HER SALSA WAS MILD
Race-faker prof posed as Puerto Rican & chided white neighbors
George Washington University professor Jessica Krug not only lied that she was black, she claimed to be a Puerto Rican from the South Bronx — and tortured her white neighbors, residents told The Post on Friday.
“She [once] told me to enjoy my last day alive,” said Anna Anderson, a Swedish woman who lives three floors above Krug at an East Harlem apartment building and has been locked in a feud with her over the educator’s allegedly nasty, bizarre behavior.
“She would pass me when I’m running and say ‘gentrifying,’ ” Anderson said. “She called me, ‘White trash, go back to Ohio,’ which is funny, because I’m an immigrant, [but] I’m a white immigrant from Sweden.”
Krug, who taught African studies at the DC college, outed herself as a race faker on Thursday in a column posted on Medium.
“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,” she wrote.
On Friday, George Washington University said Krug would not be teaching there this fall. And Krug’s fellow history department faculty released a statement saying they are “shocked and appalled” by her dishonesty and calling on her to resign — or be fired.
Kansas City, Mo., Mayor Quinton Lucas, a high-school classmate of Krug’s, told The Post on Friday that Krug was an activist at the city’s prestigious Barstow School.
“She identified fully as white and Jewish. We didn’t even have that many black people at my high school,” said Lucas, who is black.
“She gave a talk in an assembly about hosting a gay prom, which in the late 1990s, which in middle America, would have been very different for us, so I actually appreciated that.’’
She also tried to organize a flagburning event, Lucas said.
“In no way knowing her back then would I have thought that she would be one who either passed or attempted to pass for black,” he said.
But Krug not only later posed as a person of color for years, she was militant about it, acquaintances said.
She particularly singled out other whites along the way, they said.
“I said ‘hi’ to her one day, and she said ‘stupid white b- - -h’ or something,” a woman who is a friend of one of Krug’s other East Harlem neighbors claimed on Friday.
Anderson said that she first met Krug two to three years ago and that Krug shut the front door on her.
“You know when two people are walking in the building at the same time, you kind of hold the door? She slammed the door in my face when I was behind her,” Anderson said.
Krug called Anderson “white trash” and “white b- - -h” “whenever she had the chance,” the neighbor said.
“She’s a tiny person, but she’s got a very big attitude, and she kinda tried to come at me, threatened to stomp on my dog and provoke me to beat her up,” said Anderson, 39, who has a 9-year-old toy poodle, Lily.
“She’s like, ‘Are you gonna hit me? Are you gonna hit me? Are you gonna call the cops on me?’ ”
Anderson said the drama heated up when Krug allegedly started stealing her Blue Apron packages, leading the neighbor to call the cops on her.
“Cops shoot people like us,” Krug told her, according to Anderson.
A Bronx activist said Krug tried to pass herself off as a Puerto Rican from the South Bronx last year — but her salsa moves made her suspect.
“It was mediocre at best, but she was talking about how great she was,” blogger and photojournalist Ed Garcia Conde said of Krug’s dancing.
Garcia Conde said he first met Krug at last year’s Puerto Rican Day festival and she proudly proclaimed herself to be a salsa instructor.
“She joined our group of about four or five people,” Garcia Conde told The Post of the meeting with Krug.
“She said she was Puerto Rican and from The Bronx. She said she had roots in The Bronx and taught salsa.
“I can’t dance salsa, but I know salsa when I see it,” he said. “And not that this wasn’t salsa, but she did not dance like a salsa teacher.”
Worse than her dancing was her “woker-than-thou” attitude, he said.
“She came across to me as someone who was uber-militant about her activism — whether it was anti-racism or anti-gentrification,” he said.
Krug could not be reached for comment.