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Caribbean L 12 ife, Sept. 11-17, 2020
White history professor
resigns after claiming false
Black Caribbean identity
By Nelson A. Clarke
An American white history professor,
who admitted on Sept. 3 to falsely
claiming a Black Caribbean identity, has
resigned, according to the university
where she taught.
“Dr. Krug has resigned her position,
effective immediately,” said George
Washington University in Washington,
D.C., in a statement on Wednesday, referring
to Dr. Jessica A. Krug, an associate
professor in history at the university.
“Her classes for this semester will be
taught by other faculty members, and
students in those courses will receive
additional information this week,” it
added. “We hope that with this update
our community can begin to heal and
move forward.”
On Sept. 4, George Washington University
said it had moved to suspend
Prof. Krug.
Deeply concerned about the impact
on the university, the history department
at George Washington University
had sought Dr. Krug’s resignation after
she admitted to the false claim.
Dr. Krug, wrote in a blog post that
she is actually white and Jewish, and
that she has “built her life on a violent
anti-Black lie.” She wrote that, throughout
her adult life, she claimed to have
North African, African American and
Caribbean heritage.
Writing under the caption, “The
Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence
of My Lies,” Dr. Krug said that, “for
the better part of my adult life, every
move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve
formed, has been rooted in the napalm
toxic soil of lies. Not just any 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.
“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,” Dr. Krug continued. “Intention
never matters more than impact.”
The professor said that to say that
she, clearly, has been battling “some
unaddressed mental health demons”
for her entire life, as both an adult and
child, is “obvious.”
She said mental health issues likely
explain why she assumed “a false identity
initially, as a youth,” and why she “continued
and developed it for so long.”
But, she said, “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.”
Stating that she is “not a culture vulture”
but “a culture leech,” Dr. Krug said
she had thought about ending “these
lies many times over many years,” but
added that her “cowardice was always
more powerful than my ethics.”
Dr. Krug said she believes in “restorative
justice, where possible, even when
and where I don’t know what that means
or how it could work.
“I believe in accountability. And I
believe in cancel culture as a necessary
and righteous tool for those with less
structural power to wield against those
with more power,” she said. “I should
absolutely be cancelled. No. I don’t write
in passive voice, ever, because I believe
we must name power. So. You should
absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely
cancel myself.”
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