In a self-written Medium article, a white college professor admitted that she pretended for years to be Black.
In the allegedly authentic post, George Washington University professor Jessica Krug wrote, “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.”
Also known as Jessica La Bombalera in activist circles, Krug took money from educational institutions like the Schomberg Center For Research Of Black Culture in order to help fund a book she authored about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
“To say that I clearly have been battling some unaddressed mental health demons for my entire life, as both an adult and child, is obvious,” she wrote. “Mental health issues likely explain why I assumed a false identity initially, as a youth, and why I continued and developed it for so long. But 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.”
“I believe in accountability,” the professor penned. “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. 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.”