University investigates after historian’s race deception admission

George Washington University has launched an investigation after a history lecturer, ahead of being publicly exposed, admitted that she had been falsely presenting herself as black and Hispanic for the past decade.

Jessica Krug, an associate professor of history at the institution, posted an article to Medium saying she had pretended to be black in her life and career despite her origins as a “white Jewish child” from suburban Kansas City.

“For the better part of my adult life,” Dr Krug writes, “every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies.”

A George Washington spokeswoman issued a statement saying the university was investigating the matter but would offer no further comment because it was a personnel matter. George Washington later issued a statement from its provost and dean of arts and sciences acknowledging the community-wide pain caused by the situation, offering counselling to affected students, and announcing that Dr Krug will not teach courses this semester while the university conducts its investigation.

Academics around the country expressed outrage. Some said that Dr Krug – who came to George Washington after earning her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012 – admitted the deception only because it already had been discovered and was close to becoming public.

“There was no witch-hunt, but there was a need to draw the line,” Yomaira Figueroa, an associate professor of diaspora studies at Michigan State University, said in a Twitter post describing the investigation.

“Do not believe for one second that she would have come out with the truth on her own,” Dr Figueroa writes. “She made a living and a whole life out of parroting Black Rican trauma and survival. As a Black Rican I am pissed.”

Numerous others, both inside and outside academia, joined the criticism, citing the faculty job that Dr Krug won over black and Latinx female candidates, the hundreds of students she taught and misled, and her catalogue of emotional publications on the black experience.

She also adopted culturally black and Hispanic dress and speaking styles; claimed at points African, Puerto Rican and Dominican heritage; and complained about anti-black discrimination, the critics said.

In her article posted to Medium, Dr Krug cites mental illness, childhood trauma and alienation from her birth family as reasons for her fraudulent persona.

“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,” she writes.

Dr Krug is not the only academic to have tried such a thing, and not even the first at George Washington. Dr Figueroa said colleagues began investigating Dr Krug after the death earlier this year of H. G. Carrillo, a professor of creative writing at George Washington, led to the discovery that was a black American rather than the ethnic Cuban he had long presented himself to be.

That followed the 2015 case of Rachel Dolezal, an adjunct instructor of Africana education at Eastern Washington University, whose white parents revealed her racial deception.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com