The True Story of Jess Krug, the White Professor Who Posed as Black for Years—Until It All Blew Up Last Fall – Washingtonian
“I am a coward.” Jessica Krug’s confession started ricocheting across screens one brutally muggy afternoon in late-summer Washington. “For the better part of my adult life,” it began, “every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted
via Washingtonian – The website that Washington lives by.: https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/01/27/the-true-story-of-jessica-krug-the-white-professor-who-posed-as-black-for-years-until-it-all-blew-up-last-fall/
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.
Nowhere in her 1,234 words did Krug find space simply to say she was sorry.