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irisblue

(34,405 posts)
Thu Sep 3, 2020, 03:23 PM Sep 2020

Jessica Krug & "claimed a Black identity throughout her career."

Source-https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/09/03/white-gwu-professor-admits-she-falsely-claimed-black-identity/
Long article, more at source

Snip-"A history professor at George Washington University admitted in a blog post to claiming a Black identity, despite being White.

Jessica A. Krug said she has deceived friends and colleagues by falsely claiming several identities, including “North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness,” she wrote in a blog post on Medium. Krug, whose areas of expertise include African American history, Africa and Latin America, is White and Jewish, she admitted.

“I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech,” Krug wrote. “I have thought about ending these lies many times over many years, but my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics.”


The Medium Blog Post-https://medium.com/@jessakrug/the-truth-and-the-anti-black-violence-of-my-lies-9a9621401f85

more at source...


snip-"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. 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. People have fought together with me and have fought for me, and my continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is not only, in the starkest terms, wrong — unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial — but it means that every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love.
Intention never matters more than impact. 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; the mental health professionals from whom I have been so belatedly seeking help assure me that this is a common response to some of the severe trauma that marked my 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. 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.
I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech."


And "mental health issues due to childhood trauma..."

snip"
No white person, no non-Black person, has the right to claim proximity to or belonging in a Black community by virtue of abuse, trauma, non-acceptance, and non-belonging in a white community. The abuse within and alienation from my birth family and society are no one’s burden but my own, and mine alone to address. Black people and Black communities have no obligation to harbor the refuse of non-Black societies. I have done this. I know it is wrong and I have done this anyway."


19 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Jessica Krug & "claimed a Black identity throughout her career." (Original Post) irisblue Sep 2020 OP
I do not know how I did a dublicate post, that is the deleted thread above. Sorry irisblue Sep 2020 #1
man to build your life on a lie qazplm135 Sep 2020 #2
Yeah, I'm wondering as well. Her academic career is shot. irisblue Sep 2020 #3
But fame, book deal and lots of media appearances will make up for that. Kind of Blue Sep 2020 #5
I'm not sure that's a guaranteed qazplm135 Sep 2020 #6
We'll see. Rachel is just one of many whites going black face Kind of Blue Sep 2020 #8
Found it! qaz, she was being outed. irisblue Sep 2020 #10
I mean that seemed like the most likely option qazplm135 Sep 2020 #11
+1000! Kind of Blue Sep 2020 #12
This message was self-deleted by its author Kind of Blue Sep 2020 #13
Well, I'm glad that you posted it here. Kind of Blue Sep 2020 #4
I forgot that that interview was going to be on today. irisblue Sep 2020 #7
Yes, indeed, irisblue! And the other one, Against Empathy Kind of Blue Sep 2020 #9
Holy crap. PoindexterOglethorpe Sep 2020 #14
This is the same Jessica Krug I knew 20 years ago. PoindexterOglethorpe Sep 2020 #15
And the discussion about Krug in GD. irisblue Sep 2020 #16
This message was self-deleted by its author irisblue Sep 2020 #17
And Black Twitter is on this. irisblue Sep 2020 #18
Just in case people read this thread, I want to say I knew Jessica Krug when she attended PoindexterOglethorpe Sep 2020 #19

qazplm135

(7,527 posts)
2. man to build your life on a lie
Thu Sep 3, 2020, 03:44 PM
Sep 2020

to get to the point that you are a professor, and then to then tear it down so thoroughly on the apex of 40 to the point where your life literally starts over...

Makes me think someone was about to out her, and she realized the best move was to come clean herself...that or she has some sort of epiphany, but I am guessing the former.

Kind of Blue

(8,709 posts)
8. We'll see. Rachel is just one of many whites going black face
Thu Sep 3, 2020, 04:43 PM
Sep 2020

worked out well. And we can take that waay to the minstrel shows.

qazplm135

(7,527 posts)
11. I mean that seemed like the most likely option
Thu Sep 3, 2020, 05:51 PM
Sep 2020

you don't live a lie for decades and then just unbidden throw it away.

I don't wish this on her, but what friends she has left should be on suicide watch.

Response to irisblue (Reply #10)

Kind of Blue

(8,709 posts)
4. Well, I'm glad that you posted it here.
Thu Sep 3, 2020, 03:56 PM
Sep 2020

The other one seemed largely about whether she looks black or not that, to me, is not the point of the OP. I wish Krug had gotten into, even a little, her reasons for assuming black face instead of "abuse," "trauma," and "non-belonging in a white community." I'm sure lots of white people have experienced all three but never thought of appropriating and benefiting from PoC culture. It sure seems to be a thing though.

So I'm listening to this now to get some answers The Limits Of Empathy at https://www.npr.org/2020/03/06/812864654/the-limits-of-empathy. The interviews includes Alisha Gaines, associate professor in the Department of English, part of Florida State University's College of Arts and Sciences. She wrote Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy.

In 1948, journalist Ray Sprigle traded his whiteness to live as a black man for four weeks. A little over a decade later, John Howard Griffin famously "became" black as well, traveling the American South in search of a certain kind of racial understanding. Contemporary history is littered with the surprisingly complex stories of white people passing as black, and here Alisha Gaines constructs a unique genealogy of "empathetic racial impersonation--white liberals walking in the fantasy of black skin under the alibi of cross-racial empathy. At the end of their experiments in "blackness," Gaines argues, these debatably well-meaning white impersonators arrived at little more than false consciousness.

Complicating the histories of black-to-white passing and blackface minstrelsy, Gaines uses an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, race theory, and cultural studies to reveal these sometimes maddening, and often absurd, experiments of racial impersonation. By examining this history of modern racial impersonation, Gaines shows that there was, and still is, a faulty cultural logic that places enormous faith in the idea that empathy is all that white Americans need to make a significant difference in how to racially navigate our society.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32680688-black-for-a-day

irisblue

(34,405 posts)
7. I forgot that that interview was going to be on today.
Thu Sep 3, 2020, 04:06 PM
Sep 2020

Are you goung to order the book based on the NPR show?

Kind of Blue

(8,709 posts)
9. Yes, indeed, irisblue! And the other one, Against Empathy
Thu Sep 3, 2020, 04:49 PM
Sep 2020

I'm particularly interested in this...

Demby: You are skeptical about how useful empathy can be in the context of racial justice. What do you think empathy can accomplish, and what can it not do?

Gaines: It's a question I'm still wrestling with, so I have more questions myself than really conclusive answers. I think that when we wholeheartedly embrace empathy as a solution to racial justice, that's not enough. We often don't talk about the power dynamics that happen when you're trying to stand in someone else's shoes or, in the case of Halsell, Griffin and Sprigle, literally staying in someone else's skin. That empathetic impulse can be useful when it mobilizes an action or actual solidarity. But when it's just, "Oh, wow, I really feel deeply about that thing. I'm really trying to understand. And now I do." That's the failure to me.

Robin Kelley: Part of the problem is that empathy itself doesn't always produce a moral response. Paul Bloom wrote this book called Against Empathy, [in which he argues that] we have limited capacity for feeling the pain of others. We tend to identify not with the collective, but with individuals, which then reinforces exclusion. Part of Bloom's argument is that we're not able to literally step outside of ourselves or our subjectivity to become someone else. So what we do is we glom onto those people we identify with.


PoindexterOglethorpe

(26,826 posts)
14. Holy crap.
Thu Sep 3, 2020, 07:07 PM
Sep 2020

I think I know her. Or at least I knew someone with that name, who would be the same age, back when she would have been in high school.

If I can find out what high school this Jessica Krug attended, I'd know for sure. And yes, I lived in a suburb of Kansas City at the time.

PoindexterOglethorpe

(26,826 posts)
15. This is the same Jessica Krug I knew 20 years ago.
Fri Sep 4, 2020, 12:28 PM
Sep 2020

I am not remotely surprised that she would do something this dishonest.

Response to irisblue (Original post)

PoindexterOglethorpe

(26,826 posts)
19. Just in case people read this thread, I want to say I knew Jessica Krug when she attended
Sun Sep 6, 2020, 11:05 PM
Sep 2020

the Barstow School in Kansas City. Her senior year I drove her to school every day as her mom had a job that precluded that and there was only one car in the family. She lived a mile or so from me and it was completely convenient to do so.

Jessie had already alienated a lot of people at school. She was always willing to take up unpopular and divisive stands on things. If she could piss people off, she was happy. Her claim about childhood trauma and abuse simply does not ring true to me. I realize those kinds of things often go unseen, but having observed her from the time she was in 8th grade to her ignominious dismissal from Barstow at the very end of her senior year, I'd say she was always conning people, always being deceptive, always convinced she was so much smarter than everyone else that she could get away with it.

The final straw was her submission to the school literary magazine. It wasn't her work. The student editors didn't realize it, but when the magazine was printed and distributed to the student body, several people actually recognized it. Plagiarism, pure and simple. When I drove her home from school the day she'd been called in to the honor committee, she offered me some lame excuse about meeting a deadline. Well, I'm a published writer myself (trust me, you'll never have heard of me) and I know deadlines and they are not an excuse for plagiarism. She was told to clear out her locker and not return. She was not welcome to attend graduation. They'd mail her diploma to her.

The entire episode left a very bad taste in the mouths of everyone at Barstow.

Given that, when I first started seeing these stories about her, I wasn't at all surprised. It is precisely the kind of long con she'd work. What astonishes me is that she apparently got away with it for so long.

I myself am thoroughly Caucasian, so I realize I know very little about African American culture or identity. But I find it somewhat hard to believe that no one every took one look at her and said, "You're a fraud." And I'm not meaning to say she didn't "look" African American, but wouldn't a lot of her behaviors and speech been a giveaway?

I'm also curious as to at what point she started assuming a Black identity. Don't colleges keep track of that? How would she have gone from being a White student in Kansas to a Black one in Oregon or Wisconsin? And it would also be interesting to know exactly how she got hired at GWU. I'm sure she knew that if she'd tried to get hired by Howard University they'd have laughed her all the way back to Kansas.

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