The statement on the George Washington University Twitter account was dry: "We are aware of Jessica Krug's post and are looking at the situation. We are not allowed to comment on personal matters."
What happened?
By publishing a blog post on the Medium platform, the assistant professor in the history department, Jessica A. Krug, caused great excitement around the university, which was founded in the US capital Washington in 1821 - and far beyond.
In her blog post entitled "The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies," Krug admits that she grew up as a Jewish child in a suburb of Kansas City.
For practically her entire adult life, she assumed different identities in which being black was central - first as a North African, then as a black woman with US roots, and finally as a Bronx with a Caribbean background.
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Students at George Washington University (archive image)
Photo: The Washington Post / Getty Images
In her text, Jessica A. Krug calls herself a coward several times. She has often thought about ending her lies, but: "My cowardice was always stronger than my ethics".
By way of explanation, she points to mental health problems and childhood trauma.
But this is neither a justification nor an excuse.
She believes in responsibility, the historian continues, and she believes in cancel culture as a necessary and just tool that those with less structural power should use against the more powerful.
Krug's consequence: "You should cancel me, absolutely, and I cancel myself."
On the George Washington University website, Jessica A. Krug gives, among other things, the history of politics, ideas and cultural practice in Africa and the African diaspora.
Her first book publication, "Fugitive Modernities", which was published in 2018 by Duke University Press, also falls into this category.
The non-fiction book was well received by experts and was nominated for two science book awards.
In a preliminary remark to the book (here a reading excerpt) she writes that it is a "love letter" to those who could not read, to their ancestors, "unknown and without a name", and to the people whose names do not know " in my barrio, in Angola or in Brazil ".
The case of the assistant professor is reminiscent of the events surrounding Rachel Dolezal.
The civil rights activist had appeared black for years, even though she was born white.
In 2015, her parents exposed her lie about African American roots.
At that time the problem of "passing" had been discussed extensively in the USA - originally mostly a practice with which fair-skinned African Americans presented themselves as white in order to escape the disadvantages they were and are exposed to as blacks.
The opposite path, as followed by Dolezal and now also by Krug, is seen as morally more problematic, at least as long as there is racism.
Eventually, people like her could "return" to their more privileged identities.
Jessica Krug's friends and companions are correspondingly shaken, some express themselves on social media.
Several admit that they had suspected that something was wrong with their "black" identity.
But above all, they feel betrayed.
The TV writer Hari Ziyad claims in a tweet that Krug did not reveal himself in her blog post, but that she was "caught".
The case is particularly curious because Jessica Krug, apparently under her "salsa name" (according to the "New York Times") Jess La Bombalera, attended a video conference hearing of the New York City Council on police violence at the demonstrations after the death of George Floyd.
On a video clip "Jess La Bombalera" can be heard with an alternating strong Latina accent, how she railed about the treatment of "black and brown New Yorkers".
In her blog post, Jessica Krug writes that as a traumatized teenager, she could have simply fled to another place.
Now there is no such place: "I have ended the life that I had no right to live from the start."
Outside of that she has no identity, she has never developed one.
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