The Identity Hoaxers
The confession, when it came, did not hold back. “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,” read the Medium post. It was published in September under the name of Jessica A. Krug, a George Washington University professor specializing in Black history. Krug had, she said, variously assumed the identities of “North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.” She was actually a white Jewish woman from Kansas. “You absolutely should cancel me,” Krug wrote in her self-dramatizing mea culpa, “and I absolutely cancel myself.”
Krug had cultivated her assumed identity over several years, and used it to speak “authentically” about race in America. The deception appears to have begun while she was studying at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where Krug “used to identify as half Algerian, saying that her father was a white man of German ancestry who had raped her mother,” a fellow academic told The Cut. When Krug moved to New York, she became Afro-Latinx, and used the name “Jessica La Bombalera” for her activism. One of her former students said: “There was this theme in her teaching of being super-representative of her communities and saying that folks had destroyed it and gentrified it. Now looking back, she was talking about herself.”
One of the oddest aspects of the saga was that Krug’s assumed identity was so stereotypical as to be borderline unconvincing: She wore hoop earrings, crop tops, and “tight, tight cheetah pants” to class, and spoke with an exaggerated accent. She also took funding from a program designed for marginalized scholars. According to Gisela Fosado of Duke University Press, the publisher of Krug’s academic book, her scholarship “may not have ever existed without the funding that was inseparable from her two decades of lies.” And yet—the work was well regarded. The white, Jewish Jessica Krug could have had an academic career. What she would not have had was moral authority.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the case, however, is that it is not unique. In fact, Krug’s admission was prompted by scholars in the field discussing the case of H. G. Carrillo, who was also a professor at GW. After he died from COVID-19 in April, Carrillo’s family came forward to correct the initial tributes: The author of Loosing My Espanish was not, as he had always presented himself, a member of the Cuban diaspora, but a Black man born in Detroit. His birth name was Herman Glenn Carroll. This was news to everyone, including his husband.
Those who had nursed suspicions for years about colleagues and acquaintances soon brought other cases to light. Over the holiday season, and , the attorney , and the activist . All were white, but were assumed to be minorities in their professional and personal lives. The best-known example of all is Rachel Dolezal, who now goes by Nkechi Amare Diallo.
