Source: Duke University Press / Duke University Press
A George Washington University professor has come clean and said she has been living a lie for most of her adult life. Jessica Krug has been teaching African and Latin Studies and posing as a Black woman. In an essay on Medium, she admitted that she is actually a White, Jewish woman from Kansas City, Missouri.
In her essay, she said she had been posing as a Black woman with “North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.” She was candid about how wrong and unethical her actions have been. She wrote:
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. People have fought together with me and have fought for me, and my continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is not only, in the starkest terms, wrong — unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial — but it means that every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love.
Krug also said that she clearly has mental health issues that she has been battling since childhood and that the mental health professionals she has sough help from have told her that her behavior is a “common response to some of the severe trauma that marked my early childhood and teen years.”
“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,” Krug wrote. “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.”
She also proceeded to call herself a “coward” and a “culture leech.”
Krug has also lost her job at George Washington University since this hocking revelation.
“Many of you understandably have many questions in the wake of the Medium post by GW faculty member Jessica Krug,” the college said in their statement on Twitter. “While the university reviews this situation, Dr. Krug will not be teaching her classes this semester…Failing that, the department recommends the rescinding of her tenure and the termination of her appointment.”
Her sister-in-law told confirmed to CNN that Krug is a Jewish, White woman and that their family is embarrassed.
