The Patriot Post® · Identifying as Black for Status and Profit

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave … when first we practice to deceive.” ―Sir Walter Scott

On September 3, George Washington University associate professor Jessica Krug attempted to untangle a giant web of her own making. After publicly living as a black woman for years, she admitted that “every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies.”

That’s because Krug is actually white.

In a public confession, the self-proclaimed “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora” throws herself a pity party. “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,” she writes. “I have not only claimed these identities as my own when I had absolutely no right to do so … 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.”

Krug blames a troubling childhood for her deception. “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,” she concedes. “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.”

Ultimately, she concludes the only path going forward is to embrace societal nonexistence. “I believe in restorative justice, where possible, even when and where I don’t know what that means or how it could work. I believe in accountability,” she declares. “And I believe in cancel culture as a necessary and righteous tool for those with less structural power to wield against those with more power. I should absolutely be cancelled. No. I don’t write in passive voice, ever, because I believe we must name power. So. You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”

The day after her essay appeared in print, George Washington University suspended Krug. She resigned the following week.

Since then, some rather interesting — and revealing — stories about Krug have emerged. Krug reportedly skipped her mother’s funeral in 2013 for fear of being found out. Moreover, her family had no idea she was faking blackness until the media contacted them.

As for Krug’s confession, it was likely motivated by the fact that she was about to be outed. Yomaira Figueroa, an associate professor of global diaspora studies at Michigan State University, said scholars began questioning Krug’s identity in late August. Ironically, those questions arose following a discussion about the novelist H.G. Carrillo, who as a child faked being a black Latino refugee from Cuba. Following his death in April, his sister claimed he was a black American born and raised in Detroit.

As for Krug, her self-proclaimed identities were insufficiently tabulated. A fellow academic who knew Krug at the University of Wisconsin-Madison stated that she identified herself as half Algerian — because her father was a white man of German ancestry who had raped her mother.

That academic’s description of Krug was hardly flattering: “She identified and clung to and mimicked and performed what I would say are the worst stereotypes about black women, which is the trope of the aggressive black woman.”

That mindset might explain two incidents of execrable behavior evinced by Krug. During a panel discussion in 2018, she insisted that the killing of 15-year-old Lesandro Junior Guzman-Feliz — who was hacked to death outside a Bronx bodega by a Dominican street gang — was “revolutionary,” because he wanted to be a police officer. “It’s so much more difficult to understand what kind of freedom we could achieve by being willing to confront those who are working against the interests of the community,” Krug said, referring to the victim.

The second incident? A woman appearing to be Jessica Krug, but using the name “Jess La Bombera,” berated the city council during a hearing where she also hammered New Yorkers who supported police in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

The video of that tirade is quite revealing. The self-admitted curator of Caribbean-rooted Bronx Blackness apparently believes “authenticity” requires ample use of profanity and a fake inner-city street patois, while she goes about denigrating white people and condemning police, who she refers to as a “colonial occupation force.”

That particular video angered sportswriter Jason Whitlock, who likened her to fellow race faker Shaun King, while denouncing white liberals as bigots. “There is a business built around racial grievance,” Whitlock observes. “And that business is booming at such a level that white people are like ‘Hey, I’m going to adopt a whole new identity so I can benefit from being Baby Al Sharpton, Baby Jesse Jackson.’ And in academia, this has been embraced and she has been able to pull off this scam.”

Liberalism is the “new KKK hood” that allows one “to be as bigoted as you want to be,” he says. “If you want to call yourself an antifascist and support Black Lives Matter as a white person, that means you can go out into the streets, tear down neighborhoods, harass people, say all kinds of disrespectful stuff to white and black people, and it’s all good because allegedly, you’re fighting racism. Allegedly, you’re on the side of black people.”

Allegedly indeed, and nothing speaks to that ideological bankruptcy more forcefully than the posse of “down with the cause” leftist politicians more than willing to let their own cities be looted and burned, even as many of the businesses destroyed are black-owned and/or provide goods and services to the black community. They are aided and abetted by “liberal” corporations, academics, celebrities, and athletes, all of whom embrace virulently racist, anti-white bigotry and call it “virtue signaling.”

And nothing speaks more to Whitlock’s assertion that this is about money than the reality that the same people who insist sexual identity can be both “fluid” and “self-declarative” are the ones grievously offended when the exact same standards are applied to race. Philosophical sophistry is one thing. Scamming for money and status is quite another.

Perhaps in the end, what’s really surprising is that there aren’t more race fakers like Krug and King, or ethnic fakers like Elizabeth Warren, who, despite being outed as a white lady long ago, was still put on the Native American panel during the Democrat National Convention.

When victimhood is both celebrated and enabled by an American Left that heartily embraces the soft bigotry of low expectations — to the point of anarchy — one can be sure that Jessica Krug won’t be the last phony who perpetrates such charades.

Some grifts are too remunerative to pass up.