When the news broke that another non black woman, Jessica Krug, was impersonating a black woman to increase her affirmative action credit score, I laughed.
As a black man, I found it funny. Like, here is another white woman attempting to sneak her way into black spaces by literally attempting to replicate black faces. The horror. The hilarious. The audacity.
The D’wight womaning.
And when I laughed, I laughed like a rich white man would laugh at a poor white man, asking for change on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. “You’re white. Tf are you doing being poor, my guy?” You know what? I pretty much laughed like the Leo meme from Django. Yeah, that’s how I laughed. It was one of those pompous laughs. One of those laughs that made me look like I spoke with a 1862 Southern white slave owner dialect. “I must say, these white gals are getting mighty rambunctious in the year of our lord and savior, 2020,” I may or may not have said to myself when the news broke.
But then I realized something. This shit ain’t funny.
Why should we laugh at Jessica Krug? Why would I laugh at Jessica Krug? Laughing, even if we are laughing at her, dismisses the harm she’s caused. This woman, who posed herself as an Afro-Latinx educator, was allowed to seamlessly and effortlessly occupy black thought, black academic and black scholarship, just for the purpose of parasitically profiting from Black and Latinx history that is over flowing with pain and hardship.
She invaded sacred spaces the same way a parasite or a virus would do, fooling what’s left of these healthy white blood cells into assuming she was one of them, one of us. But she wasn’t, was she? From what I’ve read with people who’ve had real world experiences with her, they never thought she wasn’t Afro Latina, but they could tell something was off. Just couldn’t put their finger on it. But those are the most successful invaders. Those who seem benign, until they are able to spread it’s infection wide enough, until it’s too late.
And even after her big secret , I bet she will still profit from this. Profit from her deception, because that’s what her white woman privilege affords her. “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 wrote (I would post her write up, but nah, not here to give her more clicks).
Krug further went on to claim in her post that she had no right to claim these identities, stating that “doing so is the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures.” Well, I mean, YEAH.
But even so, how will she remedy the problem? How will she cure the ill she herself caused? By simply admitting? Nah, that’s only diagnosing the illness. To actually cure the illness will take actions white america, including (and ESPECIALLY) her are not willing to take. In her write up, she wrote no solution; no remedy; no cure; no reparation.
Or maybe she will when she inevitably publishes a book to profit from the illness she caused. Sort of like how colonizers display shit they stole in museums, or whatever.
And yeah, Rachel Dolezal is somewhere proud, smiling up from Hades.
