Her name is Jessica Krug and she’s an associate professor of history at George Washington University. Today Krug published post on Medium admitting that her own personal history has been a series of lies. Despite living as a black woman for many years, she is in fact white. Her self-denunciation is so full of SJW buzzwords and assumptions that it’s hard to take it seriously:
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. I have not only claimed these identities as my own when I had absolutely no right to do so — when doing so is the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures — 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. People have fought together with me and have fought for me, and my continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is not only, in the starkest terms, wrong — unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial — but it means that every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love…
That I claimed belonging with living people and ancestors to whom and for whom my being is always a threat at best and a death sentence at worst.
I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech.
“For whom my being is always a threat at best” is some really choice self-hatred. I wonder if even Robin DiAngelo reads this and thinks she’s trying a bit too hard. Eventually, Krug gets around to passing sentence on herself. She says she must be cancelled though she isn’t really sure what that means:
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.
What does that mean?
I don’t know…
The wrath of all whom I’ve harmed, individually and collectively, will never erase the harm I’ve done. Pain and trauma, injustice and violence, aren’t algebra, and there’s nothing to put on the other side of this equals sign but a big, bold void.
She is genuflecting before the altar of blackness and begging forgiveness she doesn’t deserve. This really doesn’t do anything to dispel the idea that wokeness operates as a religion. I’m sure if someone suggested the racial equivalent of a hair shirt to mortify her white flesh she’d jump at the chance. The confession comes to an unsatisfactor end by the author’s own admission:
There is no way for me to satisfactorily end this statement. This isn’t a confession, it isn’t a public relations move, and it damn sure isn’t a shield.
It is the truth, though.
It all feels a little bit performative, doesn’t it? It’s like she spent so much time parsing this that there’s no actual emotion left, just a pose intended to attract attention. That was apparently the reaction that feminist Roxane Gay had:
And I think this apology is BS. The self-flagellation is absurd and a performance. I believe in apologies and redemption. This one checks all the boxes, says the right things but it doesn’t feel genuine.
— roxane gay (@rgay) September 3, 2020
Really, what is anyone supposed to say to this? I mean, maybe one of the things this whole public statement doesn’t evince is a lot of actual shame. She says the words but I’d be more convinced she meant it if she had simply quit her job and gone into hiding. As it is it almost feels like she’s written an essay for some kind of white ally award. It’s deeply creepy.
Last thought: Did Krug, like Sen. Warren, tell her university that she was a minority for EEOC purposes? If so I wonder if some official discipline is in order. Lying on a job application is generally frowned upon.
