A white scholar pretended to be black and Latina for years. This is modern minstrelsy
Last week the historian Jessica Krug confessed that she had spent years engaged in a racial masquerade, taking on a North African, Black American, and later a Black Caribbean identity when she was in fact a white Jewish woman from Kansas City.
Krug’s confession was likely a preemptive move because she was about to be exposed. The week before she published her admission, we, as part of a small group of Black Latina scholars, had begun working to uncover her lies and started asking questions to her close friends and editors. Apparently tipped off, Krug tried to control the narrative and “cancel” herself, seemingly trying to set the terms for her own reckoning.
Over the course of her life Krug built an identity based on the worst stereotypes, beliefs and supposed dysfunctions of Black and Latinx people. It is bad enough that she pretended to be Black or Latina; worse, she portrayed herself as the daughter of addicts battling overdoses and suicide attempts on the “streets” of the Barrio. She claimed to be the only person in her family to go to college, took on caricaturesque anti-racist stances, and engaged in racist cosplay under the nonsensical name of “Jess La Bombalera.” If anyone questioned her white appearance, she would retort that her mother was a drug-addicted sex worker who her white father had raped.
In her world, Black Latinx people were typecast and held static in a tangled pathology of trauma, violence and poverty. She openly bullied, mocked, gaslit and antagonized Black and Latina women she encountered in academic and activist circles as a way to further authenticate and validate her imaginary struggle and holier-thanthou politics. She made a mockery of radical politics and activist organizing by tearing down those she deemed less “woke” than herself. Perhaps one of the most disgusting things she publicly did was to attempt to justify the brutal murder of 15-year-old Lesandro Guzman-Feliz, who died in a machete attack at the hands of gang members in a case of mistaken identity, by claiming that had he lived he would have ended up being a cop.
Much like the Blackface minstrel performers of the 19th century, Krug calculatingly used the most exaggerated, hackneyed and simply racist stereotypes of Latinx and Black people and made a mockery of their political stances. These exaggerated traits made it so that whites would not doubt her, since she exhibited all the characteristics associated with Latinos in film and television. And while her performance made her Black and Latinx colleagues uncomfortable, many avoided questioning her because she was prone to level accusations that we were “assimilated” if we did not exhibit the “authentic” culture of our communities or failed to live up to her hyperbolic radical politics.
This was her clever mechanism of deception: against whites she deployed trite Hollywood stereotypes all too familiar to the white imagination, and against minorities she leveled accusations of respectability politics. She terrorized Black and Latina women, panned their work and politics, and made many of her colleagues take on additional labor under the pretense of having to deal with her imaginary family saga. Krug was particularly cruel to US-born Puerto Rican scholars, who she often accused of lacking the insider knowledge and cultural fluency that she reveled in.
The cruel irony is that Latinx scholars, who constitute less than 5% of the professoriate, have fought their whole lives to create a safe space for those who speak with an accent, who are first-generation scholars, or who have not mastered the unspoken codes of the Ivory Tower. Because Krug is lightskinned, her outlandish behavior was deemed passable and presentable because anti-Black logics mean that white people are often more comfortable with minorities who are white and mestizo. By taking on a fake and exaggerated Afro-Puerto Rican identity, Krug not only engaged in a form of violent minstrelsy but elbowed her way into the very few spaces afforded to underrepresented scholars and activists. By usurping access to Black and Latinx spaces, she silenced and extracted from those whose very existence and identities she was parodying. Along the way she racked up rare scholarships, fellowships and resources earmarked for Black and Latinx scholars, such as the prestigious McNair Scholars Program.
Krug is a well-respected historian whose work would have stood in its own right. She didn’t need to cloak herself in fake Black Latinidad in order for her work to be accepted. She could have been a white ally and worked alongside the communities she allegedly cared for. But she chose to colonize our identities and even steal our names, at one point going by the alias of Jess Cruz. What is more, she specifically stole the lived experiences, culture and struggles of Puerto Ricans: colonial subjects who continually fight against their lack of sovereignty and non-consensual second-class citizenship.
Now, with her egotistically selfflagellating “confession essay”, she has once again attempted to steal the narrative before those affected by her deceit have even had the chance to voice their feelings. By performatively punishing herself, she has attempted to set the terms of her own retribution – thereby stealing from us once again.
It is unclear what the future holds for Krug. Her self-cancellation did not, apparently, include a letter of resignation. Her university colleagues have called for her tenure to be revoked. Many wonder if she will continue to profit from her minstrelsy by writing a tell-all book, as did Rachel Dolezal.
We hold no illusions that Krug actually subscribes to the social justice traditions that she made a mockery of. If she does, however, she would cease her performances and colonialist theft, stop waxing on the impossibility of forgiveness or punishment, and focus on the question of reparations instead.
Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez is an associate professor in the department of English and African American & African Studies at Michigan State University
Yarimar Bonillais a professor in the department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College and the PhD Program in anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
By usurping access to Black and Latinx spaces, she silenced and extracted from those whose very existence and identities she was parodying