A white professor who taught African history at George Washington University has admitted to pretending to be Black all of her adult life.
Jessica Krug, an associate professor at the Washington, D.C., university, revealed the news herself in a Medium article.
“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 U.S. rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness,” Krug wrote.
“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.”
Krug added: “I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech. […] “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”