‘Why would she do that?’ KC past reveals clues about white professor who posed as Black
Jessica Krug, the African history professor at George Washington University who just confessed that she’s only been pretending to be Black for her entire adult life, does have a history in the real world, even if it’s one she’d rejected until she was about to be outed as a white girl from Kansas City.
Krug attended private schools here, studying at the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy and then at the elite Barstow School with Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas. And since the one thing she didn’t change was her name, you really have to wonder: Does academia not know about Google?
In the eighth grade, she wrote in an essay published in The Kansas City Star about her realization that we all discriminate, including against white men.
She should know, she said, because she too had been the victim of discrimination — having been confronted at a Kansas City country club because of the Star of David hanging around her neck. Though anti-Semitism is all too real, it’s hard to know how literally to take that account now.
“To confirm my suspicions that people aren’t aware how they classify others,” she wrote then, “I called 10 people at random from the phone book. When I asked if they consciously discriminated, their universal response was, “Oh, no, not me.”
‘Battling some unaddressed mental health demons’
In retrospect, it’s easy to doubt whether this precocious, prolific liar ever cold-called anyone.
“I just happen to know something about discrimination and white males,” she wrote. “My ancestors were killed in Russia by mobs of angry white males because their religion wasn’t popular. A few years ago, while taking a shortcut through a local country club, I was confronted by people who uttered racial slurs about the Jewish star hanging around my neck.”
Not so long ago, millions of Jews did die for who they were. But they were written out of 38-year-old Krug’s story decades ago.
“Labels are inherently erroneous,” she wrote in the eighth grade. Then she set out to prove it.
In a weird, wandering accent that she said came from the “hood,” she told her students that she’d grown up in the Bronx, and that her earliest memories were of police brutality. Sometimes, she’d show up for her first morning class dressed for a night of salsa. Though her performance was based on a stereotype, it worked.
“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 said this week. “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 that’s not an excuse, as even she said. Because she did know right from wrong and chose the latter. On that one point, we should believe her.
Our mayor remembers his Barstow schoolmate as “aggressively progressive” and kind of brave, once standing up at an all-school assembly and announcing, “There’s going to be giant gay prom this weekend, and you’re all invited. This was 1999, so all of our jaws dropped.” Especially because gay rights didn’t seem to be a struggle Krug was fighting on her own behalf.
She was attention-seeking, though, Lucas said, and “in high school parlance, kind of kooky.”
He also remembers her being disciplined for having plagiarized a piece that ran under her name in the school’s literary magazine.
“She was a senior and had already been accepted to college, so it was like, why? Why would she do that?’’
Though most of the plagiarists and fabulists I’ve ever heard of had mental health problems, millions of people struggle with mental illness without fabricating anything.
Stealing someone else’s work and words does seem like the natural prelude, however, to stealing an entire history and extended family that isn’t your own.
Quinton Lucas’ memories of ‘a brilliant girl’
“She was a brilliant girl,” Lucas remembers, and she could easily have made a name for herself without appropriating anything. There also is an aspect to both plagiarism and the kind of identity theft she pulled off that is about wanting to get caught.
Krug, who did not respond to a request for comment, was not really that careful in her fabrications, sometimes telling students that her family was from Puerto Rico and other times from the Dominican Republic.
In her award-winning 2018 book “Fugitive Modernities,” she bowed to, “My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist. My brother, the fastest, the smartest, the most charming of us all. Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.” Or Overland Park. Or Vegas.
Her real father, Stuart Krug, was a Kansas City-born Vietnam veteran whose family was in the grocery business. According to his obituary, he moved to Las Vegas the year she graduated from high school. Her mother, Sherry Levine Krug, also grew up in Kansas City. She was a VISTA volunteer and teacher. She had moved to Albany, New York, where her father was from, and where she’d spent summers as a child, before she died there in 2013.
Krug’s family had little to no contact with her after high school, by her choice, and until this week had no idea that she’d been living as if her real life never happened. In a sense, she canceled herself years ago.
This story was originally published September 5, 2020 at 11:25 AM.
