Jessica Krug, the white college professor who pretended to be black, once said some of her “earliest memories in life were of police brutality,” video shows.
“How did I get into this? I had no choice, really,” Krug said at a 2017 event at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she spoke about her role in Harlem CopWatch, a group that films incidents of police brutality, according to a YouTube video of the speech.
“Growing up, there’s no escape from police violence. I was trying to think about this earlier this week, some of my earliest memories in life are of police brutality,” said the George Washington University educator, who grew up as a well-off white Jewish kid in Kansas City — and only admitted to her years-long race charade Thursday, allegedly under threat of being outed.
“I remember one summer when I was about 5 walking from the park with my brother who was about 12 at the time right and having the police throw him down on the ground, right, 12-year-old boy, walking his sister home from the park. So that’s been my whole life,” Krug, now 38, said at the event, titled “Bearing Witness as Protest with AFROPUNK and Harlem Stage.”
Krug then tried to act as if she was in New York City during the infamous police killing of 23-year-old Amadou Diallo in The Bronx by four plainclothes police officers in February 1999. At the time, she was actually a senior at the Barstow School in Kansas City.
“When I was a little bit older, but not too much, they shot Amadou Diallo around the corner from my home, right,” Krug claimed to the audience.
“For those of you who weren’t in New York City at the time or might not remember, it was a man who was shot 41 times, 41 times, by undercovers, right. They later found that the first bullet killed him, right, entered his chest, shredded his aorta, there were bullet holes in the bottom of his feet,” Krug said while standing beside two actual black women.
“There’s a particular kind of choreography to the ways in which we’re slaughtered.”
Krug has become the 2020 version of Rachel Dolezal after publishing a viral Medium post confessing she’d been pretending to be black for years, claiming an identity and a struggle that were never hers to adopt.
Krug is an associate professor of history at George Washington.
Dolezal, a white NAACP leader from Washington, was exposed in 2015 for pretending to be black.