White Professor Admits She Pretended To Be Black Her Whole Career To Get Ahead

A history professor at George Washington University who insisted she was black for years and received financial support from black cultural institutions has now confessed she is a “culture leech” who has been lying about her race.

In reality, Professor Jessica A. Krug is a white Jewish woman from Kansas City who profited off her claims of being a black woman. So much for so-called “white privilege.”

In a case reminiscent to Rachel Dolezal, Professor Krug took financial support from black cultural institutions such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for a book she wrote about African slavery.

In 2009 she is understood to have been award as Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. 

According to a Medium post written by Krug herself, her successful academic and literary career was rooted in a “toxic soil of lies”.

“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,” she wrote.

In Krug’s book Fugitive Modernities, published before she confessed that she is not black, she wrote in her acknowledgments: “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.”

But it was all a lie.

In her Medium post, Professor Krug confessed, “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 … every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love.”

Krug also wrote that she had mental health issues.

“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,” adding that has “severe trauma that marked my early childhood and teen years.”

She continued, “I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech … I am a coward …”

Professor Krug then said she deserves to be “canceled” and “I absolutely cancel myself.”

“I believe in cancel culture as a necessary and righteous tool for those with less structural power to wield against those with more power. I should absolutely be cancelled … You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”

But then: “What does that mean? I don’t know.”

Following the revelations in her post, Krug has been slammed on Twitter by several black writers and colleagues who are accusing her of admitting her lies because she was about to be exposed.

Hari Ziyad, a black author and screenwriter, claimed Krug only penned the post because she had been ‘found out’. 

Neal Davidson said he ‘started grad school in history at UW-Madison around the same time as Jessica Krug. Everyone I knew suspected she was full of sh*t, but no one was sure what to do about it.’

In a series of scathing tweets, Ziyad said he considered Krug to be a friend until she called him a few hours prior to the Medium post being published to confess. 

‘Jess Krug… is someone I called 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. She did it because she had been found out,’ Ziyad tweeted. 

Jessica Krug, described by the GWU website as a “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora, with a particular interest in West Central Africa and maroon societies in the early modern period and Black transnational cultural studies,” is the author of “Fugitive Modernities: Politics and Identity Outside the State in Kisama, Angola, and the Americas, c. 1594-Present” and “Fathers of No Nation.”