African history prof Jessica A Krug who pretended to be black ‘boycotted prom & planned flag burning’ at private school
A WHITE professor of African-American history who faked being black boycotted her prom and planned a flag burning at the private school she graduated from, a former classmate has said. Jessica Krug, 39, revealed on Thursday that she had lied about being black for her entire career teaching history at George Washington University. Krug – […]
A WHITE professor of African-American history who faked being black boycotted her prom and planned a flag burning at the private school she graduated from, a former classmate has said.
Jessica Krug, 39, revealed on Thursday that she had lied about being black for her entire career teaching history at George Washington University.
Krug – who described herself as an “unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood” – in fact attended the exclusive fee paying Barstow school in Kansas City, graduating in 1999.
A former classmate, who did not wish to be named, told DailyMail.Com that she was “very political” at school, and identified as a white Jewish girl.
She called me white trash, which is ironic
Jessica's neighbour Anna
Anna Anderson, her current neighbour in New York city, said that Krug referred to her as “white trash”, and hit out at her for “gentrifying” the neighbourhood by going running.
Following an argument about their bikes, Anderson said that Krug asked her: “Do you know what the police do to black people like me?”
Anderson added: “She called me white trash, which is ironic.”
In a post announcing that she had lied about her race, the professor attributed her identification issues to her “mental health demons,” but explained that her mental welfare does not condone nor excuse what she did.
Krug, from George Washington University, then continued to grovel about the issue, dubbing herself as a “coward” and “culture leech.”
Critics questioned the sincerity of her confession, saying she only admitted it because she had been caught out.
“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,” she wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
“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.
“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.”
Commenting on cancel culture, she wrote: “I should absolutely be cancelled.
“No. I don’t write in passive voice, ever, because I believe we must name power. So.
“You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”
However, Hari Ziyad, who said she called Krug “a friend up until this morning” insisted that the professor only confessed after she was caught.
“She didn’t do it out of benevolence,” Ziyad tweeted. “She did it because she had been found out.”
Dr Yomaira Figueroa, an associate professor of Afro Diaspora Studies at Michigan State University, backed Ziyad’s claim.
“Krug got ahead of the story because she was caught & she knew the clock was ticking bec folks started to confront her & ask questions,” Figeuroa wrote.
“Do not believe for one second that she would have come out with the truth on her own.”
The doctor also said that a black and latina junior scholar spoke to two of the senior scholars about concerns she had with Krug’s identity and alleged that she provided evidence that she was lying.
“There was no witch hunt, but there was a need to draw the line,” Figeuroa added.
Krug has written extensively about her alleged heritage – including a 2019 essay where she described herself as a “boricua,” a term used for Puerto Ricans, according to the Washington Post.
She also referred to herself as “an unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood,” the outlet reported.
In her book, Fugitive Modernities, Krug acknowledges: “My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist…Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.”
In a video posted in June, Krug – under her activist pseudonym Jessica La Bombalera – denounced “all these white New Yorkers who waited four hours with us to be able to speak and then did not yield their time for Black and Brown indigenous New Yorkers.
“Much power to all my siblings who were standing up, my black and brown siblings who were standing.”
Crystal Nosal, a university spokesperson, told the Post that officials are aware of the blog post and are looking into the situation.
Krug’s admission comes years after former college instructor Rachel Dolezal, who legally changed her name to Nkechi Diallo in 2016, was outed for claiming to be black, when she is a white American.
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The ruse worked for years until 2015, when her parents, with whom she has long feuded, told reporters that their daughter was born white but was presenting herself as a black activist in the Spokane region.
The story became an international sensation, and she was fired as head of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and kicked off a police ombudsman commission.
She also lost her job teaching African studies at Eastern Washington University.
