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A US university launched an investigation after a professor admitted that he had lied for years about being black and, in fact, that he is white, a surprising admission amid a tense national reckoning on racial issues, including cultural appropriation.
In a post on the Medium platform, Jessica Krug, a history professor at George Washington University in the US capital who focuses on Africa, said she had been pretending “for most” of her adult life.
“I have avoided my lived experience as a white Jewish girl in the Kansas City suburbs under various assumed identities within a blackness that I had no right to claim,” she wrote.
Krug, who is light-skinned, said he first claimed “the blackness of North Africa, then the blackness of American origin and then the blackness of the Bronx of Caribbean origin.”
One of her former students told CNN that Krug expressed her pride in her roots in the Bronx, but told another student that she was from Puerto Rico.
Krug said on Medium that his actions were “the epitome of violence, theft and appropriation, of the myriad ways that non-black people continue to use and abuse black identities and cultures.”
The teacher called herself a cultural “leech.”
In a statement Friday night, the university said: “While the university reviews this situation, Dr. Krug will not teach her classes this semester.” He didn’t say what will happen to her now.
“We want to acknowledge the pain that this situation has caused many in our community,” he added.
Krug’s situation was reminiscent of the controversial American activist Rachel Dolezal, who made headlines in 2015 after saying that she identified as black, even though her parents were white.
“I’m more black than white,” Dolezal said at the time.
Cultural appropriation has become increasingly taboo in the United States, especially in progressive and college communities.
Pop diva Adele recently found herself in trouble after posting a photo of herself on Instagram with her hair in Bantu knots, a traditional African hairstyle.
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