In an academic version of the Rachel Dozezal controversy, the New York Times is reporting that George Washington University is investigating the bizarre case of George Washington associate professor Jessica A. Krug who admitted in a Medium post Thursday that, despite publicly identifying as a black woman, she is in fact a white Jewish child from the suburbs of Kansas City. Krug has called herself a “cultural leech” and announced that she was “cancelling herself.” The Chronicle of Higher Education stated that some of the positions that she secured in teaching were due to her claimed minority status.
The case rekindles the tension in academic over claims of minority status, including the controversy surrounding the long-claims of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) who also taught at George Washington that she was a Native American. Much of our minority status designations are based on such self-identifications. The Census Bureau approach is based solely on self identification. Since 2000, it has allowed people to check multiple boxes for races and ethnicities. Brown University attracted attention for proposing a pure self identification system for “people of color.”
Krug, 39, wrote a Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.” She revealed what she described as a life built on a “napalm toxic soil of lies.” That career include different claims of minority status from African to Caribbean to Puerto Rican roots as well as being raised in a poor family in the projects. This background gave her greater credence in writing as a “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora.”
Krug has a Ph.D. and is the author of the book “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” according to her GW faculty profile. She was also a Diversity Achievement Scholar at Portland State and an Advanced Opportunity Fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
She wrote “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. I have built my life on a violent anti-Black lie, and I have lied in every breath I have taken.”
In a culturally ironic twist, she then declared that she was going to publicly commit self-cancelling: “I am a coward,” she writes, and then repeats it. “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”
Notably, she insisted that she wanted to be held accountable. It is unclear legally what form such accountability could take. Securing minority positions or benefits can be fraudulent like those at Wisconsin. However, the benefits (as discussed in the Warren controversy) can be less direct or easy to isolate for academics. As with “stolen valor cases,” the most common punishment is public recrimination and isolation.
People need to be held acountable. However, in our current environment, few, from kids to adults are held accountable. So wevend up with spoiled brats who act like this in our “entitlement society”
As Mr. Wizard said to Tooter Turtle, “Be just what you is, not what you is not. Folks what do this has the happiest lot.”
Sadly, there is a lack of integrity in today’s academic world.
Who knows? The woman may actually have African ancestry? She certainly appears to have some in her photo. She says she’s a Jew and Jews are African in origin after all, and there are black Jews. Ethiopia has had black Jews for millennia. For that matter, Jews have been associating themselves with blacks since the 1800s. The NAACP was founded mostly by Jews. Literally millions of Americans who identify as black have more European ancestry than African. Race-baiter Nicole Hannah Jones has a white mother. In this case, the woman is obviously nuts but then who really cares?
Just what a good left winger would say. Make excuses for unacceptable behaviors. Dont expect any disciplinary action when it occurs. Sorry, when children make bad decisions, discipline needs to occur. Samevwith adults!
With the makeup off she is white. After getting caught she admitted she is white. Her actual race isn’t even an issue. No, the Jews are not from Africa.
So she’s a phony and she admitted it. Maybe other GWU professors will admit their actions were for a personal or monetary reason also.
Krug wrote a “Medium” post that notes that her past actions qualify for anti-Black violence. That specific statement is problematic, since Black’s Law Dictionary defines violence as synonymous with physical force. Merriam-Webster cites the definition to include the use of physical abuse so as to injure, abuse or destroy. So Krug did not commit violence. The problem is that Krug and the left do not use words correctly or fail to understand their meaning. Rather, they use terms like violence to incite.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! How the Mighty Democrats have fallen! What Krug is, was very common back in the middle ages. Some morons got so worked up over religion and their sinfulness that they castrated themselves sometime, and mostly walked around the dirt roads whipping themselves with a quirt or a squirt or something like that. Today’s Democrats (other than the cynical vote seekers) have become that sort of person – sooo worked up over race that they feel the need to punish themselves. Like Demi Lovato.
I find this hilarious! The party that can’t bring itself to say “one nation under God” – is now manifesting itself as a reincarnation of the whole scourge-cult and Inquisition. Talk about intersectionality! And Princeton! OMG!!! From J H Kunstler today:
“The colleges have their heads so deep in the sand that you can barely see the ankles of the people-in-charge. It’s absolutely worst at the top of the heap. Case in point, a letter lately sent out to the whole of the Princeton University “community” of students, staff, and faculty by President Christopher Eisgruber (read the whole thing here). Such a reeking dumpster-load of cowardly and disingenuous race-pander has hardly been seen before, even at Harvard, Yale, and Brown, where insincerity flows like Amontillado sherry. Eisgruber writes: “We must ask how Princeton can address systemic racism in the world.” The grandiosity is really something — like, the world has been just sitting around waiting for Princeton to fix it, and now the time is ripe! And, of course, as if quixotic crusades against political hobgoblins will save Princeton.”
Here is the Princeton sociojusticebabbe, if you are interested.:
http://view.connect.princeton.edu/view_email.aspx?qs=9e1eacb1b6157ed04bb28e966ac4234dcbb329372e1fc9e46096289d3c1c08d358efdf93429aa31e685aa4c628d94d2e098e7c9374757e107432f71466474586d0751b17f3aacea650bbb82b3c9296d8
All that being said, I am willing to bet that Krug, and other People-of-Color-loving Democrats continue to live in predominantly white neighborhoods.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Can’t judge a book by its cover.
Let me see. Am I black or white today. Or am I male or female today. Or am I gay or strait today. This modern world is so complicated. I just can’t make up my mind.
Just check the box that brings the most benefits at the time. Being a people of color is popular just now.
Do “If feel black” lives matter? I can’t keep up with these brilliant liberals.
I was born a poor black child and suffered no ill effects. I do try to avoid oil cans though.
If you’re Jewish and do this, you get canceled. If you’re Anglo and do it, you get elected to the Senate from MA
How true, how very true.
Wait a minute here, isn’t she an Indian.
Ya just can’t blame this behavior on the ‘broken childhood’ ordeals. The theft of sociology corruption to justify abhorrent behavior is well documented. But then again, and most strongly in this case, you definitely have the inmates running the asylum. If not, explain this and similar behavior-if you can.
I think that the difficulty we have understanding leftists is that we try to ascribe rational motives to irrational people.
For instance: These are the type of folks who think that a law and a sign declaring a place to be a “gun-free zone” will provide them utter protection. For fun, I like to point out that “if only we’d make it illegal to kill people, the murder rate would instantly drop to zero!” On rare occasion, a leftist will get the point. Very rare occasion.
The narrative o “white privilege” is shattered, as we see whites like this pretending to be black, native American, etc., in order to get ahead. The untold narrative is that being white in America today, is harmful to many careers.
She fled to the black community as a child according to the linked article. She didn’t just claim to be black to get ahead as your narrative would tell it, she immersed herself in black culture in part to get away from something else (I assume an abusive family) and is now about 40. If she was checking boxes while living life as a white woman that would be indicative of one thing. If I fall in love with Indian culture and choose to self identify as an Indian despite no ethnic heritage it doesn’t mean Indians have an easier life than me, it just means I want to be Indian. She wanted to be black for various reasons, the least of which being that life as a minority is “easier”, although the wealth gap between black and white probably means the money she came in with could take her much farther than most who were born into that community.
My question is why she needed to identify with any particular group rather than just be an American. My family never discussed heritage other than American and it was only through DNA analysis that I discovered what ethnicity I was and it has little impact on who I am at this point. Why this obsession with clan?
“Why this obsession with clan?”
****
The left sees some advantage in spiking racial hostility and as a consequence we are congealing into clans.
A few more years of unprovoked attacks on whites and Asians in the street and attacks on whites and Asians in the academy and media and the clans will be more pronounced.
There is already a lot of cohesion happening between second generation Asians and white people. The economic and political forces brought to bear pushing us together are obvious.
Democrats want to hog every non-white migrant population in their party. They have some success with this tactic. It won’t last. You can count a huge number of partial Mexican ancestry people voting Republican in Texas for example.
The Democrats leadership, mouthpieces, and activists, including this loathsome self-hating white professor in question, gleefully anticipate the demographic decline of the native born white population because they think it will eventually give them a mortal lock on American elections. Oh, don’t be so sure, don’t be so sure
People of all races want to live in conditions of prosperity, law, and order. That’s on the ballot, not racial apportionments.
My Mexican ancestry friends in California voted for Trump first time around.
This is an uplifting story of success in the face of adversity. She voluntarily gave up her “white priveledge” and yet succeeded in acedemia despite the burden of systemic racism.
My family is proud of our ancestries. Extended family and ancestry aka “clan” was a big thing for our ancestors for thousands of years. It helped us survive when there were no authorities to be found in the hills and mountains. The shepherd protects the flock, against wolves, bandits, and rival clans. The shepherd can’t call 9-11.
America is an adopted national identity which is barely longer than 200 years. Life is short but we carry inside us the physical traces of our ancestors’ lives too.
as Goethe said, we are an “unedlich kette–” an unbroken chain of life. This is glorious!
If there ever were incontrovertible evidence of the absence of systemic racism in this country, this is it.
Why on G-d’s Green Earth would white people sacrifice all of their “privilege” and pretend to be black (or any other minority) if there were racism built into the system that would negatively impact their ability to succeed?
I would submit that cases like these (and I’d bet there are MANY more of them that we don’t know about) are prima facia evidence that the exact opposite is true.
With that said, however, from the perspective of the left, what’s wrong with what she did?
If a man can declare himself a woman because he feels like it (and then compete in women’s sports), why can’t a white person declare themselves to be black (and then qualify for minority preferences)? What is the fundamental difference here?
I suppose the biggest grumbling will be that she was “appropriating” a different culture or some other such babble. You do make an excellent point: Why would someone from the “in” group purposefully renounce all the privileges and immunities of their caste in order to relocate to the “other” group…unless the “other” group has privileges and immunities that are perceived to augment–or surpass–those of the “ins,” or in some other way benefit her?
A) While there may be social stratification, privileges and immunities are generally equivalent across social boundaries. This, of course, supports the idea that racism does not exist at the “systemic” level.
B) The “in” group purposefully makes a coordinated effort to minimize–or even reverse– privilege disparity, going so far as deferring their own privileges to the “other” and granting tangible, superior benefits to which the “ins” are not entitled. Again, showing that racism is not systemic.
C) She’s a moron and an attention whore.
D) She’s a moron and attention whore, and her real name is Seth Warner.
Incidentally, I have taken to self identify as a cis transgender lesbian: I have male genitalia, but yet am attracted to persons with female genitalia. The freedom of truly knowing one’s self is quite breathtaking!
I get your point Sailor Curt
but it actually reveals that there is anti-white systemic racism. Now let’s be clear here that for purposes of american society, Jewish are now and always have been white. With that out of the way, I observew that the professor in question got all sorts of grants, awards, and profesional placements not only based on her academic work but because she checked the box as black which helped fill a “human resource management” quota.
Affirmative action is precisely the most obvious form of anti-white racism in America and this story encapsulates how one lady took advantage of the spoils system with a lie that she was black.
Why is it that these sociopaths chose a life path that contradicts family values they were raised in. Unless she/he/it represents their respective family values. Unless if course, she is an intergalactic traveler. She is little more than a lie by herself, for herself, at the expense of everything around her.
You have to wonder what is wrong with her brain chemistry, don’t you?
It’s nice that she had the decency to apologize, and if she’s committed to integrity going forward she should probably get a second, perhaps probationary, chance. That would require sanity from administrations, though, and that has officially ceased to exist. It’s unnerving to me just how many people flagrantly and deeply lie to themselves and others. It bespeaks a mental health crisis we simply refuse to address.
Black Wives Matter. She had been trying to find a certain strain of husband.
Yawn. . . .
+1
“Know thyself.”
The natural and healthy development of identity during childhood is so important. It sounds like her childhood was rather broken. I hope she’s able to keep sorting herself out.
I am not sure her childhood had anything to do with it. Some cars come out of the factory as lemons and some kids come out of the womb lemons. This one was likely a lemon from her first breath.
Young,
I don’t necessarily disagree; I’m just going off what she wrote: https://medium.com/@jessakrug/the-truth-and-the-anti-black-violence-of-my-lies-9a9621401f85
“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.”
In any case, she needs accountability and professional help.