Published: 7 September 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
University says Jewish prof who lied about being Black won’t teach this semester (Times of Israel)
Friend and editor recalls clues to Jessica Krug’s deception including her ‘clearly inexpert salsa dancing’ and ‘awful New York accent’; George Washington University probing case
White US professor admits she has pretended to be black for years (Guardian)
Jessica Krug, an activist who teaches African American history, writes Medium post apologizing for false identity
A seasoned activist and professor of African American history at George Washington University has been pretending to be Black for years, despite actually being a white woman from Kansas City.
In a case eerily reminiscent to Rachel Dolezal, Jessica A Krug took financial support from cultural institutions such as the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture for a book she wrote about fugitive resistance to the transatlantic slave trade. But according to a Medium post allegedly written by Krug herself, her career was rooted in a “toxic soil of lies”.
“To an escalating degree over my adult life, 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 wrote.
Photo: Jessica Krug aka La Bombalera (Twitter)
