‘I am a culture leech.’ Professor posing as Black woman is a white Kansas City native

A history professor and author who has claimed to be a Black woman says she is actually a white woman from the Kansas City area.

Jessica Krug wrote in a blog post on Medium titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies” on Thursday that she has pretended to be a Black woman for much of her adult life, deceiving her friends and colleagues of her true life experience.

“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.

Krug is a history professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., describing herself as a “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora, with a particular interest in West Central Africa and maroon societies in the early modern period and Black transnational cultural studies.”

Krug also is the author of “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” a finalist for book awards named for Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

“I am not a culture vulture,” she wrote on Medium. “I am a culture leech.”

Krug cites mental health issues as a reason for assuming the false identity as a youth and continuing it through adulthood.

“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,” Krug wrote.

Krug was swiftly rebuked. Hari Ziyad, a Black author and the editor of RaceBaitr, posted tweets condemning her.

“Jess Krug, professor at (George Washington University), is someone I called a friend up until this morning when she gave me a call admitting to everything written here,” Ziyad tweeted with a link to the Medium post. “She didn’t do it out of benevolence. She did it because she had been found out.”

In the blog post, Krug wrote that “this isn’t a confession, it isn’t a public relations move, and it damn sure isn’t a shield,” but that “it is the truth, though.”

Philip Lewis, an editor at Huffington Post, tweeted a screenshot that shows Krug calling herself “an unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood.”

The admission drew comparisons to Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who posed as a Black person and served as a chapter president for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

George Washington University released a statement Thursday afternoon.

“We are aware of the post by Jessica Krug and are looking into the situation,” the university tweeted. “We cannot comment further on personnel matters.”

Krug wrote that she deserves to be “canceled” for her deception.

“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. What does that mean? I don’t know,” Krug wrote.

“Accountability works only when you are in community with people. How can I be in any type of meaningful community with those whom I have so harmfully and horrifically deceived for so long?”

This story was originally published September 3, 2020 at 4:20 PM.