GWU professor who pretended to be black went to fee paying school where ‘she planned a flag burning’

The professor of African American history at George Washington University who pretended to be black her entire career went to a fee paying, majority white Kansas City school, according to former classmates.  

Jessica Krug, 38, revealed in a bombshell Medium post Thursday that she has lied about being black her entire career and admitted to deceiving her friends and colleagues. 

She said in the blog post – titled ‘The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies’ -that she is white, Jewish and was raised in Kansas City. ‘For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,’ she wrote. 

Now DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal how Krug went to the exclusive Barstow school in Kansas City where she was described as ‘very political’ and is said to have identified as a white, Jewish girl.  

One of Krug’s former peers, who did not want to be named, said she boycotted prom and planned a flag burning while at the school from where she graduated in 1999.  

In an online bio Krug had described herself as an ‘unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood’. 

Her current neighbor in the Bronx, Anna Anderson, told the DailyMail.com that Krug would call her ‘white trash’ and tell Anderson she was ‘gentrifying’ the neighborhood by going running. 

Following a dispute over their bikes Anderson said Krug asked her: ‘Do you know what the police do to black people like me?’

Anderson told DailyMail.com: ‘She called me white trash, which is ironic.’  

In a video posted online in June of this year under her activist pseudonym, Jessica La Bombalera, Krug denounced ‘all these white New Yorkers who waited four hours with us to be able to speak and then did not yield their time for Black and Brown indigenous New Yorkers’. 

She adds: ‘Much power to all my siblings who were standing up, my black and brown siblings who were standing.’ 

Her book Fugitive Modernities includes the acknowledgement: ‘My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist…Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.’

Krug’s online confession is reminiscent of the scandal involving Rachel Dolezal – a former NAACP leader in Washington state who was exposed in 2015 as a white woman pretending to be black.  

Krug, who has a Ph.D., described herself as a ‘culture leech’ and a ‘coward’. She has taken financial support from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Guardian reports.

In 2009 she is understood to have been award as Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. 

In her Medium post Krug said: ‘I have thought about ending these lies many times over many years, but my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics. 

‘I know right from wrong. I know history. I know power. I am a coward. There is no ignorance, no innocence, nothing to claim, nothing to defend. I have moved wrong in every way for years.

‘You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.

‘I have built my life on a violent anti-Black lie, and I have lied in every breath I have taken. 

‘I have not lived a double life. There is no parallel form of my adulthood connected to white people or a white community or an alternative white identity. I have lived this lie, fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy. I have built only this life, a life within which I have operated with a radical sense of ethics, of right and wrong, and with rage, rooted in Black power, an ideology which every person should support, but to which I have no possible claim as my own.’

She acknowledged that it would be unlikely she could repair any relationship she has made given the extent of her lies. 

‘I have burned every bridge and have no expectation that any of my relationships are flame resistant. I would never ask for nor expect forgiveness. 

‘To everyone who trusted me, who fought for me, who vouched for me, who loved me, who is feeling shock and betrayal and rage and bone marrow deep hurt and confusion, violation in this world and beyond: I beg you, please, do not question your own judgment or doubt yourself. You were not naive. I was audaciously deceptive. 

‘I have a very clear, loud conscience, but I have acted as if I had none. I gaslit you. I begged for your compassion and love for my isolation and loneliness – real and raw feelings, but borne of the avalanche of deceit. 

In her blog post, Krug said she has battled ‘unaddressed mental health demons’ her entire life and that she first assumed a false identity as a child. 

She wrote that her mental health issues could never explain or justify why she pretended to be black.   

‘When I was a teenager fleeing trauma, I could just run away to a new place and become a new person. But this isn’t trauma that anyone imposed on me, this is harm that I have enacted onto so many others. There is nowhere to run. I have ended the life I had no right to live in the first place,’ she said. 

‘No white person, no non-Black person, has the right to claim proximity to or belonging in a Black community by virtue of abuse, trauma, non-acceptance, and non-belonging in a white community. The abuse within and alienation from my birth family and society are no one’s burden but my own, and mine alone to address. 

‘Black people and Black communities have no obligation to harbor the refuse of non-Black societies. I have done this. I know it is wrong and I have done this anyway.’ 

Krug has been teaching classes on African American history at George Washington University since 2012. 

Her biography page on the university website says she also specializes in subjects including Latin America, Africa, imperialism and colonialism. 

She has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to the GWU page.  

Krug has also written several books and essays on blackness and black culture. Some of the outlets who have published her work started deleting the posts on Thursday after the revelations. 

A George Washington University spokesperson said they are ‘aware of the post and are looking into the situation’, adding: ‘We cannot comment further on personnel matters.’ 

Following the revelations in her post, Krug has since been slammed on Twitter by several black writers and scholars who she had contact with throughout her career. 

Hari Ziyad, a black author and screenwriter, claimed that she had only penned the post because she had been ‘found out’. 

In a series of scathing tweets, Ziyad said he considered Krug to be a friend until she called him a few hours prior to the Medium post being published to confess. 

‘Jess Krug… is someone I called a friend up until this morning when she gave me a call admitting to everything written here. She didn’t do it out of benevolence. She did it because she had been found out,’ Ziyad tweeted. 

‘For years I defended her work, and her from her own self-loathing. I did it despite warnings from Black friends, from those who said she wasn’t Black enough even if they could accept that she was Black, and from my own mind and body. 

‘I always knew there was something off. It was in her persistent negativity and jealousy, her always needing to prove her authenticity at the expense of everything else. 

‘I kept her at arm’s length, but still close enough that she could harm Black people around me. I owe so many people apologies.’