated the book to “my ancestors, unknown, unnamed… Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.” She calls her book “a love letter for all of those who have been murdered fighting for freedom… a love letter for my siblings in solitary, from Rikers to San Quentin, for my cousins being held on gang charges, for my femmes turning tricks.”
On the biography page of her now-deleted Twitter account Krug described herself as “an unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood,” stating that “much of her time, energy, and all of her heart are consumed in the struggle for her community in El Barrio [East or Spanish Harlem, one of NYC’s largest Hispanic, predominantly Puerto Rican, communities] and worldwide, whether against the violence of the state as manifest by the police, the encroaching colonialism of gentrification, or around issues of community health and environmental justice.”
In activist circles she was known as Jessa La Bombalera [Jess the Bomber]. At a recent New York City public hearing into police brutality, she introduced herself by saying: “I’m here in El Barrio, East Harlem – you probably have heard about it because you sold my fucking neighbourhood to developers and gentrifiers,” afterwards criticising “all these white New Yorkers who… did not yield their time for Black and Brown indigenous New Yorkers.”
But in a self-abasing mea culpa, posted on 3 September 2020 to the online forum Medium, she confessed that her entire career had “been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” explaining that “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: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness”.
Although referring to teenage trauma and “abuse within and alienation from my birth family” she does not offer these as excuses for her subsequent deception: “I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech”. And while acknowledging “mental health demons” which she has been battling her entire life, and which “likely explain why I assumed a false identity initially, as a youth, and why I continued and developed it for so long”, these mental health issues, she says, can neither explain nor justify her behaviour. In particular, she highlights having regularly critiqued “any and every non-Black person who appropriates from Black people” despite this being precisely what she herself had done, and which her career and identity had been based upon. It is thought that she posted her online confession in the knowledge that a public exposure of her false identity was imminent, several academic colleagues having recently begun to confront her, following their own investigations into her background. Those who knew Krug as the activist ‘La Bombalera’ expressed their shock at the news: “I’m dazed and still processing my emotions, but mostly, I feel betrayed, foolish and, in many ways, gaslit,” wrote author Robert Jones Jr on Twitter.
The case is reminiscent of the scandal surrounding Rachel Dolezal, a civil rights activist and former chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who was outed in 2015 for having falsely adopted a Black identity by her own parents. They were poor, uneducated white Christian Pentecostalists who put her to work on their Montana farm. At times they beat her, believing her to be possessed. They adopted four Black babies when she was 15, and with her mother incapable of caring for them due to chronic fatigue, Rachel took on the role of big sister and mother, braiding their hair, teaching them Black history, and increasingly coming to identify with Black rather than white people. She began to alter her appearance, darkening her skin and having her hair permed or braided. In interviews, she stated that while biologically born white, to white parents, she identified
“I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech,” she wrote
as Black, and that she sees race as a social construct. She later allegedly referred to herself as “the world’s first trans-black case”.
Comparisons have also been made with US senator Elizabeth Warren, who had claimed Native American ancestry and falsely identified herself as Cherokee. Challenged by President Donald Trump to take a DNA test (he has repeatedly mocked her as ‘Pocahontas’), Warren’s test result indicated mostly European ancestry, but with the possibility of the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor six to 10 generations ago.
Other, more historical instances of persons claiming an ancestry other than their own include Iron Eyes Cody (1904-1999), a film actor who played Native American roles, notably Chief Iron Eyes in Bob Hope’s 1948 comedy The Paleface, but who also appeared alongside John Wayne, Joseph Cotton and Steve McQueen and others, in over 100 movies. Actually born Espera Oscar de Corti of a Sicilian father and southern Italian mother, he claimed a Cherokee father and a Cree mother. He wore his onscreen costume of braided wig, fringed leathers and moccasins in daily life, and maintained his Native identity, only revealed incorrect after his death (for more on Cody and other Native American ‘pretendians’, see FT370:46-51).
Three critically acclaimed memoirs of Navajo life were published under the name Nasdijj in the early 2000s. They received several literary awards. It was only later that their author was revealed to be Tim Barrus, previously known as an author of gay fiction. The supposedly non-fiction memoirs of the three Nasdijj books were largely imaginary, but in part inspired by Barrus’s social work career, during which he had taught Apache children at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in New Mexico.
A similar literary controversy surrounded the critical acclaim for the bestselling Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood by Binjamin Wilkomirski (1995), purportedly the memoir of a Jewish child survivor of the Holocaust who was born in Latvia and was deported to two Nazi death camps. Certain historical inaccuracies in the book raised doubts; it was subsequently claimed that ‘Wilkomirski’ was in fact Bruno Grosjean, an illegitimate Swiss boy sent to an orphanage. In 1999, the author’s literary agency commissioned an investigation by historian Stefan Maechler, who concluded that the alleged autobiography was a fiction. Interestingly, however, he noted that ‘Wilkomirski’s’ actual childhood experiences as an orphan in Switzerland closely corresponded to episodes recounted in Fragments taking place in Nazi-occupied Poland, and that his fictional autobiography had been constructed gradually over decades. Maechler suggested that this was not simply a conscious fraud, but that on some level the author may have believed that what he had written was a true memoir. As such, the case has much wider ramifications, being, for example, pertinent to those who claim they have been abducted by aliens or abused by Satanists. Guardian, medium.com, D.Telegraph, 3 Sept 2020.
FRENCH AUTHOR EXPOSED
French author Stéphane Bourgoin, whose books about serial killers have sold millions of copies, has been exposed as a serial liar. Regarded as an expert on murderers, he has written over 40 books and presented several French television documentaries on the subject. He claimed to have interviewed more than 70 serial killers, that he had been trained at the FBI’s Quantico base in Virginia, and even that his own wife was murdered in 1976 by a man who confessed to the murder of 12 people after being arrested two years later.
However, in January 2020, anonymous collective the 4ème Oeil Corporation accused Bourgoin of lying about his past. He subsequently admitted to the French press that the murdered wife had never existed, and that he had never trained with the FBI, interviewed Charles Manson, or been a professional footballer.
“My lies have weighed me down,” he told Paris Match in an interview. “I have arrived at the balance-sheet time.” In another interview for Le Parisien, he described himself as a mythomaniac. “I completely admit my faults,” he said. “I am ashamed to have lied, to have concealed things.”
He had invented the imaginary wife based on Susan Bickrest, a young woman he had briefly met in a Florida bar. 24-year-old Bickrest was murdered by serial killer Gerald Stano in 1975, who later admitted to killing 41 women and was executed in 1998. “It was bullshit,” said Bourgoin. “I didn’t want people to know the real identity of someone who was not my partner, but someone who I had met five or six times in Daytona Beach, and who I liked.”
In another interview, Bourgoin told Le Figaro he believed he needed psychological counselling, saying he had exaggerated and lied about his life because he had always felt unloved. “I am profoundly and sincerely sorry,” he added.
“I am ashamed of what I did, it’s absolutely ridiculous”. theguardian.com, 13 May 2020.