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By Lauren Michele Jackson
In late August, a prominent white celebrity made the impression on Instagram with a productive top hairstyle known for adorning the heads of black women. No, it wasn’t Khloe (Koko) Kardashian, nor any of that tribe, nor any of the same old pop girls, Miley Cyrus, et al. It was Adele, from the Power Ballad tribe, sporting Bantu knots, but that’s not all. Released Sunday night London time, hours before this year’s virtual MTV Video Music Awards, the photo showed the blue-eyed singer, known for his smoky red carpet glamor, frolicking as a component of what appeared to be a carnival birthday component. at home. She was dressed, for example, in gold earrings and a bikini with the Jamaican flag, a headdress of yellow feathers arranged around her neck. I’ve been told that jokes have been made, but by the time I reached out to social media on Monday morning, the verbal exchange had already coalesced around the dreaded word “cultural appropriation. ” This time, however, the culture, or parts of it, has pushed back the label. British blacks chided Americans for their ignorance of carnival culture; welcome to all who come with respect. The West Indians of the United States, in turn, were angry at their imperious compatriots. Jamaicans on and off the island lamented that the wringing of hands was a joy that stole their moment in the sun. (Whites, I imagine, clung to the maximum angle to assuage their oblique guilt. ) These lines of contention — cultural, ethnic, national — overlapped and were inaccurate; the diaspora, made up of so many ongoing resettlements, is resisting in short. The only solid point of reference in the debate was Adele’s uniqueness, who looked ripped off and a bit silly in her Bantu knots and dyed leggings.
On the other side of the pond, a few days later, a woman waved a white flag. Historian Jessica A. Krug, then an associate professor at George Washington University, published a confession on the Medium publishing platform last Thursday, explaining that she was not who she claimed to be. “To a growing degree in my adult life,” he wrote, “I have turned away from my delight as a white Jewish child in the suburbs of Kansas City under various identities assumed in a darkness that I had no right to claim: first the North African darkness, then the blackness rooted in the United States, then the blackness of the Bronx rooted in the Caribbean. His life and, by extension, his college career – or is it the other way around?- had been founded on a lie, admitted, or rather an overabundance, feeding an intelligent religion such as, as Krug said, “not a vulture of culture” but “a leech of culture”.
The blog post is kind to the main points – where, when and how of Krug’s masquerade. She hypothesizes that “mental fitness problems” motivated her behavior; Professionals confide in her that identity replacement is a “common response” to the “severe trauma” she suffered as a child. But it does not call for a diagnosis or elaborate on the original traumatic events, instead it resorts to the generic jargon of self-help, combined with the D. I. Y. Endemic verbiage of the self-managed branch of social justice: “reparation”, “prejudice”, “gaslit”, “belonging”, “responsibility”. (The words “sorry” and “sorry” are missing. ) The message is not well written, but it should be: his self-flagellations adopt the repetitive rhythms of slam poetry. (“I’m a coward . . . I’m a coward”; “The intention is never more vital than the impact”). The acting is mostly deeply uncomfortable. Despite all his obvious examination of how confident downtrodden teams handle the mistakes they make, it is discovered that Krug is unable to write his way. “Surely you will have to cancel me, and surely I will cancel,” he writes, borrowing, in all sincerity, a term of cultural panic that has lost its frankness centuries ago. “What does that mean?” she asks. “I do not know. ” Within twenty-four hours, an organization of Krug’s colleagues at G. W. issued a call to resign or, otherwise, to be removed from the workplace and fired. “With his conduct, Dr. Krug has raised questions about the veracity of his own studies and teachings,” said G. W. History Department said in a brief posted on its website. On Wednesday it was announced that Krug had resigned. (She did not respond to my requests to speak to her. )
It appears that Krug exposed himself to avoid exposure. “I had been following his transformation for a while,” a researcher in Krug’s box told me. The researcher, a junior professor who needed to remain anonymous, met Krug more than ten years ago. “The first time I met her she was talking about ‘us’ and ‘us’,” the young teacher said by phone. “And I was scratching my head, like ‘us’ and ‘us’? And then I found out that he was talking about black. Specifically, ‘Algerian component’: Krug said that she was the daughter of Algerian immigrants in the aspect of her mother and his father was a white man of German descent. “I took him at his word,” said the professor, “but I had some doubts. Krug spoke at the time of trauma as a component of her legacy, describing herself as the product of a rape between her mother and father, and the junior teacher said she didn’t need to invade Krug by lifting him up. Array though she and other friends, all Latino, had doubts about Krug’s claims. The way Krug spoke about the junior professor’s own identity was one component of what aroused her suspicions. “I am middle class. I never tried to be anything else,” he says. “I think he was pressuring me or encouraging me to take a more radical political position. ” Demanding situations have eroded the remaining friend lines between Krug and his fellow Afro-Latinos. “There was a point where we were like, ‘This sucks. “” Still, they were based on a feeling. No evidence, no violation of educational protocol, and no disorder with the Krug scholarship – “I have it intellectually reputed,” said the young teacher – there was nothing to do yet go up a distance. “There was not a wonderful dramatic moment. I quietly broke appointments on all fronts.
Years later, Krug returned to the researchers’ radar when his Facebook friends shared articles Krug had written for RaceBaitr, a pre-race news and criticism platform, and later for Essence. These items, now deleted (although Krug’s paintings appear in September/Essence’s October Print Factor), showed that a replacement had occurred. Krug had left his Algerian roots and had remade, like a chameleon, through Spanish Harlem. “I’m a boricua, just so you know,” he wrote for Essence last year. However, the young student said to me, “I sat quietly with this, for who will I be?”
Krug’s calculation, however, was launched after other G. W. Professor H. G. Carrillo died in April, at the age of 59, of headaches for the new coronavirus. Carrillo, who went through the nickname “Hache” (“H” in Spanish, spelled), was known as a Cuban-American queer writer who captured the remote delight of the Latin American diaspora, especially in his 2004 novel “Loosing My Espanish” Array. However, after reading a triiete to the writer in the Washington Post, Carrillo’s sister and niece contacted the newspaper with up-to-date critical information: Carrillo had not yet been born in Cuba in the United States. – United, in Detroit to be exact. His parents were also born in Michigan and, like Carrillo (born Herman Glenn Carroll), were black Americans with no Latin ancestry. He came here as a surprise to Carrillo’s husband and the literary community, provoking conversations between Afro-Latin writers who had told him among his own.
It was also, the young researcher told me, “a moment of synchronicity. ” On August 26, he sent a text message to two other Afro-Latino researchers after hinting at an imaginable Carrillo-like scenario in his field on Twitter. One of the other people he texted was Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, associate professor of Afro-Diaspora studies at Michigan State University. With a third investigator, Figueroa-Vásquez began investigating Krug’s background and found evidence of his identity once and for all in the obituaries of Krug’s parents. But there was still the question of what to do with the information. “We weren’t going to write a big, flashy letter. We weren’t looking to ruin his life, ”said Figueroa-Vásquez. “In fact, we think, as black Latina women, how can we do this ethically?” They did not intend to touch G. WArray; What they wanted, Figueroa-Vasquez said, was for Krug to “stop lying” and apologize. They contacted other people who knew Krug personally, colleagues in his field, and editors he had worked with to gather more information. But Figueroa-Vásquez suspects that Krug was “warned” through one of those other people. Within 8 days of their initial verbal exchange about Krug (“Black women are smart if not anything else, we’re getting to the bottom of it,” Figueroa-Vásquez joked), the Medium post was online and it was a political frenzy. the media had started.
Jessica Anne Krug grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. His parents, Stuart and Sherry Krug, worked as a grocer and instructor respectively, according to the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle obituaries. Krug attended Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy, a Jewish school located on the outskirts of Overland Park, followed by Barstow School, a preparatory school in the city proper. In 1996, when he was in eighth grade, Krug wrote an op-ed for the Kansas City Star, opposing “attacking white males,” despite his reports of harassment by that demographic. “A few years ago, when I was taking a shortcut through a local country club, I ran into other people who cursed the Jewish star around his neck,” he said. she writes. She attended Portland State University and then earned her doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. She was “passionate about African and African diaspora history,” she told me. she confided to Francisco Scarano, a member of her thesis committee via email, calling her a “voracious reader”. After trips to Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, she said, “it turns out that she comes back with energy through the reports she has had and the other people she has met here. ” However, they never had conversations about their race and people, and Scarano said he was surprised by the news of their forged identities.
“The Blackness of North Africa,” “Blackness Rooted in the United States,” “The Bronx’s Blackness Rooted in the Caribbean,” even white space equals a radical shortcut. During his educational career, Krug knew himself as Algerian, African-American, Black Boricua, vaguely Afro-Latin, vaguely Caribbean; comes from Kansas City, the Bronx and the neighborhood. Krug’s students, interviewed through The Cut, remembered a “very strong accent” and a cold, affected brunette girl. The touch of puts and labels explains little more than the ethnographic tastes of its author However, what unies them is Krug’s affinity for darkness as a tool of authenticity when he made it the academy.
Much of Krug’s politics reduced his tale to this point: The lack of darkness. The comparisons to Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane woman, now known as Nkechi Amare Diallo, who went viral, in 2015, for her own act of minstreling alive, are written. But while Dolezal’s creation relied on a flat sense of American black identity (the Howard University degree, the leadership position at N. A. A. C. P. ), Krug’s transformation from white to black more complicated. The options that Krug has chosen to identify with – North Africa, the West Indies, East Harlem, the Bronx – have fallen prey to a certain American laziness when it comes to analyzing race further. through Jim Crow. It stands to reason that Krug has hidden himself among the intelligent religion of the American humanities, who, again, as a whole, like the country as a whole, have a tendency to be incurable when it comes to the difference between race and ethnicity. mention how one intersects with the other. (Thus, many outlets tend to report Adele’s presentation only in black and white terms. )
Take, for example, the images circulated at a New York City Council hearing held at Zoom in June showing Krug in his Afro-Latino pose. She introduces herself as Jess La Bombalera, a nickname supposedly created by herself, adapted from Bomba, an Afro-Puerto Rican music and dance genre. Broadcasting live on “El Barrio”, and wearing purple sunglasses and a nose ring, she punishes gentrifiers, yells at her “black and brown brothers and sisters” and twice yells “white New Yorkers” for not having surrendered your talk time. What stands out, however, is the way Krug speaks, with a jagged accessory that begins with chunky “Rs” and moves on to what can be more productively described as a gangster from the B movie. He’s there. that preference exceeds experience. However, The Times, in an article about Krug’s exhibition last week, called him a “Latina accomplice,” crediting Krug’s performance. (The word was later removed). The spontaneous scoring is a small example of Krug’s adherence to his entire educational career, through advisers and committee members, editors and colleagues. They failed to recognize the gap not between the genuine and the fake, but between what is thrown away and what is experienced. This inattention was Krug’s escape hatch.
A symptomatic reading of the scene is almost too easy. Krug’s educational studies focus on other homeless people whose identities cannot be reduced to state or tribal ancestry: the other indigenous people have become Africans turned slaves turned fugitives who have forged a new symbol of themselves. right from the start. His 2018 book, “Fugitive Modernities,” focuses on Kisama, a region of present-day Angola whose other people resisted slavery and Portuguese colonialism in the 17th century. It was published through Duke University Press, which is known for its pioneering monographs on the black studies box. Editorial director Gisela Fosado explained in a press blog post that she too had been lied to: on her first contact, Fosado wrote, Krug claimed that her last call was Cruz. Array Fosado added that she wasn’t sure what to do with Krug’s inventory now. exchange, which “has been widely acclaimed and identified as important. ” I am far from Krug’s paintings of period, region and methods, I am not provided to assess the relevance of his studies. I can only say that his writing shows ambivalence about his themes, which would possibly reflect the openness or insecurity of the author. After the publication of the Medium message, excerpts from “Fugitive Modernities” circupast dued on Twitter. Seasoned writers like to joke about the length of the thank you segment in the books through novice authors, who tend to thank everyone they meet, even their kindergarten teachers. But Krug is gentle with thanks and takes on a combative tone. The only user identified through the call is rapper Biggie Smalls; Krug is tempted, she writes, to simply “rock” her comments on her part, “to be wrong about each and every establishment and patron that ever got in my way.
Black studies, a collaborative and multidisciplinary field, is whiter than anyone who has ever been in a room with us can imagine. I’m not talking about white scholars here, although there are many, but the rest of us – combine us as an organization and you’ll have a hard time finding a scholar with a path of permanence darker than the proverbial paper bag. There is a family story that explains the prevalence of confusing other kinder people in America, the legacy of post-war rape, the same story that Krug clung to when he created the myth of his smooth skin presentation, in the ‘use as a club to protect her from those who might take a look at her to delve into the complexities of her history. (According to the young student, in her graduate studies, Krug called herself “tall yella,” a derogatory term for the fairer African-American set. ) But there is another story that explains how someone who looks like Krug can blend in, so to speak: the story of how the gentlest of us have a way of perpetuating her gentleness across generations, valuing her as precious through the establishments in those that evolve. This presents a strange paradox among arguably the most productive researchers positioned to confront white supremacy from within the university: all that fair skin is not incidental to how black studies understand themselves: who is promoted, professionally and ideologically, in the field, and to whom expanded, as Krug has expanded, both benefit from the doubt.
These things are known but rarely identified in such a combined society. However, there would possibly be a replacement in the air. The outcome of Krug’s masquerade began with a kind of network of whispers, as many of those things do. The whisper continues. I know of at least one researcher, known for playing with the color line, who has recently silently replaced his institutional biography. Self-enrollment now specifies “blank”.
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By Doreen St. Felix
By Jelani Cobb
Artist Grace Lynne Haynes describes her procedure of depicting American abolitionist Sojourner Truth’s struggle for greater equality on her first New York cover.
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