White American Teacher Admits She’s Pretending to be Black for Years | World News

A seasoned activist and professor of African American history at George Washington University has been pretending to be black for years, despite being a white woman from Kansas.

In a case hauntingly reminiscent of Rachel Dolezal, Jessica A Krug received financial support from cultural institutions such as the Schomburg Center for Black Culture Research for a book she wrote on fugitive resistance to the transatlantic slave trade. But according to a Medium post supposedly written by Krug herself, her career was rooted in a “toxic soil of lies.”

“To an increasing degree throughout my adult life, I have avoided my lived experience as a white Jewish child in the suburbs of Kansas City under various assumed identities within a blackness that I had no right to claim: first the blackness of the North Africa, then the blackness of American roots, then Bronx Blackness of Caribbean roots, ”he wrote.

In Krug’s book Fugitive Modernities, published before his confession, he writes in his thanks: “My forefathers, unknown, nameless, who bled their lives in a future who had no reason to believe that it could or should exist. My brother, the fastest, the smartest, the most charming of us all. ? Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my neighborhood, in Angola or in Brazil ”.

Krug called herself Jessica La Bombalera in activist circles and could be seen speaking at a public hearing in New York City about police brutality in June.

“I am Jessa Bombalera. I’m here in El Barrio, East Harlem, you’ve probably heard of it because you sold my damn neighborhood to developers and gentrifiers, ”he begins as he introduces himself. A few moments later, she adds: “I want to call all these white New Yorkers who waited four hours with us to speak and then did not give their time to the indigenous black and brown New Yorkers.”

Those who knew Krug as La Bombalera have taken to social media today to announce their displeasure. “I’m stunned and I keep processing my emotions, but mostly, I feel betrayed, silly and, in many ways, gas-lit, “said author Robert Jones Jr on Twitter.

As early as 2018, Jones had posted her conversations with Krug in a thread she wrote for underserved communities.

Krug alludes in his Medium post to a traumatic childhood and mental health issues, but says he doesn’t think they can be used to excuse his behavior.

“To say that I have clearly been battling some untreated mental health demons my entire life, both as an adult and as a child, is obvious. Mental health issues probably explain why I assumed a false identity initially, when I was young, and why I continued and developed it for so long.

But mental health problems can never, never, never explain or justify, or condone or excuse, that, despite regularly meeting and criticizing each and every non-black person who appropriates black people, my false identity was crafted entirely from the fabric of black lives, ”he wrote.

The Guardian has reached out to Krug College of Colombian Arts and Sciences and George Washington University, in Washington DC, for comment.

In 2015, civil rights activist and former NAACP president Rachel Dolezal was denounced by her parents for posing as a black person when she was born white. Dolezal’s own childhood trauma story was later revealed. Dolezal later referred to herself as “the world’s first trans-black case.”