Professor of African American studies comes out as White
Written by Ominira Mars, guest author, and graduate student
Blackfishing (a pop-culture term used to describe nonBlack people online who utilize different mediums to appear Black) is a trend that should not only be applicable to online experiences but non-virtual ones as well.
In this article, I discuss an open letter posted by a professor of African American studies at George Washington University on Medium titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black violence of my lies.” In her open letter, professor Jessica Krug “canceled” herself for pretending to be Black.
As a Twitter user with a largely Black following, it did not take me long to know the full story behind Krug’s deceitfulness. Before outing herself as a white Jewish woman, Krug was an activist, historian, and author who published a well-known, award-winning book titled Fugitive Modernities. In this book, Krug explores resistance to European colonialism in West Africa.
From “North African Blackness”, to “US Rooted Blackness”, to “Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness”, Krug outlines in her open letter the many identities of the Black diaspora she clung to during her imitation of Blackness. Krug went by several “ethnic” names including “Jessica La Bombalera” to portray herself as an Afro-boricua (Afro-Puerto Rican).
It should be stated as well that Jessica Krug came out about her antiBlack lies when confronted by a group of Black professors and practitioners who were collectively putting the pieces together about Krug’s identity, and coming to the conclusion that Krug was not a Black woman.
I had begun reading one of Krug’s famous books titled “Fugitive Modernities,” which I found to be a well-written and captivating book to which the need to deceive and Blackfish was not necessary; white authors write compelling books on the histories of colonialism often.
In our course on Human Rights in the Media, we read “Race and/as Technology” written by Wendy Chun, which in many ways defines race as a tool. Thinking about human rights, media, and antiBlackness, I approach this media and Chun’s reading with critical thoughts from Wilderson’s theory on Afropessimism and Sexton’s critique of multiculturalism. Wilderson’s explanation of “gratuitous violence” as a tenet of Blackness as social death speaks to the violence in which Blackness freely elicits; even if it isn’t physical. The type of antiBlack violence Krug commits is an epistemological one; an emotional-psychological one; especially considering all of the Black students she has taught and mentored.
I kept asking myself after reading Krug’s open letter;
why would someone want to pretend to be Black when Black spaces and Black bodies are consistently devalued and reduced to objects of fugitivity and fungibility? Having studied the history of colonialism and the fugitivity of Blackness, wouldn’t Krug know this?”
My answer simply points to Wilderson’s explanation of “negrophilia.”
Another question that haunted me was: how did she get access to so many spaces? How was Krug able to “cosplay” three different Black diasporic-identities?
I answered this question for myself using Sexton’s critique of multiculturalism. The truth is that race now functions as a phenotypic tool of dominance; where racially ambiguous and more lighter-skinned people are centered, praised, and uplifted in media and academia for having phenotypical proximity to whiteness. Where blackness must become palatable to the white-gaze. Where dark-skinned less white-passing Black people are not as aesthetically acceptable to whiteness. This contradiction in a world that caters to whiteness leaves a wide opening for Blackness to become a caricature. All Krug had to do was exaggerate and appropriate “signifiers” of afro-boricua culture and that made her Blackness valid. What exists in the antiBlack pandemic is an unspoken truth on colorism and multiculturalism as oppressive tools of Black erasure.
