Can a university fire a professor who admits to not being Black?

by philg

“Professor Jessica Krug admits she lied about being black: ‘I cancel myself’” (New York Post):

Despite publicly living as a black woman for years, George Washington University associate professor Jessica Krug admitted Thursday that she is actually a “culture leech” — who is white.

“For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” Krug, 38, writes in a brief but life-shattering Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.”

The self-proclaimed “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora” goes on to detail a lengthy trail of public deception.

Krug has a Ph.D. and is the author of the book “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” which “interrogates the political practices and discourses through which those who fled from slavery and the violence of the slave trade in Angola forged coherent political communities outside of, and in opposition to, state politics,” according to her GW faculty profile.

Can the university, which I attended as a 14-year-old back in the Jimmy Carter malaise years, fire her? If so, on what grounds? Can they say “We hired you because of your skin color and we would never have hired such a weak thinker and scholar with white skin”?

(The Medium essay is pretty awesome. I think she deserves her job:

I have 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: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness. … 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.

as the story unfolds, I think we will learn that she is primarily a victim:

When I was a teenager fleeing trauma, I could just run away to a new place and become a new person.

)

Loosely related…

15 thoughts on “Can a university fire a professor who admits to not being Black?”

  1. HOW DARE YOU suggest that she keep this job that she is unqualified for? How will she possibly make amends for denying scholars of color an opportunity for employment, for poisoning the field with fraudulent “scholarship,” and think about all of the students that have been cheated with lies! GWU should refund impacted student’s tuitions for this fraud at the very least. She must immediately be fired and then make restitution for her crimes. It is rarely the case that I think prison time is appropriate, but she is an exception, as she has harmed the Community, not just isolated individuals.

    • @Alan

      I will double check the next time I am at the farmers’ market, but I think I am paying 79¢ per pound.

  5. Pardon my French, but how exactly did she support this claim? For example, I can claim it as well, but nobody would believe me, because I don’t look the part.

    • You just have to know how to network and talk the talk. Most of the social sciences, psychology, and Victimhood Studies is elaborately decorated fraud. When everyone lives on Horseshit Mountain, it’s hard to kick someone off because they farted.

      If this woman really wanted to do the world a service, she would document just how deep the fraud really goes.

    • Also if you dig a little deeper, she was starting to get questions about her background from some people who are actually Black. So she jumped off the Mountain before they pushed her.

  6. GWU’s undergrad tuition is $58,550/yr. based on 12-18 credit hours per semester. Here’s a sample review from Rate My Professors — everyone should read the rest. Her 3-credit HIST 101-1 doesn’t require any reading and grades were based on in-class participation in her rambling discussion, and take home exams. So the course cost each student between $9,758.33 and $14,637.50, with approx. 150 students in the room, and they didn’t learn much, but Horseshit Mountain got taller by $1.5 to $2.2 million.

    https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1806264#ratingsList

    “Don’t take this class if you want to learn about history. It’s easy tho. You don’t have to read and you don’t have to take notes after the midterm. The midterm is a take-home and the final is an essay. Grading is fully based on your TA. Attendance and participation in discussion is very important, that is the only reason I got an A!”

    I think everyone would be better off with The Great Courses.

    https://www.thegreatcourses.com/category/history.html?CFM=category_slider

  7. Harvard didn’t fire the squaw so she is good to go. Plus she is part of academia’s in tribe. Watch for the ‘only way to understand blackness is to fake blackness’ course coming soon.

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