‘I Am a Culture Leech’: White University Professor Reveals She’s Been Pretending to be a Black Woman for Her Entire Adult Life

On Thursday, George Washington University associate professor Jessica Krug revealed that she has been pretending to be a Black woman for years. In an essay posted to Medium, Krug admitted she is really a white Jewish woman from the suburbs of Kansas City, although she pretended to be North African, Black American, and Caribbean at different times in her life.

Krug teaches Black American and African History at GWU and says she has presented herself as a Black woman for her entire adult life. She has received financial support from cultural institutions, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and authored a book about the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Jessica Krug. (Photo: George Washington University)

In her book “Fugitive Modernities,” Krug appears to allude to the idea that she is a descendant of enslaved people. “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,” she writes in the acknowledgments.

But in the Medium essay “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies,” posted on Sept. 3, Krug admits she was born a “white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City.” She goes on to say that at various stages of her life she identified first with “North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.”

Dr. Yarimar Bonilla, a professor at Hunter College said she was a fellow at Schomburg at the same time as Krug and that she was fooled by her false identity.

Krug states that “mental health issues likely explain why I assumed a false identity,” but later says that mental health struggles don’t “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.”

She calls herself a “coward,” several times, and goes on to describe herself as a “culture leech,” saying, “I should absolutely be cancelled…You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”

Michigan State University professor Dr. Yomaira Figueroa said on Twitter that several Black scholars had done research on Krug’s background and planned to expose her. Figueroa claimed Krug only revealed her true identity in order to “get ahead of the story.”

Krug assumed the pseudonym Jessica La Bombalera when engaging in activism with other organizers. At a police brutality hearing in June, she identified as a Harlem native. “I wanna call out all these white New Yorkers who waited four hours with us to be able to speak and then did not yield their time for Black and brown indigenous New Yorkers,” she said.

A screenshot of Krug’s old Twitter bio shows that she described herself as “an unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood.”

People have drawn comparisons between Krug and Rachael Dolezal, a white woman who passed as Black and served as a branch NAACP president until she resigned amid mounting public pressure. Dolezal maintained that she identified as a Black woman, even after her parents released photos of their daughter, clearly a white blond child.

“I have built my life on a violent anti-Black lie, and I have lied in every breath I have taken,” Krug wrote in the Medium post. “There are no words in any language to express the depth of my remorse.”

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