White professor admits that she assumed Black identities
George Washington University announced it is looking into a blog post, written under the name of an associate professor of history, saying she had engaged in a yearslong deception by assuming various Black identities even though she is white.
In the post, the author, Jessica Krug, wrote that she had eschewed her “lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City” and had assumed identities she had no right to claim. Those identities included “first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness,” she wrote in the piece on Medium, which was posted Thursday morning.
“For the better part of my adult life,” she wrote, “every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies.”
Her assuming of a Black Caribbean identity, she wrote, was “not only, in the starkest terms, wrong — unethical, immoral, antiBlack, colonial — but it means that every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love.”
Jessica Krug is the name of an associate professor of history at George Washington whose résumé includes prestigious grants and scholarly publications, along with articles in popular outlets like Essence and RaceBaitr, a website exploring race.
Her academic work, including the 2018 book “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” focuses on the politics and culture of African and African diaspora societies in the early modern period.
Krug did not respond to emails and text messages Thursday, and the university said it could not confirm the authenticity of the Medium post.
“We are aware of the post and are looking into the situation,” Crystal Nosal, a university spokeswoman, said in an email. “We cannot comment further on personnel matters.”
But within hours of the essay’s being posted, there was a storm of reaction on social media, as some who said they had crossed paths with Krug, who was also involved in activist circles in New York’s East Harlem neighborhood, expressed outrage or moved to disavow her.
Many drew comparisons to the secret life of Rachel Dolezal, who led friends to believe that she was Black and became the local NAACP president in Spokane, Washington, before her parents came forward in 2015 to out her as a white woman, causing a national uproar.
RaceBaitr said Thursday that it had removed Krug’s work from its website.
“Her charade has taken her into many Black sacred spaces, including this one,”
RaceBaitr said in a message on Twitter. “We apologize for platforming her work and not taking seriously enough some of your warnings.”
Krug’s scholarly work has won respectful attention. “Fugitive Modernities,” which examined the politics and cultures of fugitive slave communities in Angola and in the African diaspora, was a finalist in 2019 for two prestigious awards, the Harriet Tubman Prize and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
Recently, several Black Latina scholars had started questioning Krug’s background, according to Yomaira Figueroa, an associate professor of global diaspora studies at Michigan State University. She declined to identify the scholars.
In the Medium post, the author wrote that “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,” even though she said those issues did not justify her fabrication.