By Ana de Liz
Freelance Reporter
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Jessica A. Krug, an associate professor at George Washington University whose expertise spans colonialism and African American history, has admitted pretending to be Black for years.
Krug revealed in a Medium post that for the majority of her life, including her adulthood, she "eschewed" her lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City, Missouri.
Instead, she lived "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," her post said.
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In her post, Krug says that mental health issues "likely explain" why she assumed a false identity in her youth and continued to develop it into her adulthood. She adds that mental health professionals assured her that this is a common response to "some of the severe trauma" that marked her early childhood and teen years.
"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," Krug wrote.
"That I claimed belonging with living people and ancestors to whom and for whom my being is always a threat at best and a death sentence at worst."
Krug, whose case is reminiscent of that of NAACP official Rachel Dolezal, took financial support from cultural institutions such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, NY, for a book called Fugitive Modernities, in which she wrote about fugitive resistance to the transatlantic slave trade through their identities.
The George Washington University website lists Krug as an associate professor at its Department of History with a "particular interest in West Central Africa and maroon societies in the early modern period and Black transnational cultural studies."
She taught classes on African history and received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012.
The university is investigating. "We are aware of the post and are looking into the situation," Crystal Nosal, spokeswoman for GWU, told The New York Times. "We cannot comment further on personnel matters."
The Washington D.C. professor also engaged in activism going by the name of "Jessica La Bombalera," pretending to be an Afro-Latina woman from the Bronx. She testified by video in June to a New York City City Council meeting on police violence.
The Department of History at the university has been contacted for comment.
Rachel Dolezal, who changed her name to Nkechi Diallo in 2016 and served as president of her local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter despite not being black, was charged with fraud in 2018.
According to court documents, Diallo illegally received $8,847 in food and childcare assistance between August 2015 and November 2017, even though she was also earning income from a book she published called In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.
A number of former students and black journalists, professors and authors, including Robert Jones Jr., who held a Twitter conversation with Krug on liberation through his Son of Baldwin channel, have reacted to her confession.
Krug's author biography on the website RaceBaitr, where she published some articles, said she was "an unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood."
The bio also said she spent most of her time and energy "in the struggle for her community in El Barrio and worldwide, whether against the violence of the state as manifest by police, the encroaching colonialism of gentrification, or around issues of community health and environmental justice."
RaceBaitr, a platform focused on "creating freer black futures" has since deleted Krug's work from its website and issued a statement welcoming "suggestions for better vetting and elevating writers committed to the liberation of Black people."
Krug is not George Washington University's first professor to fabricate their identity.
Novelist H.G. "Hache" Carrillo taught creative writing there full time for eight years until 2015. Carrillo's true name was Herman Glenn Carroll, which his husband only discovered after he died of COVID-19 complications April.
While Carroll told a story that his parents fled Fidel Castro's Cuban regime when he was seven years old, he was actually born in Detroit and his parents were both from Michigan, The Washington Post revealed.
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