‘Surprising’: Professor posing as Black woman went to school with Kansas City mayor
A white history professor who gained international headlines Thursday for pretending to be a Black woman is from Kansas City — and went to high school with Mayor Quinton Lucas.
Lucas said in a tweet Friday morning that Jessica Krug graduated “a few years ahead” of him at the Barstow School, a co-ed private college prep school in south Kansas City.
In a blog post on Medium, titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies,” Krug wrote that she has pretended to be a Black woman for much of her adult life, deceiving friends and colleagues.
“I am not a culture vulture,” Krug wrote on Medium. “I am a culture leech.”
In a tweet, Lucas called it, “One of the stranger person-in-your-yearbook-photo-did-this stories I’ve stumbled upon,” and included a yearbook photo of a school club.
“She was interesting back then, but it is really surprising she’s tried to pass as Black for 20 years,” Lucas tweeted. “Her apology in reflection is warranted.”
Lucas added that StuPac — “devoted to political discussions,” according to the yearbook picture — was his favorite club.
Krug wrote she deserves to be “canceled” for her deception.
“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 teaches history at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., with a focus on Africa and the African diaspora. She is also the author of “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” a finalist for book awards named for Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.
The 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 was swiftly rebuked online.
“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,” Hari Ziyad, a Black author and the editor of RaceBaitr, said in tweet with a link to the Medium story. “She didn’t do it out of benevolence. She did it because she had been found out.”
Krug drew comparisons to Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who was formerly a chapter president for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and claimed she was Black.