Writing about demonstrations in Puerto Rico last summer, Jessica Krug, an associate professor at George Washington University, accused those leading the protests of being imposters.
Beneath her essay, a biography said the author was “an unrepentant and unreformed child of the ‘hood” who was perpetually involved in “the struggle for her community in El Barrio”, in Harlem, New York. She had also portrayed herself as African-American and was a respected historian of colonialism and the African diaspora who assailed white supremacy in all its forms.
Dr Krug has now offered a correction. She is not from East Harlem. She is actually white and Jewish, and grew up in a suburb of Kansas City.
“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 I had no right to claim,” she wrote in a blog post.
She had not been living a double life, she said. “I have lived this lie fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy.”
George Washington University said it was “looking into the situation”.
Dr Krug’s fellow writers and scholars were less reticent. She “is someone I called a friend up until this morning”, the author Hari Ziyad said on Twitter. He said she had confessed because she had been found out. For years he had defended her from those who felt “she wasn’t black enough”, he wrote. He apologised “to all the black people I allowed her to say and do wild shit to because they weren’t from New York or from ‘the ‘hood’ as she claimed to be.”
Read the article by Will Pavia in The Australian (from The Times).