Earlier, by John Derbyshire: Why Are Non-Blacks Passing As Black? Black Privilege!
As I’ve often mentioned, unlike in Brazil where controversies are routine over whether a person applying for affirmative action preferences is just a white person with a tan and fluffed up hair, white Americans so seldom cheat on quotas for blacks that it’s a huge national scandal every time one example turns up.
I call it the Affirmative Action Honor System.
For example, there was Rachel Dolezal back in 2015. And now there is Jessica A. Krug, an associate professor of history at George Washington U., specializing in African and Caribbean history, who today admitted she’s really just a white Jewish woman from the Kansas City suburbs:
She’d make a good Tracey Ullman character: a Jewish academic pretending to be a Jessica Lopez-style Boricuan.
The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies
Jessica A. KrugSep 3 · 5 min read
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.
Not just any lies.
***
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. I have not only claimed these identities as my own when I had absolutely no right to do so — when doing so is the very epitome of violence
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures — but I have formed intimate relationships with loving, compassionate people who have trusted and cared for me when I have deserved neither trust nor caring. People have fought together with me and have fought for me, and my continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is not only, in the starkest terms, wrong — unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial — but it means that every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love.
Intention never matters more than impact. To say that I clearly have been battling some unaddressed mental health demons for my entire life, as both an adult and child, is obvious.
There is so much white Privilege in America that a mentally ill white got tenure (I think?) at an extremely expensive college right next to the White House by pretending to be Puerto Rican. (From the Washington Post: “In an essay published on Essence about the Puerto Rican uprising against its governor in 2019, Krug said she was a ‘boricua,’ a term used for Puerto Ricans.”)
Mental health issues likely explain why I assumed a false identity initially, as a youth, and why I continued and developed it for so long; the mental health professionals from whom I have been so belatedly seeking help assure me that this is a common response to some of the severe trauma that marked my early childhood and teen years.
But mental health issues can never, will never, neither explain nor justify, neither condone nor excuse, that, in spite of knowing and regularly critiquing any and every non-Black person who appropriates from Black people, my false identity was crafted entirely from the fabric of Black lives. That I claimed belonging with living people and ancestors to whom and for whom my being is always a threat at best and a death sentence at worst.
I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech. …
And I believe in cancel culture as a necessary and righteous tool for those with less structural power to wield against those with more power.
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.
… My politics are as they have ever been, and those politics condemn me in the loudest and most unyielding terms.
***
I have built my life on a violent anti-Black lie, and I have lied in every breath I have taken.
One interesting thing is that she pretended to be Puerto Rican, but her whole apology is to blacks, who rank higher on the intersectional altar of worship.
I have no identity outside of this. I have never developed one. I have to figure out how to be a person that I don’t believe should exist, and how, as that person, to even begin to heal any of the harm that I’ve caused.
***
No white person, no non-Black person, has the right to claim proximity to or belonging in a Black community by virtue of abuse, trauma, non-acceptance, and non-belonging in a white community.
Also, race does not exist!
Off topic, but I like this picture of Jess at the Frederick Douglass Book Awards talking to somebody who appears to be Brad Pitt in blackface playing Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino’s exceedingly transgressive next movie.
The abuse within and alienation from my birth family and society are no one’s burden but my own, and mine alone to address. Black people and Black communities have no obligation to harbor the refuse of non-Black societies. I have done this. I know it is wrong and I have done this anyway.
***
I have not lived a double life. There is no parallel form of my adulthood connected to white people or a white community or an alternative white identity. I have lived this lie, fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy. I have built only this life, a life within which I have operated with a radical sense of ethics, of right and wrong, and with rage, rooted in Black power, an ideology which every person should support, but to which I have no possible claim as my own. …
WRITTEN BY
Jessica A. Krug
Okay, so she’s a white Jewish lady from the suburbs who pretended to Puerto Rican for years but still wound up a leftist college professor. I guess genes do matter, no matter how big the hoop earrings you wear?
As always in these rare cases, black ladies on Twitter are outraged at the white woman trying to steal their Black Privilege.
