PIGMENT OF HER IMAGINATION
Professor of African-American studies faked being black
It was a little white lie. Jessica Krug, an associate professor at George Washington University, admitted yesterday that she’s pretended to be black for years — when she was really Caucasian. “I cancel myself,” she wrote in her confession.
A white professor of African history at George Washington University admitted on Thursday that she has been masquerading as a black woman throughout her career in academia, calling herself a “culture leech.”
Jessica A. Krug said in a confession posted to Medium that she actually grew up “a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City.”
“For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” wrote Krug, 38.
The post, titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.” drips with contrition. “I am a coward,” she says. “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”
But all the self-flagellation was calculated — and preemptive — because she was about to “get outted,” one now-former friend revealed.
“Jess Krug, professor at @GWtweets, is someone I called a friend up until this morning when she gave me a call admitting to everything written here,” author Hari Zizad tweeted, linking to the Medium post.
“She didn’t do it out of benevolence. She did it because she had been found out.”
Krug’s big reveal calls to mind the saga of Rachel Dolezal, the former president of the NAACP’s Spokane, Wash., office who in 2015 was outted as white by a local reporter.
But for all her years of efforts, Dolezal was a slacker next to Krug.
Krug not only said she was black — she also adopted multiple black personalities.
She admitted in her Medium post that she took on “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.
That last identity appeared to reference a particularly outlandish — and abrasive — alter-ego named “Jess La Bombera.”
A YouTube recording of “La Bombera” from a virtual City Council hearing, captures an accent that lurches unevenly between Kansas Caucasian, Caribbean patois and a decided Bronx honk.
Meanwhile, as an author and history professor at George Washington, the admitted white former Kansan exalted in her bogus blackness.
Krug’s book, “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” is mentioned in her George Washington University faculty profile.
The book “interrogates the political practices and discourses through which those who fled from slavery and the violence of the slave trade in Angola forged coherent political communities outside of, and in opposition to, state politics,” the profile reads.
Still, her imaginary “barrio” origins remained with her.
“Jess Krug is an unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood,” reads her now-deleted author bio on author Zizad’s Web site RaceBaitr.
In her Medium confession, Krug attributed her deception to mental health.
“Mental health issues likely explain why I assumed a false identity initially, as a youth, and why I continued and developed it for so long,” she writes.
“When I was a teenager fleeing trauma, I could just run away to a
place and become a new person.
“But this isn’t trauma that anyone imposed on me, this is harm that I have enacted onto so many others. There is nowhere to run. I have ended the life I had no right to live in the first place.”
Krug — or La Bombera — could not be reached.
According to her George Washington University faculty profile, Krug is “a historian of politics, ideas, and cultural pracgan tices in Africa and the African Diaspora, with a particular interest in West Central Africa and maroon societies in the early modern period and Black transnational cultural studies.”
She teaches world history and African history.
“We are aware of the Medium post and are looking into the situation,” a George Washington University spokeswoman told The Post.
“We cannot comment further on personnel matters.”
Her bio remained up last night on the Web site of the university, where she has taught since 2012. But even before Thursday’s controversy, her students had been giving her a thumbs-down. On the teacher-rating Web site, Rate My Professors, only 35 percent of the 37 responding students said they would take her class again.
“Don’t take this class if you want to learn about history,” one reviewer wrote. “It’s easy tho.”
Dr. Yomaira Figueroa, an associate professor of Afro Diaspora Studies at Michinew State University, also said Krug came forward only after being confronted.
“Krug got ahead of the story because she was caught & she knew the clock was ticking bec folks started to confront her & ask questions,” Figueroa tweeted.
Figueroa said a junior scholar, who is black and Latina, had approached two senior scholars with her concerns about Krug and helped conduct research to prove Krug had been lying about her identity.
They then reached out to other senior scholars and institutions with the evidence, Figueroa said.
“There was no witch hunt, but there was a need to draw the line,” Figueroa said.
Krug admits she doesn’t know where she can go from here.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” she writes. “I don’t know what to build from here. I don’t know that it is possible to repair a single relationship I have with another person, living or dead, and I don’t believe I deserve the grace or kindness to do so.”
The Medium post, while a statement, is neither an admission nor an attempt at protecting her life and career, she said.
“This isn’t a confession, it isn’t a public relations move, and it damn sure isn’t a shield,” she concludes. “It is the truth, though.”