Unless you’ve been hiding from the pandemic under a rock and away from social media you have probably already heard about Jessica Krug. In case you haven’t many media outlets broke the disappointing story today, including The Guardian which said Krug ” A seasoned activist and professor of African American history at George Washington University has been pretending to be Black for years, despite actually being a white woman from Kansas City.” Allegedly Krug herself came dirty (I’m not going to write came clean) in a blog post where she cited “mental health demons,” as one of the reasons for her lies and deceptions. I got some demons for her, and some ancestors too.
But leaving otherworldly retribution aside, let’s get to the living Black scholars, myself included, who are furious about what she has done. #BlackTwitter is full of real people who were duped by her actions and angered by her subsequent Doezal-splaining. Some are calling for reparations, the return of the grant money and other funds she received as a result of this deception. Others said they saw it coming, like in the following Twitter post by Dr. Holly McGee.
This all comes as no surprise to plenty of people who know/knew #JessicaKrug. I’ve got $5 says this confession comes right before an announcement of her next book: “This is only news to you”: Race, Attention, and Desperation in Contemporary America
— Dr. Holly Y. McGee (@drhollymcgee) September 3, 2020
In an conversation with a friend today they wondered why Krug decided to even make the blog post at all. However, it turns out that she knew that she was about to be exposed anyway. The New York Post reported ” Hari Ziyad, a black author and screenwriter, posted a series of tweets calling Jessica Krug “a friend up until this morning” when Krug apparently called Ziyad to confess the falsehoods she detailed in a Medium post …“She didn’t do it out of benevolence,” Ziyad wrote. “She did it because she had been found out.”
People may be wondering why I did not link to Krug’s post, in my not so humble opinion I’ve decided to focus on actual BIPOC scholars, myself included. Here are a few works to look at and support if you can.
- Voodoo and Afro-Caribbean Paganism by Lilith Dorsey
- Orishas, Goddesses and Voodoo Queens by Lilith Dorsey
- Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present (Nation of Nations)– Dixa Ramirez
- Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Early American Studies)– Jessica Marie Johnson
- Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature– Yomaira C Figueroa-Vásquez
- If any other Black academics would like to be added to this post please email me at [email protected]
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