Black unlike me: the strange case of Jessica Krug
This is one of the strangest stories I’ve ever read. I had never heard of Jessica Krug before; I doubt many people have. She seems to be somewhat typical of the sort of leftist professor focusing on racial studies so prevalent in colleges and universities today.
But in one way she’s very atypical – she’s been “passing” as black for her entire adult life, although she’s white.
A photo can be found here.
Krug’s photo points out the difficulty of racial classification by phenotype, because it turns out that Jessica is Jewish by birth (certainly not by practice; leftism seems to be her religion). I can see how she could pass for mixed race or Hispanic (she claimed to be of Caribbean origin), and this is true of a lot of basically white people.
It’s been true of me, too, although it never occurred to me to even try.
Krug remains an unrepentant and deeply committed leftist, and as such is also a person who has bought every single bit of the “anti-racism” anti-white line of the left. For all I know, she’s anti-Semitic too; it wouldn’t surprise me in the least, although she doesn’t say anything about that. But she’s what one might call a “self-hating white” – and my guess (and it’s only a guess) is that her hatred of herself as a white person caused her to flee into blackness, even more than the history of early personal trauma to which she refers, or even a desire to advance her career (which was probably also operating, although she doesn’t mention it).
Krug also obviously wants attention at this point, and she got it. Even from me.
According to NPR, GWU will be investigating this “professor”, an SJW masquerading as a legitimate scholar. It is now being claimed that she published her mea culpa only because she was on the verge of being revealed as a fraud. Her book (from Duke U P, probably the most mindlessly “woke” of all university presses) had no reviews on Amazon until yesterday, but several people have now posted their displeasure at her faux-blackness.
I have a relative by marriage who looks a lot like Krug and who identifies as black. However, she probably genuinely has some black ancestry, and is an adopted child raised in a black family. But this kind of thing shows how fluid racial identification can be. Lying about this for political or professional advantage (like Elizabeth Warren) is disgusting.
Happened to see a clip of her speaking, with what sounded to me like an uneducated Brooklyn accent with the “F” word injected every ten words or so.
I wonder if that is fake too.
Imagine for a moment that a conservative claimed they where black, native american, hispanic, etc, and later announce they were not.
How fast would this individual be fired from her academic position?
How fast would this person be indicted for making false statements to take advantage of affirmative action polices that were enacted to help real minority individuals.
I would deport this b***h right now and dump her in Havana, Cuba; a nation that under reports the percentage of the population that is black, and has a govt that is damn near 100% white.
I would partner her with that Cherokee Indian from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren so they can both enjoy living in that earthly nirvana.
If Black people in America are all oppressed victims of systemic and inescapable racism — then why are all these people claiming to be Black?
I feel sorry for her. There has to be more to this story, something that caused her to take this escape route and cling to it. In any case, the mob will eat its own rather than show any compassion.
I lived in the Caribbean for many years and the racial spectrum there is fully populated. Everybody has some African or Indian ancestry in their families there, and everybody has elements of the culture in them, too. You simply can’t always tell from physical appearance.
I suppose it’s right that her fraudulent work should be consigned to obscurity. But I don’t have a problem with people pretending, until they start getting strident and activist with it (Ward Churchill, Rachel Dolezal, etc) ….Sad.
A novel new angle on self-hating… although if we’re honest it was most likely more about hating *other* White People.
Perhaps the greatest happiness she could conceive of would be herself getting lynched.
^^— Digression on the coming Civil War —>:
It has to be no holds barred and scorched earth because there is no escape for our side if we lose. Too much data about everyone’s political views online and they’ll be able to hunt us down at their leisure if they win. Wont’ be any chance to submerge, reinvent oneself, live a quiet life.
Here are 3 minutes of her blathering in her hoodvoice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n40wEIFtImU
She was born and raised in Kansas City
—-
Happened to see a clip of her speaking, with what sounded to me like an uneducated Brooklyn accent with the “F” word injected every ten words or so.
I wonder if that is fake too.
“I lived in the Caribbean for many years and the racial spectrum there is fully populated.”
And how. I was in the Navy and spent years on islands. I’ve been on San Salvador, Eleuthera, Puerto Rico, Antigua, Barbados and Ascension Island. You see everything from light skinned blonds to almost coal black skin.
I think that Eugene Rose pointed out that nihilism is a big reason for self hatred.
A combination of woke self-hatred along with a narcissistic desire of attention. And, boy did she get it! Unfortunately, I think this is all too common among guilty white liberals.
An aside, I’m white, but have a darker complexion (due to my eastern and southern European ancestry). Over the course of my life, I’ve often been mistaken for Hispanic, Middle Eastern, East Indian and, occasionally, mixed-race with black. I’ve never been offended by anyone asking my background, but I will say it is invariably liberals who are the most inquisitive…likely because they need to know where to place me in their pecking order of the aggrieved.
I’m any case, were I lacking in scruples and craving money and attention (which I am not), perhaps I should adopt a new racial persona, a la Krug and Dolezal? It seems to be both trendy and lucrative!
Of such as she are collaborators made.
It has always been so.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/sentenced-to-shaving.html
By now, there really is no such thing as racial purity. Human beings travel from everywhere to everywhere. And everywhere we go, we end up having sex with the locals. We are hardwired genetically to be attracted sexually to differentness. This assures that the gene pool gets refreshed and diversified. Too much inbreeding is not healthy.
So, by now, there is no such thing as all black, all white, or all anything. Society labeled Tiger Woods as black, but he is half Southeast Asian.
Personally, I believe that “race” issues in the U.S. are not so much about race as they are about culture. And, if it is about culture more than genetic heritage, I suppose she has a right to identify herself how she pleases. If the black community doesn’t want to accept her because her skin isn’t dark enough, then they are the ones who are racist.
On a broader note, I am really tired rehashing race issues over and over and over again…
Did she have a real epiphany or is this a career move?
Profs are supposed to be able to write? Can she get enough of a book deal to finish up her retirement funding? Depending on the age and actuarial tables, $100k ought to yield…depending…maybe $6k a year life and ten.
What more do the American public need to see in order to perceive how insane and worthless the contemporary university has become? Between things like this, the replication crisis, speech codes, and the destruction of a George Washington statue on the campus of George Washington University, academia is clearly beyond repair. When will people stop paying to send their children to these lunatic asylums? Of course, had Jessica Krug “appropriated” a masculine identity (Jesse Krug?), he would be lionized and protected from questioning by federal law. . .
Regarding the difficulty of classification: when Meghan Markle began to appear in the news it didn’t occur to me that she was “black,” which is to say officially and culturally black though obviously of mixed race.
Neo your speculations, correct as they seem to me, were a bit too Biden-y. I think their expression is left to verbalization in a much more private setting
Regarding the difficulty of classification: when Meghan Markle began to appear in the news it didn’t occur to me that she was “black,” which is to say officially and culturally black though obviously of mixed race.
Her mother is a social worker of California New Age sympathies and her father’s family is bourgeois Wonderbread mix-and-match (people who don’t function well, people who function passably but are somewhat vulgar, and haut bourgeois – between her father, his brothers, and their children you see the whole spectrum. Unfortunately for the Duchess of Sussex, her immediate family is where the ruin is).
This is a subject-example of why I walked away from psychology in college despite the classwork record I was building and the ease with which I did it. [ Basketweaving, as they used to say] I became convinced that apart from cases of diagnosable medical causes, people were in part, large part, responsible for their own dysfunctions as the result of choices, acts of will, and strategies which they knew were wrong, but adopted anyway in order to solve a smaller problem. It was not just handfuls of people feigning illness and developing psychosomatic disorders as I saw it, it was much more widespread. “Empathy”, which is actually a form of projection, and not an actual picture, is what prevents us from seeing it, or at least calling it out, clearly. That, and delicacy.
And they do eventually become sick, or unbalanced or just crazy. They become this as the cumulative result of the choices which they have made; just as assuredly, in my view, as a Type 2 diabetic can be said to be responsible for its own diabetes as a result of years of compounding, self indulgent, choices to seek gratification from the outside rather than building up strength from the inside.
Ask yourself this: If you had a non-contact acts-at-a-disrance device which you could point at their heads and get a reading as to whether they were mentally ill or not, had mood disorders or not, or had chacteriological problems, what percentage of these goddamned leftist annoyances do you imagine would drive the needle right off the scale and set buzzers buzzing and lights blinking?
What percentage of liberals do we already know are taking mood altering and anxiety relieving medications because of some permanent problem they have?
Four Antifa shot. Four Antifa with criminal records involving interpersonal conflict and molestation. Batting a thousand there.
A stage crowded with raging pussy hats, half, seemimgly, proudly proclaiming their diagnosed psychological problems as some kind of badge of honor.
And we accord these people the status of moral peers?
We are being hectored, harassed, and impeded to death: day and night, week by week, month by month, year over year, by a bunch of damnable mentally and morally defective scammers, subversive nihilists, and predators, who should, if abstract justice were to be done, be loaded into trebuchet buckets as flung naked to antartica. Or, if that’s too harsh, then given suitcases full of hundred dollar bills, loaded onto luxurious cruise ships, and transported to the Big Rock Candy Mountain of the tropical seas … anywhere, anywhere they like, as long as it is not here.
But instead, well you know, instead every day is Victims Appreciation Day; and mercy, solidarity, understanding, suicidal tolerance and all that shit rules, because, forget what this polity really is and is for, we are instead just one giant no limits, no boundaries dysfunctional family, from which there is no escape and should be no escape, because life is all about being a doormat for crazies, enabling the insane to act out, and then applauding them as they do it.
And frankly, as we all know, you cannot throw enough money or goods in the face of a nuisance to make it go away forever. Because money and goods, and even balmy leisure and endless sex won’t permanently satisfy its sense of self-stoked grievance against the world. Only hanging its carcass around your neck will do it – for a time – because you have to feel it’s pain, and its pain is never ending as it obsessively tears the scabs off of potentially healing wounds.
When Bill Clinton first told his audience that he felt their pain it made no sense whatever to me. Who’s in pain? What kind of pain? What good is feeling it, and who would want you to do that, rather than just solve a problem?
I did not fully understand what liberals were, inside, psychologically; though, because that piece of crap Karl Marx had spilled the real motivating beans with his blather about “alienation” I had some clue to go on to answer the question: “What is their real problem?”
And now, because of the progress of cultural Marxism in our own society, we know firsthand rather than merely suspect or surmise..
Goddamn these gleefully, self-righteously, deliberately insane types, and the nihilistic viciousness and ruin they spread to everything and everyone they touch.
DNW, I cannot entirely approve your rant, but the “Ask yourself this…” paragraph is very funny and all too likely to be correctly answered with “Somewhere over ninety.”
At some point after my ’60s radical/hippie period ended, I asked myself a similar question about my former compatriots, and myself as well. I concluded that most of us were somewhat or very messed up psychologically, and were in part acting out our problems.
The question that remains is, were we really any more messed up on the whole than everybody else, differing mainly in the ways we manifested the messed-up-ness?
@ Mac,
The entire point of a rant is to let, perhaps hyperbolically, loose with [what one takes to be] possibly inconvenient or disquieting truths without the usual limits of decorum or complete seriousness.
It is understandable you would not unconditionally approve.
But I think that the great and frustratingly ignored, or excused, or even celebrated as “diversity”, truth is, that there is a smeary line between the content of certain sociopolitical claims, and the imbalanced minds or disturbed personalites that generate these claims against others. And that that is especially pronounced in progressivism, and may even be a defining element of it.
When Karl Marx diagnoses the existential problem that both underlies, and reflexively informs the problem of capitalist commodity production as one of “alienation”, one can from this moment see where the whole project is headed and what the psychological needs and anthropological presuppositions of the one doing the diagnosing are. It is the “You exist for me, or by my leave” attitude. Because, in lieu of God or intrinsic meaning, species being(s), or some crap, is the only resort possible for such a person.
It is probably why liberal anxieties are never quelled, and their efforts always unceasing. Someone somewhere might escape from or ignore them. Nothing in the objective world can ever really match what their minds are insistently telling them; anymore than you can convince a schizophrenic that there are no people trying to steal “his numbers and information” by trying to show him that “375” occurs in contexts that cannot possibly have anything to do with him.
As for your last hypothetical, I think that although there are many more damaged people than we imagine, and that some of them do indeed find ways to compensate, or even sublimate positively, that this serioulsly wounded state s not a universal part of the human experience.
But then, I don’t actually have one of those machines. I have to judge by the things they say and admit, and by the after action reports, so to speak.
I think there is evidence in the paleo-anthropology literature that the mitochondrial DNA—women only have this—spread and diffused in a wider geographic range than did the Y chromosome DNA—men only have this—during mankind’s long evolution. The implication is that women wandered away from the tribal home more often than men did…so that their genes spread over a wider range. And, even today this is supposed to be true: men—on average—stay and reside and work nearer to the geographic site of their birth more often than do women. The explanation today I would guess would be that romantic attachments account for much of this, like marriage and dating.
My question is why do you think that in pre-history, thousands of years ago, this happened? We’re women kidnapped or enslaved more often? Did they fall in love with wandering exotic, foreign hunters and gatherers? Or with warriors? Were their children kidnapped and the women followed their kids? We’re they expelled from tribes more often than men? I would guess that they were captured and taken away from the tribes. But, if this were so, did their kids go along? What happened to them?
That clip of Jessica La Bombalera posted by Gerard is truly disgusting and nonsensical. It’s not hard to see why some of her associates thought that she was “off.”
“Hari Ziyad, a black author and screenwriter, posted a series of tweets calling Jessica Krug “a friend up until this morning” when Krug apparently called Ziyad to confess the falsehoods she detailed in a Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.”
“She didn’t do it out of benevolence,” Ziyad wrote. “She did it because she had been found out.”
https://nypost.com/2020/09/03/jessica-krug-admitted-she-lied-about-being-black-after-being-caught/
This is really sad. Obviously, Hari Ziyad’s friendship is not worth very much. Whether Jessica is Jewish or mixed race shouldn’t make any difference in a genuine friendship.
That said, I suspect that before she was exposed, Jessica probably participated in destroying other people with gusto. That is why she is defenseless now. Although her crime in passing as a woman of color is minor, she has no higher morality to appeal to in her defense.
Perhaps Jessica can run for the US Senate and join Elizabeth Warren as a “minority”. On the left, political power atones for everything. Jessica’s problem right now is that she is not useful to the left anymore. All she needs is political power and all will be forgiven.
Dennis:
Well, most people – even friends – don’t like being lied to, except for something really minor. And race isn’t that minor. It is especially and particularly not minor to people whose lives are focused on racial identity. Those are the circles in which Krug moved, the coin of that realm. She cheated and claimed a status she didn’t deserve.
Dnaxy:
I haven’t a clue.
I’m old, but I’m not that old 🙂 .
Neo said:
“It is especially and particularly not minor to people whose lives are focused on racial identity. Those are the circles in which Krug moved, the coin of that realm. She cheated and claimed a status she didn’t deserve.”
The fact that her declared racial background matters to her “friends” shows just how sick Krug and her “friends” are. The society in which race is the “coin of the realm” is deeply racist. She deserves everything that is coming to her since she has promoted that racist narrative, but still, none of them are worth calling friends.
I agree that people don’t like to be lied to, but in a color blind society, no one would really care. The reason that her lies are not minor is because we are dealing with black privilege which is worth many thousands of dollars and a job and prestige for those who can claim it. If she had been a woman claiming to be a man, no one would have cared one way or another. On the other hand, a man claiming to be a woman so that he could shower with the women would raise some eyebrows – or maybe not.
Dennis:
Actually, if she were merely pretending to believe she was a trans man rather than actually believing she was a trans man, people would care.
Jessica comes across as an obnoxious person, so it is not surprising that her friends have not stood by her. I once worked with a young female X-ray tech who flipped out and changed her identity and became estranged from her family. As far as we could tell, her parents were good people who really cared for her. It is hard to imagine how much it hurt her parents, but her parents and friends still cared for her. We knew that her new identity was false, but we cared more about her than about what identity she claimed.
DNW, your “rant” was more understandable (to me) than some of your more philosophical comments. The presentation of such people as mentally ill also brought to mind Thomas Sowell’s depiction of people having a constrained vision vs. those having an unconstrained vision. That latter group believe people are “perfectible” if given help from society or government. Sowell might not characterize that vision as mental illness, per se, but people who won’t leave you well enough alone when that is your preference may come across as mentally off if they push too hard.
Your comment about the mindset of Marx is enlightening and helpful in trying to understand how his ideas have been so persuasive to so many people.
Roy Nathanson on September 5, 2020 at 6:24 am said: “We are hardwired genetically to be attracted sexually to differentness.” While I agree with you about the merit and healthfulness of genetic diversity, I question the “hardwired” attraction to someone else if the cultural differences are really great. Mistrust of “the other” is also part of our genetic makeup. Many have commented about the greater success of homogeneous societies (say Scandinavian or the US up through 1820 or so) vs. those that permit or have “excessive” cultural intermixing (at least until some assimilation/ accommodation has occurred, which is of course part of America’s strength). The “chemistry of affection” is still a mystery and the pull of an exotic or alpha “other” is certainly possible. I think it would still be relatively rare.
Your comment also suggests the women involved have more agency over the selection of their marriage partner than had been the case historically until relatively recent times.
Dnaxy on September 5, 2020 at 2:54 pm said: “… mitochondrial DNA … spread and diffused in a wider geographic range … implication is that women wandered away from the tribal home more often than men…” I can’t answer your set of questions with any greater certainty than Neo did, but if “wander away” includes purposeful intermarriage across tribes to help cement friendly relations that would be part of it. Kidnapping of the women or her children, but not both together, would also disperse her gene pool. I doubt women would attempt to survive on their own outside of a family/ clan/ tribal support system [Hobbes’ or Locke’s or Rousseau’s “state of nature” is a fiction or a literary artifact.]
Indirectly related: the incidence of up to 4% Neanderthal DNA in some homo sapiens groups suggests to me the genetic transfer occurred via rape rather than consensual physical or emotional attraction, or tribal sharing of women. But men being men, the rape could have occurred in either or both directions. This idea also presupposes these were low density groups such that the woman could “wander off” during her gathering efforts and become more isolated that would normally have been the case. Everyone acts like this genetic transfer happened consensually in all cases, and I am suspicious of that viewpoint.
Yeah, when Dnaxy mentioned the greater diffusion of females, I thought of Isaac’s servant being sent some distance to fetch Rebekah. I suppose that’s in a way a bit of a counterexample in the sense that the specific reason for that story was that Isaac was to marry from among his own people, so it ended up still being an internal match as far as genetic diversification went. I didn’t know that about mitochondrial DNA, though; so there are sex-specific tracers! Is interesting.