A history professor at George Washington University (GWU) has admitted she is white after falsely claiming to be black for years.
Jessica A. Krug, 38, an expert in African-American history, dropped the bombshell Thursday in a Medium blog post, in which she admitted lying about being black for her entire career and deceiving friends and colleagues.
“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 the post, entitled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.”
Krug, who gained her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012 according to her GWU bio, described herself in the online confession as “a culture leech.”
Krug called her appropriation of false racial identities “unethical, immoral, anti-Black, [and] colonial,” and admitted she’d “gaslighted those whom I love.”
The deceitful academic’s revelation recalls the scandalous case of Rachel Dolezal, a onetime NAACP leader in Washington state exposed in 2015 for identifying and passing as a black woman despite being white.
Ironically, Krug has been teaching classes on African American history at George Washington University since 2012. Her research interests include Africa, Latin America, African-American History, Early Modern World, as well as Imperialism and Colonialism, according to her bio on the university’s website.
Krug tried to account for her actions by claiming she’d battled “some unaddressed mental health demons for my entire life.” However, she conceded that “[m]ental health issues can never, will never, neither explain nor justify, neither condone nor excuse … my false identity.”
A GWU spokesperson told the Daily Mail they are “aware of the post and are looking into the situation,” adding: “We cannot comment further on personnel matters.”