Professor of African history who lied about being black

AN academic who specialised in African American history has admitted lying for years about being black.

Jessica Krug, who in reality is a white Jewish woman, said she was guilty of being a ‘culture leech’.

The 38-year- old, an associate professor at George Washington University in the US, said ‘I cancel myself’ in an online post in which she added that she was a ‘coward’.

The extraordinary story recalls the case of Rachel Dolezal, a civil rights activist and African studies instructor who kept up the pretence of being black for years.

She made headlines in 2015 when her parents outed her as white, but was unrepentant and later said: ‘I’m not going to stoop and apologise and grovel.’

Miss Dolezal, who worked at Eastern Washington University, said she ‘identified as black’. The announcement by Miss Krug, pictured, came in an online blogging post in which she admitted living her whole adult life in ‘the napalm toxic soil of lies’.

She wrote: ‘To an escalating degree, 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.

‘I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech.’ Miss Krug blamed ‘unaddressed mental health demons’ for assuming her false identity. But former friend Hari Ziyad, a black author and screenwriter, said Miss Krug only came forward because her lies had been exposed.

One of Miss Krug’s students, a black woman, told ABC News: ‘I thought I’d found a kindred spirit.’ Others said she used to talk about how her family in the Dominican Republic loved plantains and used the N-word when it appeared in texts. In an online biography, the academic called herself a ‘child of the hood’.

The introduction to her 2018 book, Fugitive Modernities: Politics and Identity Outside the State in Kisama, Angola, and the Americas, says: ‘My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist. Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.’

It comes as Adele was accused of cultural appropriation this week for braiding her hair in an African style and wearing a Jamaican flag bikini. George Washington University, in Washington DC, said it could not comment.