White College Professor Caught Pretending To Be Black. (Again.)
Everybody lies. It's a function of human nature, or at the very least, it was a catchphrase of one Dr. Gregory House, but even though none of us like to admit it, all of us lie from time to time. However, those lies usually don't make the news. Not the case for Jessica A. Krug, an associate professor at George Washington University, who admitted in a self-published article on Medium that she had spent almost her entire adult life pretending to be a mixed-race woman of Black and Latinx descent. The kicker, of course, is dun-da-da ...
She's just white.
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It gives a new meaning to the phrase "telling white lies," except it probably doesn't because that was for sure a joke someone told back when Rachel Dolezal famously claimed to be of African-American descent back in 2015.
In fact, this isn't even the first GW professor caught lying about their race this year. That honor belongs to Herman Glenn Carroll (known as "Hache" to his friends), who had claimed to be a Cuban-American, having fled Havana during childhood. It was only upon his death this year that we learned Carroll was actually born in Detroit and had no Latinx heritage.
It's a bizarre trend to claim another racial identity as your own, but what makes it even more strange is just how deeply everyone who does it commits to the bit. It's not only that Krug claimed to be Black and Latinx, but she also became a professor of Black and Latin American history. She wrote books and essays on topics ranging from hip-hop to fugitive communities in Brazil and Jamaica. It seems that almost every choice she made was wholly built to reinforce this lie.
It vaguely reminds you of "stolen valor" in the military, where dipshits show up to a pancake luncheon with a million medals pinned to their chests and a vague story about how if they only disabled one more IED, they could have saved Johnny. In Krug's Medium essay, she attributes her actions to mental illness and childhood trauma saying:
"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."
This might be true, but there are those saying that Krug only made this admission because she was about to be caught in her lie.
So maybe the mental health issues are just more of the same ruse? I don't know. Maybe we should consult a doctor to find out? Or at least someone pretending to be one. We know a guy:
Support Dan on Twitter and he will talk about his life with you in lieu of getting a therapist.
Top Image: Duke University Press, Aaron Robert Kathman/Wiki Commons
