US professor who pretended to be Black quits job

WASHINGTON

Jessica Krug, a white George Washington University professor who pretended to be Black for years, has resigned from her post, the university said Wednesday.

Krug "has resigned her position, effective immediately," the university said on Twitter. "Her classes for this semester will be taught by other faculty members, and students in those courses will receive additional information this week."

In a post last week on the blogging platform Medium, the history professor admitted to faking a Black identity and that she is actually a white Jewish woman from Kansas City.

“To an escalating degree over my adult life, 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,” she said in the post.

"Mental health issues can never, will never, neither explain nor justify, neither condone nor excuse, that, in spite of knowing and regularly critiquing any and every non-Black person who appropriates from Black people, my false identity was crafted entirely from the fabric of Black lives," she wrote.

Krug has yet to speak publicly, and the university appears to have taken down her biography.