Why Black People Cannot Afford To Forgive Jessica Krug

We can all agree that, for most of us, 2020 has been a complete shitshow. We are in the middle of a global pandemic, schools are grappling with how best to adapt to the new normal (but also keep the revenue pouring in even at the expense of the students, faculty, and staff), a new election season is upon us, the cops who killed Breonna Taylor are still out here living free with no foreseeable arrests or indictments in the future, activists are being murdered in the streets, and to add insult to it all, King T’Challa (our beloved Chadwick Boseman) just joined the ancestors. As I said, 2020: shitshow.

Then it happened. Just as Black folx are in the throes of grief, trying to reconcile all that is happening to and around us while maintaining and reaffirming our humanity, we met Rachel Dolezal 2.0, Jessica Krug. On September 3 — the day Dennis’ daddy died — Krug, an associate professor of African American Studies at George Washington University, released a statement on Medium admitting that she has been pretending to be Black for much of her adult life.

I, like everyone else, was shocked at her announcement. Yet, I cautioned myself to be gentle with her because she appeared to strike the right tone in her apology, saying “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.” While writing this response, I even asked a group of my close Black women friends if my tone was too harsh. I didn’t want to seem too angry. But, fuck that; I am angry. Luckily, they all responded with the same energy: “Keep it harsh; she can get grace elsewhere. #TryJesusNotMe.” And, they are absolutely right. Krug should be canceled, not because she gave us permission to do so, but because Black folx cannot afford to keep forgiving the Dolezals and Krugs of America. There is too much at stake for Black people to give Krug a pass or applaud her apology. That shit was problematic as fuck anyway. The more I think about it, the angrier I become. Here’s why.

Apart from being two white women who performed Black identity in disturbingly stereotypical ways, Dolezal and Krug have so much more in common. The parallels between them are uncanny and unsettling. They each decided to occupy — or infiltrate — sacred Black spaces within and outside the academe.

But here’s the thing: any discussion of these fraudulent-ass white women is also necessarily a conversation about what it means to be a Black woman in America. And as a Black woman, I am more than just bothered by that; I’m livid. The assault on Black identity knows no bounds, especially from white women. Why is that? We have to deal with police brutality and Karens; with a whole-ass pandemic and white women in blackface hijacking Black Studies. And Krug didn’t just put on blackface, her trash-ass put on ALL the blackfaces that ever blackfaced. She wasn’t just assuming Black identity; she assumed ALL the Black identities. She was North African Black, then African American Black, and finally Afro-Latina Black. She didn’t just pretend to be Black, but she was from all over the entire damn diaspora. She even put on a fake-ass accent and bamboo earrings — the kind that L.L. was talking about when he described his “Around the Way Girl.” You have to be a special kind of racist to do some shit like that.

There is the in-your-face MAGA kind of racist and then there is the stealthy performative ally type of racist, and I don’t like any of them. But that stealthy one has a way of disarming Black folx and lulling us into a false sense of security. They have a way of making us invite them to the cookout, only to get there and steal all the damn food; or worse, to get there and tell everyone they cooked all the fucking food. Their furtiveness is something at which to marvel and fear. They say the right things, profess the right politics, attend all the protests, and feign outrage at the right moment of injustice. But they’re still racist, and I’m sick of it. Yes, Jessica Krug is a bona fide racist. There, I said it.

As a racial passing scholar and, more importantly, a Black woman, there are several aspects of Krug’s decades-long shuck-and-jive routine that infuriate me most: The infiltration and colonization of Black Studies. The harm Krug has done to her students and to Black folx in general. The disturbing and inaccurate link to which she gestures between mental illness and the phenomenon of racial crossing. There is also the inherent assumption that white people, especially in the academe, know more about Black life and culture than those of us who are Black. Oh, and there is the deliberate centering of whiteness in the discourses of Black life and identity, a position that is diametrically counter to the politics of Black Studies. But, mostly, it’s the blatant racism for me.

The trend of white scholars researching Black life is not a new one. In nearly any Black Studies department one is likely to find several well-funded white scholars researching Black history, politics, literature, culture, folklore, and/or music. Yet, this is not necessarily an indictment of all those white folx. But there is a specific group of them that I take issue with. How many of those white scholars have a decidedly Black politic? For many white people who study Black life, Black studies is nothing more than a job. They have no other obligation to Black people outside their research. I propose that Black scholars have the right — a sacred duty even — to expect that any non-Black scholar who studies Black life embody a deliberate and unwavering Black politic to match. Absent that, a white person in Black Studies being awarded all the research funding for their “innovative” scholarship, receiving research leaves and recognition for their work on Black people is simply continuing in the tradition of the white exploitation of Black bodies in America.

Black Studies differs from other conventional disciplines in the academe. It is historically rooted in the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It was not established because some kindly old white person decided to finally allow Black folx to study their own history at the university level. It emerged from a political struggle in which Black college students who were concerned with confronting contemporary political issues occupied buildings and refused to leave until university administrator’s gave them a place of their own to be. Black Studies is doomed if we do not guard it from the vultures, whether they exist in the form of white women performing Black identity in order to become the faces of the field or if the vulture is the PWI itself deciding to scale back Black Studies programs, calling them too divisive, too exclusionary, and/or not worthy of (material and financial) space in institutions’ strategic plans. What is clear is that Black Studies — and Black life more broadly — is under attack and Krug is the latest perpetrator of that assault.

Being a Black student at a PWI comes with its own set of challenges. Black students tend to intentionally seek out Black professors with whom they can build lasting relationships and who will help them survive the academe with their humanity intact. The thought that Black and Afro-Latinx students may have looked to Krug for mentorship and support, believing her to know their specific struggles and to celebrate their triumphs and she was “audaciously deceptive” is maddening. Black students need Black professors for much more than what they provide in the classroom. I can remember how many of my Black students — and “many” is relative considering that I teach at an institution where the Black student and Black faculty population is inexcusably low — felt when 45 was elected. They seemed so much smaller. They shrank during class time, saying less while many of their white counterparts became emboldened in terrible ways. My Black students were experiencing a range of emotions. They would come to my office hours and just sit, sometimes saying nothing, other times literally in tears discussing how difficult it was for them to be Black at this PWI in the South, especially now that 45 had been elected.

I think of those students often. I remember the atmosphere when neo-nazi Richard Spencer descended upon the campus and how afraid the BSU students were. I recall how those students had been among those targeted by Spencer and his tiki-torch-carrying clan. I think often of how on the day the protests and counterprotests occurred on campus, three Black women faculty (myself included), decided to attend the various protests because our students expected — needed — to see us there. They needed to know they were not alone. So, we went. And when they saw us sharing their anxieties and holding their fears, they felt seen. I know this because they told us so. It is moments such as these, though not always as palpable, in which Black students rely heavily on Black faculty to support and encourage them, to make them feel safe in otherwise unsafe spaces. Krug violated the sacred space between Black professor and Black student. How does a Black student who has been graded or chided by Krug or called a fraud by her reconcile the audacity of Krug’s whiteness? How does any student—Black or otherwise—unlearn the bullshit that Krug has taught through her deception?

Let’s talk for a minute about one of the most troubling aspects of Krug’s apology. She intentionally links her deception to her mental health, and perhaps she is not entirely wrong in that association, but even establishing the link for us is a ruse. It is meant to in some way absolve her of her wrongs; though, she’d never explicitly say so. She will rely on the audience to do that for her. She simply left the big-ass breadcrumbs for the audience to follow. She contends, “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.” The connection she attempts to make between mental illness and racial performance is troubling at best and dangerous at worst. She is not the first to have performed race. Her motive, however, differs wildly from many others who were legally Black and visually white and used their racial ambiguity to, as Langston Hughes once put it, “fool our white folks.” To be clear, there are distinct differences between Krug’s racial subterfuge and those of mixed-race people throughout American history whose fair skin and racial performances allowed them to cross the color line in pursuit of freedom. Krug is not now and can never be them. She — like her foremother Dolezal — is absolutely a white woman who wielded her white woman privilege in order to racially reclassify for no apparent reason, not that there is any motive that would warrant a pardon for her.

There is something to be said about the strategy of her apology. Krug uses the right language in it. She strikes the perfect balance between feigning contrition and encouraging sympathy when she says, “Mental health issues likely explain why I assumed a false identity initially . . . 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.”

This is perhaps one of the most manipulative aspects of Krug’s confession; it is what led some Black folx to respond with sympathy. But I have no pity for her. And that feels strange to say when I have built my entire life and career on the belief in humanity first and a critique of cancel culture. However, this is much more than one of those trivial moments of error that any human being can make. This took forethought, scheming, costuming, improvisation, strategy, privilege, and a complete disregard for the racial group to which Krug claimed to belong. It took a different kind of racism to pull off this charade. It relied on exploiting the history and oppression of Black folx.

The group of Black women I spoke with while writing this response includes a couple of psychologists. So, I put the question of Krug’s connection between mental illness and racial performance to them directly. With her permission, I’m delighted to share one of their responses here because, well, cite a sista, and also because Dr. Hunter responded much better than I could have when she argues, “White women have traditionally been seen as victims — demure, helpless, innocent. All why they brought their kids to witness the literal lynching of Black folx. So, they are never suspected of violence, which allows them to perpetuate it all the more harmfully, to wield it and then claim victimhood, which is how I see her connecting mental health to this appropriation.”

In a confirmation of my earlier point about how harmful the mention of Krug’s mental health is Hunter maintains, “What we know is that of the 75% of folx in the US who struggle with mental illness, most don’t assume false identity. This is not psychological. Her attempt to connect her mental health to this behavior is yet another example of her exacting harm on another disenfranchised group of folx.” For me, it is tantamount to Kevin Spacey gesturing toward his sexuality when he was accused by a man of sexual assault. His mention of his sexuality at that moment drew an implicit link between predatorial behavior and being gay. Krug’s reference to her mental health in this moment was, to my mind, as harmful to those suffering from mental health issues as Spacey’s mention of his sexuality after he allegedly sexually assaulted a man was to the gay community. Which is to say, the attempt to link these behaviors exacts additional harm.

Krug did get one thing right though when she said, “I gaslit you.” Yet, I do not wish Krug harm. What I wish is that she would not be rewarded for the damage she has caused. I wish she wouldn’t be booked on talk shows and given book contracts, further exploiting the people she has injured. Call it reparations or karma, but I really wish Black folx, Afro-Latinx folx, those suffering from mental illnesses would benefit in some way from this. I wish she did not get one minute of my time, but she did; mostly because my scholarship is on racial performance and the politics of passing. I wish she would not earn another damn dime off the backs of Black folx. I wish that every reader, instead of going to read her piss poor apology, would instead read and amplify the voices of Black and Afro-Latinx scholars instead. Books like Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez’s Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern UP 2020); and my first book, That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing (UNC Press 2020); and so many other Afro-Latinx and Black women scholars, some of whom Figueroa-Vásquez mentions on her twitter page (@DrYoFiggy). Amplify their voices and drown out the noise from the other chick.