She was a Black historian and a steadily rising star among African study academicians until she wasn't--Black, that is.
Jessica Krug is the latest high-profile figure in higher education to have taken "Blackfishing" to its most fraudulent and disgraceful extreme. In a revelatory blog post last week, she admitted that though she masqueraded as a Black woman for her entire academic career, in truth she grew up as a "white Jewish child" from Kansas City.
Blackfishing is a term coined a couple of years ago on social media (toned down from its original more vulgar form) to describe white women who use cosmetic products, lip fillers and hair texture styles to impersonate blackness or racial ambiguity for monetary and social gain.
Wanna Thompson, a 20-something Black Canadian pop culture critic, helped the word (a play on "catfishing") go viral and wrote an article in 2018 on the subject: "How White Women On Instagram Are Profiting Off Black Women." She claimed that "countless" women and "numerous celebrities" were guilty of Blackfishing, and named Instagrammer Emma Hallberg and YouTuber Mika Francis as prime examples.
Krug's ludicrous pretense turned out to be lucratively profitable in an industry where myriad affirmative action and diversity programs and policies are designed to give preferential funding, treatment and positions to Black people.
Would a white Jewish woman from Missouri have been hired and given tenure at prestigious George Washington University to teach African history? Doubtful.
Would a white professor have won the grants Krug received from a Black culture center to study African diaspora? Probably not.
Would a white author have landed a publishing contract with Duke University Press to write a book about slaves from Angola and their efforts to organize politically in the Americas? Unlikely.
That Duke's triple-peer-reviewed praise for Krug's debut book has since been rescinded only highlights the confusing lens of fact-and-fiction politicization among academic elites. Her research work was declared "careful and innovative" and "impressive" and a "major contribution" when the reviewers believed her to be Black; now that she's white that's no longer so?
What is certain is that Krug's decades-long deceit enabled her to purloin opportunities and accolades reserved for a Black person. She also co-opted at least one other Black-Latino personality to speak to the New York City Council earlier this summer, in which she dropped a number of f-bombs, claimed solidarity with her Black and brown siblings, and condemned the NYPD as a "colonial occupation force."
Krug joins the infamous ranks of Rachel Dolezal and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom benefited by abandoning their Caucasian heritage and claimed to be of minority race.
Dolezal taught in Eastern Washington University's Africana education program, and was the Spokane NAACP's chapter president until her white parents exposed her deception as a Black woman five years ago.
Massachusetts Senator Warren formally but falsely declared herself as having Native American heritage in the 1980s and 1990s to law school officials at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, the latter of which held up her claimed ethnicity as proof of faculty diversity.
In Krug's mea culpa, she said she cancels herself. If only it were that simple.
Leave it to Joe Biden to unintentionally invoke irony of ironies about historical illiteracy.
"Why in God's name don't we teach history in history classes?" was the question he asked at a Black church campaign stop in Wisconsin.
His brain paused, but his mouth kept moving: "A Black man invented the light bulb, not a white guy named Edison, OK?"
No, it's not OK to be 100 percent wrong.
A few moments later he added, "We've got to give people facts."
On that point, he's 100 percent correct.
FACT: A Black man did not invent the light bulb.
FACT: Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb, either, though he was the first American inventor to create a practical bulb. His fame and fortune came from improving and marketing the bright idea, and nobody of any race, ethnicity or national origin figures more prominently in light bulb legacy than he.
FACT: The first patent for an incandescent lamp was obtained by a white Englishman in 1841, and white English physicist Sir Joseph Swan developed the first carbon-filament bulb in 1878. Across the pond, Edison was refining the bulb vacuum, extending the life of the filament, in 1879.
FACT: Lewis Latimer (who a spokesman identified as the Black man Biden was referring to) developed a filament in 1882 that lasted longer than Edison's, which he patented and then sold to Edison. A child of former slaves, Latimer became the sole Black member of "Edison's Pioneers," as the elite research team was called, when he went to work for Edison in 1884.
Biden apologists were quick to defend the former vice president's intention, which they insisted was to demonstrate the lack of Black history being taught. But asserting racialized hyperbole and denying historical truth serves neither race relations nor education and is, in fact, corrosive to both.
A campaign of low expectations keeps going lower.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.