Jessica Krug

Jessica Anne Krug is an American historian, author, and activist (sometimes using the "salsa" pseudonym Jess La Bombalera).
She is the author of several works relating to African American history and Latin America, and was a tenured associate professor of history at George Washington University (GWU) (2012–2020) until scrutiny from colleagues led her to admit her assumed racial and ethnic identities were falsified, forcing her resignation.
Her works include Colombian, Brazilian, and West African histories "Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom," about the Quiçama people at home in Angola and within diaspora, especially in Brazil. The book was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize. According to Krug, her principal focus has been in advocacies on behalf of people of color as well as in anti-gentrification activism. She has published essays in "Essence" and at the race-exploring website RaceBaitR.
Krug took financial support from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture that led to her book, "Fugitive Modernities". In 2009, she was awarded a $45,000 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship.
In a September 3, 2020 blog post, Krug confessed that: "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." These identities included that of being half-Algerian-American and half-German-American and of being a Bronx-bred Afro-"boricua" (Afro-Puerto Rican) who went by the self-described "salsa" name of "La Bombalera". Krug's resignation from GWU shortly followed her confession.
Early years and personal life.
Krug – who pronounces her surname "Cruz" ( or , or —in General American) – grew up in a Jewish family in Overland Park, Kansas, in the Kansas City metropolitan area. She graduated from The Barstow School, a co-ed private college prep school in south Kansas City. She later attended the University of Kansas as a white woman. In her September 2020 blog post, Krug said she had "been battling some unaddressed mental health demons for my entire life" and, to escape from unspecified emotional "issues" and "severe trauma", began passing as a light-skinned person of color in her youth.
Krug, who taught university classes in the Washington D.C. area, is known to have an apartment in East Harlem in New York City. According to Krug, she has been a part-time dance instructor.
Works.
"Fugitive Modernities".
In Krug's book, "Fugitive Modernities", she engages in a "rigorous examination of identity formation" of Kisama, a mountainous region in Angola that became a destination for those fleeing the slave trade in the late 16th century. Krug's intellectual history of Kisama was "impressive in its breadth of research" and gave scholars different ways of thinking about how Africans influenced Black people elsewhere around the world. It was also the first history of the Kisama region. Krug argued that "Kisama allows us to imagine a more humane and less brutalized form of interpersonal relationship in which the structures erected by states to constrain us are overcome in favor of shared liberation."
Publications.
Books
Journal article & book chapters
Academic scandal.
Discrepancies among racial claims over time.
Prior to Krug's 2020 admission in the essay, one junior scholar noticed that ethnicities and racial groups of which Krug claimed had changed from being part-Algerian–part-German to Afro-Puerto Rican. Word of this discrepancy reached Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, an associate professor of Afro-diaspora studies at Michigan State University, who, upon researching the matter, discovered that Krug was from Kansas City and born to parents who were white.
Aftermath.
Hari Ziyad, the editor-in-chief of RaceBaitr, a website where Krug had published articles, said she had only come forward with the revelation of her racial deceptions because they had been discovered by others and was about to be made public against her wishes. "She didn't do it out of benevolence," they said. "She did it because she had been found out." Similarly, Michigan State University assistant professor Yomaira C. Figueroa believed that pending public revelations of Krug's true racial identity prompted her confession.
George Washington University spokesperson Crystal Nosal said in emails to news organizations that the university was "aware of the post" and "looking into the situation". GWU's department of history asked Krug to resign her tenured professorship, saying that "With her conduct, Dr. Krug has raised questions about the veracity of her own research and teaching." GWU cancelled her classes after the scandal. On September 9, 2020, GWU confirmed that Krug had resigned from the university.
Assistant professor of global diaspora studies at Michigan State University Yomaira Figueroa, believing that Krug "took up some of the very few — very few — resources and spaces that there are available to Black and Latino scholars and use those to her advantage," said to a reporter that she calls for there "to be a form of restitution for the things that she [Krug] took. It's egregious."
Duke University Press, the publisher of Krug's "Fugitive Modernities", said that all proceeds from her book will be donated to a fund that will assist Black and Latinx scholars.
Commentary.
Michigan State University's Yomaira Figueroa and Hunter College's Yarimar Bonilla, writing in an op-ed, labeled Krug's various cultural appropriations a current form of minstrelsy. Figueroa told reporters, "The very first night that I learned about it, I couldn't sleep, because I just thought how awful it was that someone was perpetrating this identity, but not only that. Kind of preying on the white imagination, and pulling from some of the worst stereotypes that there are about black people and Puerto Rican people, and using that as a cloak for her identity" (referring to revelations that Krug had falsely claimed that her parents had been drug addicts and her mother a sex worker).
Illinois State University's Touré F. Reed believes that Krug did not appropriate legitimate black culture but rather, within a "minstrel act", its "racist caricature."
Welcome2theBronx journalist Ed García Conde wrote that Krug was once a salsa teacher of a friend, and that he had once seen her dancing salsa at a festival in East Harlem with a Puerto Rican flag hanging from her shorts. Garcia Conde is of the view that Krug's identification of herself as Afro Latina led her to gain grants and opportunities, thus denying them from others. "How many grants and opportunities did she steal by passing as such? How many other "real" Afro Latinas missed out on a crucial opportunity to advance their careers because of this vulture appropriating a culture that is not hers?"
Doctoral candidate Lisa Betty of Fordham University wrote in a blogpost, "Krug took up space, opportunity, time, and money. I call for reparations."