White Professor Who Spent Years Pretending to Be Black Resigns

A white history professor has quit her job after she admitted to misrepresenting herself as a Black woman. 

George Washington University confirmed the news Wednesday, stating Jessica A. Krug had submitted her resignation effective immediately. The GWU tweet stated Krug’s classes for the current semester will be led by other faculty members.

The resignation comes less than a week after Krug posted a Medium essay in which she confessed to spending years posing as a Black person. Krug was an associate professor who taught courses on Latin American and African history, and penned a number of academic works, including the Fathers of No Nation manuscript and Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom; the latter of which was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize.

Krug—a white Jewish woman—said she had “assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim.” She confessed to misrepresenting herself as someone with North African and Caribbean roots. She also said she was “not a culture vulture,” but rather “a culture leech.”

“I have not only claimed these identities as my own when I had absolutely no right to do so …” she wrote. “Intention never matters more than impact. 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. 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; the mental health professionals from whom I have been so belatedly seeking help assure me that this is a common response to some of the severe trauma that marked my early childhood and teen years.”