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The Heartless Felon
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‘Black’ professor Jessica Krug admits that she is really white and Jewish Will Pavia, New York Saturday September 05 2020, 12.01am BST, The Times
Jessica Krug claimed that she had been fleeing trauma when she invented her multiple ethnicities
In an essay about demonstrations in Puerto Rico last summer, a George Washington University professor named Jessica Krug attacked impostors who tried to claim that they were leading the protests.
“I am boricua, just so you know,” she wrote. “Boricua, not Puerto Rican, to reflect the name by which the indigenous people knew the island before Columbus invaded.”
Beneath the essay, a small biography explained that 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 known as a respected historian of colonialism and the African diaspora who assailed white supremacy in all its forms.
Professor 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.
A spokeswoman for the university said: “We are aware of the post and are looking into the situation.”
Her fellow writers and scholars were less reticent. Professor Krug “is someone I called a friend up until this morning when she gave me a call admitting to everything written (in her blog post),” said the author Hari Zizad, in a thread on Twitter. He said she had made the confession because she had been found out.
He had often thought there was something “off” about her, he wrote. There was “her clearly inexpert salsa dancing” and “her awful New York accent”. He put that down to her childhood growing up “in a bunch of different foster homes” where “she was never exposed to one way of speaking consistently”.
In Kansas City, relatives of Professor Krug told the television station KCTV that they were not aware of any trauma she had suffered. She had attended a Jewish school and then an elite private high school in the city, they said.
They said she had stopped communicating with her family years ago.
In Harlem, she was sometimes known by her “salsa name”, Jess La Bombalera. At a city council meeting earlier this summer, Jess La Bombalera spoke out about police brutality, speaking in an accent that regularly seemed to veer off course. The New York Post described it as a mix of “Kansas Caucasian, Caribbean patois and a decidedly Bronx honk”.
She saluted “my black and brown siblings” and called on white New Yorkers to yield their time to those who had actually experienced discrimination. “We talking about decades this taking place,” she said. “Come on, man.”
The moral of this is: if you're going to do a Pascoe, learn to dance...
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