The editorial director who helped bogus-black college professor Jessica Krug publish a book said she is “sickened, angered, and saddened” by the years of being lied to — and is donating proceeds from the book to cheated non-white scholars.
Gisela Fosado, the editorial director at Duke University Press, said Thursday she now feels guilty about helping the disgraced former African history professor publish her book, “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom.”
In a blog on her company’s website, Fosado said she needed time for “processing” Krug’s “decades-long fraudulent and hurtful appropriation of a Black and Latinx identity” — and how she abused “funding and opportunities that were earmarked for non-white scholars.”
“I have been sickened, angered, and saddened by the many years that she deployed gross racial stereotypes to build her fake identity, and the way that she coupled her lies with a self-righteous policing of racial politics within the Black and Latinx circles that she intruded upon,” Fosado wrote in a post on her company’s website.
From the beginning of their relationship, Krug told Fosado that her surname was pronounced “Cruz” — claiming it was a “transcription mistake” when her “grandparents came to this country from the Caribbean,” the editorial director wrote.
“She also repeated other details that I now know to be false about her identity and her past,” she said of the professor who this week quit her job at George Washington University amid the firestorm over her confession that she is white.
That admission left everyone who worked with her “grappling with several layers of anger and hurt,” Fosado wrote.
“There is the personal pain of having someone impersonate your own identity in the most racist way possible, through caricatures and stereotypes,” she wrote.
“There’s also the shameful sense that, as someone who labored to support her work as her acquisition editor, I helped publish the work of someone who, early in her career, took funding and other opportunities that were earmarked for non-white scholars,” she said.
“Krug’s scholarship may not have ever existed without the funding that was inseparable from her two decades of lies.”
Krug’s book “did not generate a profit” and its “expenses were more than its revenues,” Fosado said.
“Despite that, Duke University Press is committed to moving all proceeds from the book to a fund that will support the work of Black and Latinx scholars,” the editorial director announced.