A white Jewish woman pretended to be Black and Latina her entire professional career as an African and Latinx studies teacher; reports show she even used the n-word while teaching students.#Jessica A Krug, an associate professor at George Washington University, has taught and written extensively about Africa, Latin America, the diaspora, and identity while claiming that she is of Black and Latinx heritage, CNN reports. But that’s all a lie, she recently admitted in a Medium.com article that she is actually a Jewish white woman.
“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,” Krug wrote in the article that was published Thursday. After all these years, Krug admitted in her post that she had no right to claim either of the identities, saying that “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.”
She apologized for what she calls her “continued appropriation of Black Caribbean identity.” She added that she was wrong, unethical, immoral, anti-Black, and colonial, CNN reports. “I am not a culture vulture,” she wrote. “I am a culture leech.” One of Krug’s students said she is mortified by the revelation. Anmol Goraya told CNN that Kurg would often speak in and out of Spanish, using “plátanos” instead of “plantains” and would boldly reinforce her fake Black and Latinx heritage. “It was the last thing on my mind to think she was lying. I would think I had the details confused,” said Goraya.
Crystal Nosal, a spokesperson for George Washington University, wrote to CNN, saying that the university is aware of Krug’s article and is looking into the situation. Nosal said that at this time, it “cannot comment further on personnel matters.”
