Jessica Krug resigns from George Washington University after pretending to be black

A professor at George Washington University who pretended that she was black resigned on Wednesday, the university confirmed.

Jessica Krug, an associate professor of history and Africana studies, grew up as a white Jewish child in Kansas City.

In later life, however, she assumed a series of different black identities, which she confessed to in a Medium blog post on September 3.

On Wednesday the university confirmed she had resigned.

‘Update regarding Jessica Krug: Dr. Krug has resigned her position, effective immediately,’ GWU tweeted. 

‘Her classes for this semester will be taught by other faculty members, and students in those courses will receive additional information this week.’ 

M. Brian Blake, the provost of GWU, and Paul Wahlbeck, dean of GWU’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, wrote an email to students and staff detailing their decision.  

‘Dr. Krug has resigned her position, effective immediately,’ they wrote.

‘Her classes for this semester will be taught by other faculty members, and students in those courses will receive additional information this week.’

The email encouraged students to seek support from campus resources and said: ‘We hope that with this update our community can begin to heal and move forward.’

Krug has not commented since the scandal broke last week. 

The history department’s faculty called for her resignation the day after she wrote the blog post.

They said they were ‘shocked and appalled’ by the information in the Medium post, and called for Krug’s resignation.  

‘Failing that, the department recommends the rescinding of her tenure and the termination of her appointment,’ they wrote.

According to her sister-in-law, Jessica Krug is ‘white as snow white’ and the family only discovered the masquerade after being contacted by the media.  

Krug appeared downcast on Saturday night while returning to her East Harlem apartment building after a tumultuous week.

While dressed in a pink blouse, jeans and sunglasses, Krug kept a bag slung over her shoulders as she attempted to keep a low-profile. 

Students, colleagues and others who’ve encountered Krug have expressed their utter shock over the admission. But according to her sister-in-law, her family was blindsided, too.

The sister-in-law, who wished to remain anonymous, told CNN that ‘there’s no way she’s black.’

‘I can tell you that, there’s no member of the family that is black,’ she said.

The sister-in-law said that her husband has been estranged from Krug for two decades. 

She confirmed that her husband and Krug are Jewish and grew up in Kansas.

‘Our last name is tarnished, and all my husband and I want to do is cry our eyes out right now. I can only imagine my father-in-law rolling around in his grave,’ she said. 

She claimed that the family was completely unaware of Krug’s deceit until they received a phone call on Thursday from a reporter.

‘We had no clue, we are shocked right now and hurt. Our name is ruined,’ the sister-in-law said.

‘It hurts because she slapped everyone in the face, not only her family, she slapped every black woman in the face.’ 

The sister-in-law said she has not met Krug, and she’s not welcome in their home.

In her blog post, titled ‘The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies’, she went into detail about the deceptions that rooted in all aspects of her life.

‘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.  

‘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. ‘

Her confession is reminiscent of Rachel Dolezal, a former NAACP leader from Washington state who was exposed as a white woman pretending to be black in 2015.

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. 

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.’

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.