I am an imposter: ‘black’ authority ­Jessica Krug

Writing about demonstrations in Puerto Rico, ­Jessica Krug accused protest leaders of being imposters. She’s now offered a correction.

Jessica Krug

Writing about demonstrations in Puerto Rico last summer, ­Jessica Krug, an associate professor at George Washington University, accused those leading the protests of being imposters.

Beneath her essay, a biography said the author was “an unrepentant and unreformed child of the ‘hood’ ” who was perpetually involved in “the struggle for her community in El Barrio”, in Harlem, New York. She had also portrayed herself as African-American and was a respected historian of colonialism and the African diaspora who assailed white supremacy in all its forms.

Dr Krug has now offered a correction. She is not from East Harlem. She is actually white and Jewish, and grew up in a suburb of Kansas City.

“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 I had no right to claim,” she wrote in a blog post.

She had not been living a ­double life, she said. “I have lived this lie fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy.”

George Washington University said it was “looking into the situation”.

Dr Krug’s fellow writers and scholars were less reticent. She “is someone I called a friend up until this morning”, author Hari Ziyad tweeted. He said she had confessed because she had been found out. For years, he had ­defended her from those who felt “she wasn’t black enough”, he wrote. He apologised “to all the black people I allowed her to say and do wild shit to because they weren’t from New York or from ‘the ‘hood’ as she claimed to be.”

He had often thought there was something “off” about her, he wrote, including “her clearly inexpert salsa dancing” and “her awful New York accent”.

Akissi Britton, assistant professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University, said: “So many times she accused me of not being black enough in terms of my politics. She’d point to her childhood to question my ­middle-class black upbringing.”

Yomaira Figueroa, an associate professor at Michigan State University, said Dr Krug’s claims about her background had been subjected to scrutiny by several black Latina scholars. “There was no witch-hunt but there was a need to draw the line,” she tweeted. “Krug got ahead of the story because she was caught.”

In Kansas City, relatives of Dr Krug told local television they were not aware of any trauma she had suffered: she had attended a Jewish school and an elite private high school.

The Times