Jessica Krug, the George Washington University professor who admitted to lying about being Black, has resigned, the university said. Krug, who is White, wrote a Medium post last week apologizing for building her life “around a violent anti-Black lie.”
“Dr. Krug has resigned her position, effective immediately,” the university said in a letter to students and alumni. “Her classes for this semester will be taught by other faculty members, and students in those courses will receive additional information this week.”
During her time at the university, Krug taught classes including “Topics in African History,” “Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World” and “Africa and the African Diaspora: (Trans)Nationalisms and the Politics of Modernity,” according to her page on the university’s website, which as since been removed.
In her Medium post, Krug said throughout her adult life, she has “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.”
“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,” she wrote.
Krug acknowledged that “unaddressed mental health demons” likely contributed to her decision to assume a Black identity, but said that those struggles did not excuse the harm she caused to the Black community.
“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,” she wrote.
Krug said she believed she deserved to be “cancelled,” but did not specify what form that would take. She has not commented publicly since releasing the Medium post.