A professor at George Washington University who insisted she was black for years has now admitted in a Medium post that she has been lying about her race.
Jessica Krug, whom the GWU website describes as a “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora, with a particular interest in West Central Africa and maroon societies in the early modern period and Black transnational cultural studies,” is the author of “Fugitive Modernities: Politics and Identity Outside the State in Kisama, Angola, and the Americas, c. 1594-Present” and “Fathers of No Nation.”
She wrote on Medium, “For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies. Not just any lies. 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 continued guiltily, “I have not only claimed these identities as my own when I had absolutely no right to do so — when doing so is the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures — but I have formed intimate relationships with loving, compassionate people who have trusted and cared for me when I have deserved neither trust nor caring … every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love.”
She wrote that she had mental health issues; arguing, “To say that I clearly have been battling some unaddressed mental health demons for my entire life, as both an adult and child, is obvious,” adding that she “severe trauma that marked my early childhood and teen years.”
She claimed that her existence in her true identity would constitute “a threat at best and a death sentence at worst” to black people of the present and the past.” She continued, “I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech … I am a coward …”
Then she argued for the propriety of cancel culture: “I believe in cancel culture as a necessary and righteous tool for those with less structural power to wield against those with more power. I should absolutely be cancelled … You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”
But then: “What does that mean? I don’t know.”
Will that change her perspective? No: “My politics are as they have ever been, and those politics condemn me in the loudest and most unyielding terms.”
More dramatically: “I have burned every bridge and have no expectation that any of my relationships are flame resistant.”
Concluding: “I have lived this lie, fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy. I have built only this life, a life within which I have operated with a radical sense of ethics, of right and wrong, and with rage, rooted in Black power, an ideology which every person should support, but to which I have no possible claim as my own. There is no way for me to satisfactorily end this statement. This isn’t a confession, it isn’t a public relations move, and it damn sure isn’t a shield. It is the truth, though.”
Krug’s perspective differs markedly from Rachel Dolezal, the former president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane and teacher of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University who claimed for years she was black but was exposed as the daughter of white parents. In July, Dolezal stated people were telling her that the Black Lives Matter movement had “vindicated” her. She stated, “Overwhelmingly, most people I hear from are black or mixed or non-white in some way and a lot of people have said this is your moment, you’re vindicated. I have received hundreds of messages. Most of it’s been overwhelmingly positive,” according to the New York Post.