An associate professor of history at George Washington University admitted on Thursday that she has been lying about her identity as a Black woman — most recently as a Black Latina — for most of her adult life.
I have lied in every breath I have taken.
Jessica A. Krug wrote in a Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies” that for years she has “eschewed” her “lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City” and instead identified “within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then U.S. rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.”
“I have built my life on a violent anti-Black lie,” she wrote, “and I have lied in every breath I have taken.”
The deception carries echoes of the 2015 saga of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman and adjunct instructor of Africana education at Eastern Washington University who pretended to be Black.
Krug, who specializes in Africa and the African diaspora, according to her George Washington web page, wrote that “mental-health issues” most likely explain why she assumed the false persona when she was young, and why she continued and developed it “for so long.” She also acknowledged that those issues “can never, will never, neither explain nor justify” her false identification. She called herself a coward.
“I am not a culture vulture,” she wrote. “I am a culture leech.”
In 2017, Krug wrote a post for the online platform RaceBaitr with an author bio that described her as an “unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood” who spends her time “consumed in the struggle for her community in El Barrio,” according to an archived version of the article. At the beginning of her book, Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom, Krug mentions her ancestors, who “bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist,” as well as her metaphorical “siblings in solitary” and her “cousins being held on gang charges.” She wrote the book for those “whose names I cannot say for their own safety,” including those in “my barrio.”
Krug also appears to have posed as an Afro Latina activist known as Jess La Bombera, or Jess La Bombalera, who in June testified about various topics before the New York City Council, News One reported.
According to a version of her CV that appears to be several years old, Krug obtained a few opportunities early in her academic career that were earmarked for underrepresented groups in academe, though they were also available to economically disadvantaged students. She was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar at Portland State University. The program introduces juniors and seniors who are “first-generation and low-income, and/or members of underrepresented groups, to academic research and to effective strategies for getting into and graduating from doctoral programs,” according to its website.
She was also a Diversity Achievement Scholar at Portland State and an Advanced Opportunity Fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The fellowship targets students from ethnic minority groups, including African Americans, though economically disadvantaged students who don’t belong to one of those groups may also apply, according to the website.
In her Medium post, Krug did not explain why she chose to confess now. She also did not immediately respond to an interview request from The Chronicle. (A spokesperson for George Washington said in an emailed statement that the university is “aware of the post” and is “looking into the situation.”)
In her post, Krug expressed remorse and a desire to be held accountable, but she did not provide details on what such accountability would comprise.
