Who is Jessica A Krug? White uni professor exposed after pretending to be Black for years

4 September 2020, 16:30

By Jazmin Duribe

Jessica was an expert on African American History and works as a professor at George Washington University.

A white historian has admitted that she's been pretending to be Black for years.

On Thursday (Sep 3), Professor Jessica A. Krug, published a letter on her Medium blog titled "The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies". Apparently, she decided to come clean after two students at the university she taught in raised the alarm.

She wrote: "For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies. Not just any lies. 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."

READ MORE: White women are being exposed for 'posing' as mixed race and the internet is pissed

Jessica, known as Jessica La Bombera, went on to confess that she claimed various types of Black identity that she had "no right to claim" over the years, even writing a book about the transatlantic slave trade dedicated to her "ancestors".

She added: "I have not only claimed these identities as my own when I had absolutely no right to do so – when doing so is the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures – but I have formed intimate relationships with loving, compassionate people who have trusted and cared for me when I have deserved neither trust nor caring.

"People have fought together with me and have fought for me, and my continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is not only, in the starkest terms, wrong – unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial – but it means that every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love."

Jessica believes that she adopted a false identity because of mental health issues stemming from childhood trauma, however, she said it did not justify the lies. She continued: "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."

The whole debacle has left many Black people furious, with some noting that opportunities meant for Black women had been lost to Jessica, who accepted financial support from cultural institutions like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in order to write her book.

Many are comparing her to Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who had famously been moonlighting as Black before being exposed in 2015. She still believes that she's transracial.

Some former students have also reported strange instances they've had with Jessica.

According to the BBC, George Washington University are investigating the situation.

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