What We Should Really Be Learning from the Jessica Krug Scandal
By: Aidan Hess
Tags: Politics, Jessica Krug, Society, Racism, Race

Jessica Krug, an associate professor of History at George Washington University, published a Medium article last week in which she, a “white Jewish child from Kansas City, admitted to lying about her Black identity for much of her adult life.

Unsurprisingly, the response from the public and media pundits has been scathing.

For many, it reawakens anxieties which had emerged 5 years ago under similar circumstances — when Rachel Dolezal, a white woman and former NAACP president of the Spokane chapter, was ousted by local media as falsely claiming to be Black. As another Medium author, Lisa Betty, has noted, frustration with both is rooted not simply in their lying about being Black but how these lies do great damage to entire Black communities, whether Spokane or GWU, which had welcomed and supported them as Black folks.

Indeed, the damage done by Jessica Krug’s false claim to Black identity is perhaps even more egregious than that of Dolezal. For one, the former’s identity became constitutive of an entire lifelong career in academia where racial positionality is particularly prominent and very sensitive. Research publications, lectures, and courses throughout her tenure were all introduced as work on race produced by a Black woman and validated in part by her Black lived experience. University initiatives to showcase, fund, or otherwise highlight the research of underrepresented groups in the academy had been compromised. And, what’s more, it undoubtedly (and rightfully) serves to foment distrust among Black academics in her field for other white researchers studying Black identities and experience — not to mention Black students who had looked up to Krug as role model for their own academic aspirations.

All of these things should be seen as examples of the lasting damages of cultural appropriation, for sure. But what I want to argue is the problem extends much deeper. It raises serious questions not only about white motivations in racial justice movements, that is, but also about the limits of the overarching politics of race within which Krug is embedded.

Why did Krug assume a Black identity? Given how difficult it still very much is to excel in the university as a nonwhite male scholar, I think the idea that it was for personal or professional gain is misguided, or at the very least it is a secondary concern. Such a conjecture rests on a level of cynicism that is, at least given what we know now, entirely unsubstantiated.

A simpler, more compelling suggestion is this: Krug wanted to be Black because she felt guilty about being white and because she saw impersonating a Black woman as the only opportunity to abscond from her whiteness.

This is someone who immersed herself daily in scholarship on the Black radical tradition, critical race theory, racial justice, and the ongoing histories of slavery and settler colonialism. Hence, this is someone who knew, clearly, that simply being white carries an immense burden in upending the dominant racial hierarchy. And this is someone who, as a white person, did not want to carry that responsibility.

But we must not get stuck, as many commentators have done, on Krug’s fear, selfishness, or cowardice. Such critiques are simple-minded and lazy. They take the easy way out by merely personalizing the problem. They treat racism as a character flaw to be corrected on an individual basis rather than see it as an impersonal, complex, and contradictory structure of power.

So, instead, I want to suggest that Krug’s motivations are in fact not the central issue here. Rather, they are symptomatic of the broader failures of anti-racist politics in the US to position whites as anything other that perpetually subservient ‘allies’ — that is, this politics too often refuses recognition of white participation in anti-racism as means for their liberation, too.

According to the prevailing politics of race, that is, what is demanded of white people is not coalitional participation in shared struggle but ceaseless self-flagellation, trite confessions, and personal sacrifices. White people are not comrades-in-arms but either patrons or servants to ‘Black-led’ racial justice movements. The result of this asymmetry of Blacks and whites in anti-racist struggle is the reproduction of the very racial hierarchy this struggle claims to be undoing.

And so, under these demands, white people cannot escape the double bind between perpetual repentance for their racial identity, on the one hand, and retaining the unjust, immutable ‘privileges’ of whiteness on the other. They are condemned, paradoxically, to permanent superiority by design (i.e. of the racist structure of power) and permanent inferiority by choice (i.e. commitment to undoing that structure is a voluntary, subservient sacrifice without end).

Thus, Krug’s flight from whiteness was motivated primarily by the claustrophobia which this mental prison inevitably harbors.

When white people fail to see their liberation as also tied to anti-racist politics, they cannot escape the hierarchy implied in being patrons for nonwhite folks’ freedom. That is to say, when someone cannot recognize the struggle against racism as their own, when they can only recognize their actions at their righteous as beneficial to others, then they will do everything they can to escape from themselves.

Modification of anti-racist politics such that more white folks can recognize themselves as already in it is a task which must be taken up by fellow whites.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, broaching the topic of racial justice among white people on the basis of ‘white privilege’ is, I think, a dead-end. Instead, it will be more productive for white people to talk to their white friends and relatives about how racism affects their lives, how white supremacy is also something which is alienating for them.

It is not just because white supremacy is violent toward nonwhites that it must be dismantled, after all, but also because it fabricates an image of whiteness than the vast majority of white people do not actually live up to. Clearly, poor whites suffering spiking unemployment and deaths of despair are not living reflections of the ideals of white supremacy — but neither are white suburbanites living menial, redundant, sanitized lives.

Part of the task of confronting white people about structural racism, then, means showing how it is not nonwhites but the facade of racial superiority itself which is the root of their alienation, anxiety, depression, and so on.

If this fails to occur, then white people will continue to think there is nothing really at stake for them in anti-racist politics. This is a problem which will continue to yield fraudulent ‘race escapees’ like Krug and Dolezal, and it will continue to embolden white folks to appropriate Black identity as a means of escaping from the double bind of ‘white allyship’ and ‘white privilege’.

To be sure, fighting for others is a worthy cause, but revolutionary social transformation is won on the basis of shared struggle and universal liberation — which means liberation for white people, too.