Source: Duke University Press / Duke University Press
Jessica “Cancel Me” Krug has put in her letter of resignation with George Washington University after less than a week of confessing about her faking a Black identity her entire career.
Buzzfeed reports university Provost M. Brian Blake and Columbian College of Arts and Sciences dean Paul Wahlbeck sent a short email to students announcing Krug’s immediate resignation from the institution and offered counseling services for those emotionally impacted by the scandal.
Since 2012, Krug worked at George Washington University under the pseudo name Jess La Bombalera, teaching African history and African diaspora courses as an associate professor. While once respected, colleagues in the department were outraged by her “‘audaciously deceptive’ appropriation of an Afro-Caribbean identity” and issued a joint statement demanding her immediate termination from the institution.
It gets worse.
Krug authored the booked “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom” which made such an impression, it was in the running for the Harriet Tubman Prize and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize last year. Despite the success, the betrayal burned a bridge with the editor, too.
Gisela Fosado, the editorial director who helped her with the book, released a statement practically dragging Krug in an effort to create distance from the situation. “I have been sickened, angered, and saddened by the many years that she deployed gross racial stereotypes to build her fake identity, and the way that she coupled her lies with a self-righteous policing of racial politics within the Black and Latinx circles that she intruded upon,” Fosado wrote on her company’s blog.
Throughout her career, Krug has claimed Afro-Latinx heritage and, on occasion, donned a fake Nuyorican accent to keep up her sham of an image. The whole time she was really a White-Jewish woman from a Kansas City suburb who stole opportunities from established, non-white scholars who are already battling disenfranchisement in the form of severe budget cuts within academia.
Krug’s written confession gave mention to her “battling some unaddressed mental health demons” but copped to being a “culture leech” for the bamboozling. There’s no mention of cutting a check for all the years she’s earned money as a person of color, so what is she really saying here?
“I should absolutely be cancelled. No. I don’t write in passive voice, ever, because I believe we must name power. So. You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”
Say less, Jess. Say less.
