A PROFESSOR of African history who pretended to be black has only confessed because “black colleagues exposed her fake background.” Jessica A Krug – a 38-year-old white professor who taught African history at George Washington University since 2012 – had pretended to be black until admitting to her lie in a blog post on Thursday. In […]
A PROFESSOR of African history who pretended to be black has only confessed because “black colleagues exposed her fake background.”
Jessica A Krug – a 38-year-old white professor who taught African history at George Washington University since 2012 – had pretended to be black until admitting to her lie in a blog post on Thursday.
In the aftermath of her bombshell blog post on September 3, Dr Yomaira Figueroa, validated Krug’s claims on Twitter.
Figueroa, an associate professor of Afro Diaspora Studies at Michigan State University, tweeted on Thursday about why Krug “finally admitted” her false identity.
She tweeted: “The only reason Jessica Krug finally admitted to this lie is bec on Aug 26th one very brave very BLACK Latina junior scholar approached two senior Black Latina scholars & trusted them enough to do the research & back her up.
“Those two scholars made phone calls & reached out to other senior scholars & institutions with proof.
‘There was no witch hunt, but there was a need to draw the line.
“Krug got ahead of the story because she was caught & she knew the clock was ticking bec folks started to confront her & ask questions.”
Figueroa, who uses the Twitter handle Dr YoFiggy, urged people to not trust that Krug would have revealed the truth on her own.
“She made a living & a whole life out of parroting Black Rican trauma and survival. As a Black Rican I am PI**ED. The other thing is that, let historians tell it, her work is actually good, chick is smart- so why lie?”
Also, Hari Ziyad, who said she called Krug “a friend up until this morning” insisted that the professor only confessed after she was caught.
“She didn’t do it out of benevolence,” Ziyad tweeted.
“She did it because she had been found out.”
Krug’s shocking blog post is titled The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.
Krug attributes her long-lived lies to her “mental health demons” and “cowardice.”
She says her false identity was borne out of isolation and loneliness.
During her career, Krug has written extensively about Africa, Latin America, the diaspora and identity.
Krug has also written a lot about her alleged heritage – including a 2019 essay where she described herself as a “boricua,” a term used for Puerto Ricans, according to the Washington Post.
The condemned professor – who grew up in suburban Kansas City to a Jewish family – has referred to herself as “an unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood,” the outlet reported.
In her book, Fugitive Modernities, Krug acknowledges: “My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist…Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.”
In a video posted in June, Krug – under her activist pseudonym Jessica La Bombalera – denounced “all these white New Yorkers who waited four hours with us to be able to speak and then did not yield their time for Black and Brown indigenous New Yorkers.
“Much power to all my siblings who were standing up, my black and brown siblings who were standing.”
A former classmate has claimed that Krug boycotted her prom and planned a flag burning at the private school she graduated from.
Meanwhile, on RateMyProfessors, Krug received a 2.5 out of 5 rating based on 37 reviews – with only 35 percent of students saying they would take her class again.
One former student wrote: “If you ask her the history about WWII, Nazi Germany, Cold War, or something like those, she will only answer you the history about the Caribbeans and Africa.”
Another student’s review read: “This class is not ‘world’ history, but african and latin american history. Krug is hard to follow in lecture & her test short answer aren’t relevant to any of the reading you did, rather definitions of obscure terms she uses in class.”
Crystal Nosal, a university spokesperson, told the Post that officials are aware of the blog post and are looking into the situation.
Krug’s admission comes years after former college instructor Rachel Dolezal, who legally changed her name to Nkechi Diallo in 2016, was outed for claiming to be black, when she is a white American.
