The Perils of Claiming an Identity

In recent days, the story of Jessica Krug has rocked the academic and activist worlds. Krug is an Associate Professor of History at George Washington University (at least for the moment), where she specializes in African and Carribean histories. For years, she passed herself off as a woman of color, variously as African or Latina. The other day she posted a “confession” that she was really a white woman from Kansas who has been faking it all these years and even saying she should be “cancelled”. I won’t post to her confession, since the consensus seems to be that the only reason she offered it is that she was about to be revealed by others in her department who became suspicious and did some digging.

I will post a couple of responses from people that can give you a sense of what she did and what it means to the communities of color that she claimed to be speaking and writing for. It seems worse in many ways than the Rachel Dolezal scandal from a few years back, or maybe just more brazen.

This piece by LD Burnett from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History is quite good, as are the numerous accounts from people who actually knew her or engaged with her online.

Krug’s duplicity was at the expense not just of Black or Latino/a voices, but at the expense of the platforms and jobs and book contracts and grants that she took from them by trading on her “identity” and vehemently maintaining it. Reading through all the accounts (and twitter here is a great source for much of this) it’s hard not to see what she did as a kind of violence,.

This week, we’re starting Jeff Chang’s book We Gon’ Be Alright and he can help us navigate some pretty tricky conversations around race and identity, help that we all need in different ways no doubt. But even as we are writing about and “reclaiming” our own identities (as I say on the syllabus), it’s worth noting that identities are not something we pull out of thin air.