She’s been labelled ‘Rachel Dolezal 2.0’
A few years back the world was shocked when the story of Rachel Dolezal broke. Rachel, also known as Nkechi Amare Diallo, is a white woman who had been identifying as black and deceiving people about her heritage for years. As well as being a college professor and activist, she was a former National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) chapter president.
Well, buckle up… because it’s happened again.
Jessica Krug, a white woman from Kansas, has been posing as a black woman for her entire professional career and has written a blog post admitting it fully.
Although Jessica wasn’t caught out in quite the dramatic fashion (who can forget the live TV footage of Rachel being confronted) no, Jessica’s admissions come in the form of a Medium blog post, self-authored amidst an apparent urge to come clean. In her post, Jessica admits to ‘eschewing’ her lived experience with an identity she had no right to claim;
“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.”
In terms of reasoning as to why someone would do something like this, Jessica points to mental health issues in the piece;
“To say that I clearly have been battling some unaddressed mental health demons for my entire life, as both an adult and child, is obvious. Mental health issues likely explain why I assumed a false identity initially, as a youth, and why I continued and developed it for so long; the mental health professionals from whom I have been so belatedly seeking help assure me that this is a common response to some of the severe trauma that marked my early childhood and teen years.”
So who is Jessica Krug?
It seems her life eerily mirrors that of Rachel Dolezal’s, her description matches the biography of an African studies professor at George Washington University. An investigation at the University is now underway and according to The New York Times Jessica will not be returning to take her classes in the fall. As well as her academic work, Krug is also a celebrated author, her book ‘Fugitive Modernities‘, examines slave-trade resistance and was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman prize in 2019.
