Jessica Krug, the embattled historian and African studies scholar who admitted last Thursday to impersonating a Black woman, has resigned from her post as an associate professor at George Washington University.
Her resignation was announced by the university in a tweet Wednesday afternoon, explaining that her classes for this upcoming semester “will be taught by other faculty members.”
Krug initially shared her story on the blogging platform Medium, where she confessed that she “built her life on a violent anti-Black lie” by claiming a multiplicity of Black identities over the course of her adult and professional life, including being Afro-Caribbean and North African. Krug is, in fact, a white Jewish woman.
She attributed her appropriation of Black identities to “unaddressed mental health demons” from her childhood.
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.
Pictured: The book Fugitive Modernities written by Krug
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.