How racism helped enable professor’s deception of being Black

A professor of African and Latin American studies at George Washington University recently resigned after revealing that she had spent years posing as a light-skinned Black woman when she’s actually White. Jessica Krug engaged in a strikingly similar deception as Rachel Dolezal, the White woman who’d previously been found to be posing as a light-skinned Black woman who also worked as a college professor and chapter president of an NAACP chapter in Spokane, Wash.

In Krug’s own account, she acknowledges what she calls her own cowardice, anti-blackness and violence in forcing herself into spaces that were not for her, and in forming relationships with others based on her lies. There have also been conversations on social media stating that she only came forward because people who’d suspected her deception were about to tell the truth, whether she was willing to admit it or not.

“What Krug did was minstrelsy,” said Michelle Moyd, an associate professor of history at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., and associate director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. “She is part of a long tradition of minstrelsy in this country, and as such, she is a thief.”

Moyd is joined in conversation by Naila Keleta-mae, an artist and associate professor with expertise in race, gender and performance at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. They discuss the ways that the history of the “onedrop rule” and colorism work in favor of White supremacy in these cases. (This email interview has been edited for length and clarity. For the full interview, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdutlisa-deaderick-staff.html.)

Q:

Earlier this month, Jessica Krug, a professor of African and Latin American studies, revealed in an essay that she’d spent years lying about being a Black woman, and that she is, in fact, a White woman. This, of course, reminded me of Rachel Dolezal. What was your reaction to the news about Jessica Krug?

Keleta-mae: It made me think about performance and the many ways in which White supremacy can be thought of metaphorically as a theater, where White people can use stories, clothing, make-up, lighting and sets to create whatever fantasies they have about the aspects of Black people’s lives that fascinate them, without ever asking the Black people in the audience what we think of their show. Sometimes the performances are elaborately maintained over years, as in the cases of Krug and Dolezal, and sometimes the performances are sporadic, as in the case of Canada’s current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who wore blackface on more than one occasion.

Moyd: My initial reaction to the news about Jessica Krug was rage. Here was a White woman adopting multiple Black and Brown personas over a long span, performing different identities in different phases of a long-term fraud. She took up space in the academic profession, which has a well-documented dearth of actual Black and Brown people in its ranks. Scholars who interacted with her over the years reported that she habitually berated those she deemed not radical enough. In translation, not Black enough, or not Afropuerto Rican enough. The jawdropping audacity of a White woman judging actual Black and Brown people’s politics and scholarship produces a special kind of anger. Krug fabricated a difficult, tragic past that drew on some of the worst stereotypes and caricatures of Black and Brown people, and she weaponized that fake past to diminish people’s actual experiences, politics and scholarship. This sustained gaslit performance is inexcusable, and in many ways, unfathomable.

Q:

One of the first things that came to mind for me was this tendency I’ve seen from people who do not appear to be Black, claiming that they are Black based on very distant and partial Black ancestry. Can you talk a bit about the “one-drop rule”? What it is, and how it’s historically been used?

Keleta-mae: The one-drop rule worked in service of the kind of anti-black racism that White supremacy in the United States required in the 20th century, when it was legal in some states. The one-drop rule dictates that if someone has one drop of blood in them that can be traced to Black ancestry, then regardless of their skin color, that person is Black and also inferior to a White person.

In practice, the one-drop rule did things like allow White slave owners to disinherit their offspring who had Black ancestry, and it facilitated the horrors of the Jim Crow era.

No longer legal, the legacies of the one-drop rule continue to unfold in the ways that people view and value Black people well beyond the United States.

Moyd: The “one-drop rule” refers to the notion that if a person has any hint of African ancestry, they are, by definition, Black. One-drop rule logics underwrote exclusionary practices in U.S. history. Different variants of onedrop rule legislation and practices appeared in the first decades of the 20th century. One example was the 1924 Racial Integrity Act passed in Virginia, though there are also earlier examples. These laws were used to categorize people according to race, and to prevent people from different races from having interracial sex or marrying.

But to return to the first part of this question’s framing, it’s important to note that people legitimately self-identify as Black based on “very distant and partial Black ancestry” through a variety of means, including familial and kinship ties, genealogies, cultivation of spaces of belonging beyond bloodlines, and much more. It is not really for outsiders to judge whether or not people who “do not appear to be Black” are Black or not. This is another pernicious aspect of Krug’s disrespect for, and abuse of, Black people. She exploited a difficult, often sensitive issue within Black communities for her personal gain.

Q:

And how does the one-drop rule appear to be used in these cases (i.e. Krug, Dolezal), where it seems to still be serving and benefiting whiteness?

Moyd: The legacies of one-drop rule logics in the United States enabled Krug’s (and Dolezal’s) ability to make false claims to Blackness based on performance of a caricature that gave them opportunities they would not otherwise have had.

The one-drop rule created the space for them to perform these caricatures. It’s important to remember the context within which the one-drop rule was created: White people constructed it as a way of preserving and bolstering White supremacy. Krug’s decision to walk into that space was a purposeful use of a feature of White supremacy for her benefit. For Black people, the one-drop rule meant exclusion. For Krug, it opened access and laid the groundwork for her to commit a form of theft.

Q:

Can you also talk briefly about colorism? What it is, and how it seems to work in favor of, and in service to, this kind of deception?

Moyd: Colorism is an outcome of our racist society, in which dark skin is demonized and white or light skin is celebrated as an ideal. This means that Black people with lighter hues benefit from being closer, visually, to White people, and this visual proximity often manifests in better socio-economic opportunities and possibilities as well. On the other hand, Black people who have darker skin experience the worst forms of everyday racism.

Their specific, understandable frustrations with the constant privileging of lighter-skinned Black folks in our society must be named.

As a beneficiary of light-skin privilege myself, I am naming it here. Krug derived the elements of the deception she perpetrated from the colorism that orders our society. She was given the benefit of the doubt in spaces where she did not belong. Black people with darker skin rarely receive such grace. This is certainly true in U.S. academia, where Krug ran her game for so many years.

lisa.deaderick@sduniontribune.com