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.

A few years ago there was another white woman who passed herself off as black. I can't fathom what motivates them, but there's definitely something wrong with their mental state.

1. Thread https://www.democraticunderground.com/118768697

2.https://www.democraticunderground.com/118768729

I honestly don't care what she wants to call herself as long as it did not hurt others. Can someone explain?

the struggles that black folks have endured for generations in their search for justice and equality. You don't think that's hurtful?

She isn't supporting black causes, she is leaching off of their righteous outrage. Maybe she's looking to glom onto some sort of sick sympathy over the public's rising awareness of the disparities between blacks and whites.

I'm not black, and I don't intend to speak for our DU community, but her actions offend me as well.

Many students took her courses because they thought she was black, thus having particular insight into the issues.
She was hired partly on that perspective, the college could claim diversity in their hiring of professors.

Now the college has to wonder about her entire background, they may be looking at lawsuits for supporting
a fraudulent staff member.

She lied at length about her experiences.

I watched about thirty seconds of a video of some conference where she starts talking about being about being in the Bronx, being five years old, walking with her twelve year old brother and suddenly he was thrown to the ground by white cops. At least she was accurate about the age difference between her and her actual brother. Everything else was pure fiction.

- from undercover journalists Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffitn and Grace Halsell to Profs. Dolezal and Krug - is that no matter their righteous intent, they are basically self-serving, ultimately harmful to members of the appropriated community and therefore to that community as a whole.

An interesting analysis is that they are at an extreme level of white guilt, "Guilt implies a self-hatred that is destructive and, in an unexpected way, an expression of superiority. The person who outwardly displays white guilt seems to be degrading himself, but, in the act of contrition, he morally elevates himself above his fellow white people. The self-abasing act of contrition is not really about fixing a problem; it’s about establishing the moral superiority of the demonstratively penitent." Here, I think, that this elevation applies not only to white people but to their object as well. Halsell thought black women she encountered in Harlem were "acting white" for wearing pantyhose and living "regular" lives not in abject poverty/depression went looking for "authentic" blacks in Mississippi. In their charade, and besides taking scholarships intended for PoC, Dolezal and Krug denigrated black and Hispanic colleagues and students (women) as basically not as "woke" as they should be.

The author explains historically how "White Guilt Never Helped Anyone" https://www.spiked-online.com/2015/06/16/white-guilt-never-helped-anyone/

My opinion right now is inconclusive about conservative republican Sprigle who I found no account, though he could and ultimately did, as with Griffin and Halsell, took breaks from whiteness when overwhelmed by the pressures of blackness. It seems to me that Sprigle was about uncovering the truth in winning the Pulitzer Prize in the 1920s revealing that newly-appointed SC Justice Hugo Black was a Klan member. He had donned disguises and used the pseudonym James Crawford many times before to write first-hand accounts of conditions in state mental hospitals and coal mines and to investigate illegal gambling operations. His expose of Pittsburgh's thriving black market in meat during World War II, for which he posed as a butcher and bought and sold meat for a month, won him another national prize, the 1945 Headline Club award. And he wrote of the variety of black lives from introductions to the impoverished as well as prosperous farmers and other professionals. http://old.post-gazette.com/sprigle/sprigleintroduction.asp Some say he was simply trying to get another prize.

Back to Krug:

From the blog University Diaries https://www.margaretsoltan.com/?cat=30

More links https://www.thecut.com/2020/09/students-on-fake-black-professor-jessica-krugs-classes.html#comments

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/09/jessica-krug-white-scholar-black-latina

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/complicated-racial-politics-going-undercover-report-jim-crow-south-180962164/#SXgDW2CPCz71b5ZH.99

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/06/812864654/the-limits-of-empathy

https://www.phillytrib.com/commentary/michaelcoard/coard-white-man-as-black-man-exposes-southern-racism-embarrasses-racists/article_3f84cfeb-6e99-57a5-ac2c-3c13af3c27ab.html

https://triblive.com/opinion/tom-purcell-our-national-discussion-on-race-is-far-from-over/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/criticism.58.1.0035?read-now=1&seq=12#page_scan_tab_contents Black Like Malcolm: Grace Halsell’s Rewriting of Black Like Me (1961) in Soul Sister (1969)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289114276_Near_black_White-to-black_passing_in_American_culture

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8784327/passing-white-black

I've already posted in the other threads, but I'll say a bit more here.

I wish someone would dig a little deeper into the Jessica Krug story.

When did this deception start? How exactly did she pull it off? How could she have suddenly gone from being a White student to being a Black one? Aren't things like race generally kept track of, especially in a University environment? And if she suddenly was claiming Blackness, wouldn't that raise some kind of questions?

I will add that because I am myself White, there's a lot I don't know about being Black or anything other than White. But honestly, I keep on wondering about the record keeping.

I knew Jessie when she was a student at Barstow. My two sons attended there, although neither was in her grade. I knew her from the time she started in 8th grade, until she left in disgrace at the very end of her senior year.

I even was her car pool driver, taking her to school pretty much every day during her senior year, because her mother's job made it too hard for her, and there was only one car in the family. I lived about a mile away, she was closer to Barstow, so driving her was not at all a hassle. During that year I got to know her quite well.

She was always willing to shock, anger, and offend people. It's hard to stress that enough. More to the point, she was determined to shock, anger, and offend people.

Oh, and I'm not buying her story of childhood trauma, or even her tale of being confronted because of wearing a Star of David. While she certainly never hid her Jewish identity, I don't recall her ever wearing that. The Jewish population of the Kansas City area is, I'm not even sure how to express this, but perhaps I'll say comfortably assimilated. For what it's worth, my (now ex) husband is Jewish, and so I'm slightly conversant in such things.

Her mother adored her. That was obvious from the first time I met Sherry Krug. She and Jessie's father were divorced, which I see as no big deal since divorce is very common. I honestly have no idea what role he played in her life, since he was never mentioned. If you'd have asked me back then I'd have guessed he was dead or totally out of their lives.

I suspect the turning point was the high school plagiarism. She didn't get away with it, and was effectively expelled about five days before the end of the year, but I suspect the lesson she took away was that if she were more savvy and cagy, she could get away with it the next time. Which is why I'm not particularly surprised at all this.

I doubt she tried to pass as Black at KU, but it would be interesting to know at what point, in either of her two next schools, that deception started. Plus, what puzzles me the most in this whole case, is that a person's stated race is often on a lot of official paperwork. So when all of a sudden she was claiming to be Black, why weren't any hackles raised?

It seems to me that just letting this story go with "Oh, she deceived everyone for a number of years and now her career is over" misses a lot. Misses things and issues that really ought to be raised.

So much is missing from this story.