Many are asking themselves how #JessicaKrug managed to fool anyone into believing she was Afro Latina. Well, let me tell you: we were both fellows at the Schomburg and I suppose she fooled me. (a thread 🧵)
I mean, I don't feel hurt or betrayed in this moment because the truth is I always knew something was off with her, but I thought the pathologies she displayed were the product of systemic violence, and not of her twisted racial fantasies...
See, not only did she try to "pass" (we need a better term here - masquerade?) as Latina from "El Barrio" but she also told us her parents were addicts and even said that there were overdoses and suicide attempts happening during the fellowship period.
She always dressed/acted inappropriately—she'd show up to a 10am scholars' seminar dressed for a salsa club etc—but was so over the top strident and "woker-than-though" that I felt like I was trafficking in respectability politics when I cringed at her MINSTREL SHOW.
In that sense, she did gaslight us. Not only into thinking she was a WOC but also into thinking we were somehow both politically and intellectually inferior.
While claiming to be a child of addicts from the hood, she boasted about speaking numerous languages, reading ancient texts, and mastering disciplinary methods—while questioning the work of real WOC doing transformative interdisciplinary work that she PANNED.
She consistently trashed WOC and questioned their scholarship. She even described my colleague Marisa Fuentes as a "slave catcher" in the introduction to her book. Kind of amazing how white supremacy means she even thought she was better at being a person of color than we were.
That pathology remains evident in her mea culpa article. Somehow she manages to remain ultra woke and strident, still on her political moral high horse, caling for white scholars to be cancelled --in this instance her own white self.
She says she doesn't know what accountability looks like—well, clearly, she needs to quit her job (a job that if I am not mistaken was a diversity hire) since no scholar can be respected when they engage in this kind of fraud.
Second, she needs to start a fellowship fund for afro latina scholars, and fund it with at least as much money as she obtained through her lies.
Third, she needs to stop with the Dolezal-splaining about how wrong her actions and philosophizing about her punishment. I'm not investing a single drop of energy punishing her— esp not in the middle of a pandemic. Instead, I will recommit to radical self/community care. #bye
