White US professor Jessica Krug admits lying about being black
A prominent US professor of African American history at George Washington University has admitted lying for years about being black.
Jessica A Krug revealed she is a white woman from Kansas City, whose career is built on a “toxic soil of lies”.
Ms Krug previously took financial support from cultural organisations to fund writing a book about fugitive resistance to the transatlantic slave trade and referred to herself in a biography as “an unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood”.
“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,” Ms Krug wrote on the website Medium.
In her book Fugitive Modernities, written prior to her recent confession, Ms Krug wrote: “My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist.
"My brother, the fastest, the smartest, the most charming of us all.
"Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.”
Ms Krug is also well-known for her activism, going by the name Jessica La Bombalera on the activist scene.
“I’m Jessa Bombalera. I’m here in El Barrio, East Harlem – you probably have heard about it because you sold my f****** neighbourhood to developers and gentrifiers,” Ms Krug said at a City Council hearing.
Ms Krug later added: “I wanna call out 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.”Within her post on Medium, Ms Krug alludes to a difficult childhood and unresolved mental health problems, although she says this does not justify her lies.
“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.
"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.
“But mental health issues can never, will never, neither explain nor justify, neither condone nor excuse, that, in spite of knowing and regularly critiquing any and every non-Black person who appropriates from Black people, my false identity was crafted entirely from the fabric of Black lives.”
Ms Krug’s story is similar to that of civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal, whose own parents outed her for pretending to be black in 2015.