The internet is ablaze over Blackfishy bamboozler Jessica A. Krug, an associate professor at George Washington University whose expertise spans colonialism and African American history, who admitted to pretending to be Black for YEARS.
Yep, YEARS like her transracial ancestor Rachel Dolezal who still, to this day, believes she’s a Black woman.
Krug (who went by the activist name Jess La Bombalera) revealed her deception in a Medium post where she explains how she evolved from a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City, Missouri to a Black activist who teaches salsa classes and occasionally writes for Essence Magazine–a publication targeted toward Black women.
Over the years, she lived “under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, the US rooted Blackness, then the Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness,” she revealed in the looney post.
She speculated that mental health issues “likely explain” why she assumed a false identity in her youth that continued into her adulthood and recalled mental health professionals assuring her that her actions were a common response to “some of the severe trauma” that marked her early childhood and teen years.
“But mental health issues can never, will never, neither explain nor justify, neither condone nor excuse, that, in spite of knowing and regularly critiquing any and every non-Black person who appropriates from Black people, my false identity was crafted entirely from the fabric of Black lives,” she wrote.
Krug even took financial support from cultural institutions like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, NY, for her book “Fugitive Modernities” about fugitive resistance to the transatlantic slave trade through their identities.
As “Jessica La Bombalera,” she pretended to be an Afro-Latina woman from the Bronx who testified by video in June to a New York City Council meeting on police violence.
Naturally, this ridiculous story blew up on social media marking the second time a white woman (who looked very white) was able to move (and be successful) in Black spaces by Blackfishing.
How do you feel about Jessica Krug’s Blackfishery? Is she worse than Rachel Dolezal? Tell us in the comments and peep the well-deserved Twitter dragging on the flip.
