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Jessica Krug has also resigned from George Washington University after colleagues protested.
Jessica Krug has also resigned from George Washington University after colleagues protested. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Jessica Krug has also resigned from George Washington University after colleagues protested. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Publisher denounces Jessica Krug for pretending to be black

This article is more than 3 years old

Duke University Press says all proceeds from Krug’s book Fugitive Modernities will go to support black and Latinx scholars

The publisher of Jessica Krug, the white academic who revealed she had pretended to be black for years, says she is “sickened, angered, and saddened” and that all proceeds from Krug’s book will go to a fund supporting black and Latinx scholars.

Krug, a white Jewish woman from Kansas and professor focusing on imperialism, colonialism and African American history at George Washington University, admitted in a Medium post earlier this month that she had “assumed identities within a blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US-rooted blackness, then Caribbean-rooted Bronx blackness”. After the university cancelled classes taught by Krug, and her colleagues called on her to step down, Krug resigned from her position last week .

Duke University Press published Krug’s book Fugitive Modernities, which explores the histories of “those fleeing expanding states and the violence of the transatlantic slave trade”, in December 2018. It was well received, and shortlisted for the Harriet Tubman and the Frederick Douglass book prizes.

But now her publisher, Gisela Fosado at DUP, has spoken out about what she called Krug’s “decades-long fraudulent and hurtful appropriation”, criticising how the academic had “deployed gross racial stereotypes to build her fake identity, and the way that she coupled her lies with a self-righteous policing of racial politics within the black and Latinx circles that she intruded upon”.

Fosado said that while Krug’s book did not generate a profit for the press, the publisher was nonetheless “committed to moving all proceeds from the book to a fund that will support the work of black and Latinx scholars”.

Fosado said she was “grappling with several layers of anger and hurt” over Krug’s deceptions. “There is the personal pain of having someone impersonate your own identity in the most racist way possible, through caricatures and stereotypes,” she wrote on the press’s website. “There’s also the shameful sense that, as someone who laboured to support her work as her acquisition editor, I helped publish the work of someone who, early in her career, took funding and other opportunities that were earmarked for non-white scholars.”

In her acknowledgments to Fugitive Modernities, Krug thanks institutions including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, for support in writing it. She also thanks “my ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist. My brother, the fastest, the smartest, the most charming of us all. Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.”

Fosado said the first time the academic lied to her was in 2017, when she told her that her name should be pronounced Cruz, recounting a “fictitious story of how her grandparents came to this country from the Caribbean and how immigration officials made a transcription mistake on their last name.”

Fosado said that DUP would continue to hold “conversations and deliberations about other actions” in regard to Fugitive Modernities.

“What are we then to do with her scholarship, which, as it happens, has been widely praised and recognised as important? Many scholars and scholar-activists have continued to push for a focus not just on content of scholarship, but also on context, methods, ethics, and politics – often promoting decolonial approaches,” she wrote. “These are the conversations and movements that can lead us forward. I hope that we can all muster the strength to lean into these conversations, even though they will challenge us all.”

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