Jessica Krug: White professor who admitted to pretending to be Black resigns university job

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Update 10:21 p.m. EDT Sept. 9: A white George Washington University associate professor, who sparked outrage one week ago by admitting in a blog post that she has been posing as a Black woman for decades, has resigned.

University officials launched an investigation into an essay posted on Medium Sept. 3 under Jessica A. Krug’s name, in which the author described deceiving friends and coworkers for most of her professional career by assuming numerous Black identities.

“Dr. Krug has resigned her position, effective immediately,” M. Brian Blake, a provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, and Paul Wahlbeck, the dean of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, wrote in an email to the campus community.

“We hope that with this update our community can begin to heal and move forward,” Blake wrote in the email, obtained by The New York Times.

Original story: A George Washington University associate professor, who specializes in African-American history as well as Africa and Latin America, admitted in a Thursday blog post that she has been deceiving friends and coworkers for most of her professional career.

“I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech,” the blog post on Medium attributed to Jessica Krug stated. “I have thought about ending these lies many times over many years, but my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics.”

The post, titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies,” unmasked Krug as a white, Jewish woman from Kansas City, despite a professional career steeped in her “blackness” that never was.

“I have built my life on a violent anti-Black lie, and I have lied in every breath I have taken,” she wrote.

Specifically, Krug stated in her post that she had falsely assumed multiple cultural identities over the years, including “North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.”

According to BBC News, Krug blamed her lies on mental health issues and early-childhood trauma, but acknowledged those underlying conditions do not excuse her behavior.

In a tweet, Black author, screenwriter and editor in chief of the online publication RaceBaitr Hari Ziyad said he had considered Krug “a friend up until this morning when she gave me a call admitting to everything written here. She didn’t do it out of benevolence.”

According to GWU’s website, Krug has taught history courses since 2012, including classes about the African diaspora and African history. The university offered no immediate comment.

One of Krug’s most prominent published works on the subject of Blackness was featured in an essay for Essence.com about the Puerto Rican uprising against its governor in 2019, The Washington Post reported.

In that piece, for instance, Krug referred to herself as a “boricua,” a term used for Puerto Ricans, and described herself as “an unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood” who has spent much of her time advocating for communities of color and opposing gentrification in New York, the Post reported.

Read more here and here.

Cox Media Group