In it, sherevealed she is white, Jewish and raised in Kansas City.
Krug has written many academic books and essays related to African American culture. Photo / Duke University via Facebook
"For the better part of my adult life, every move I've made, every relationship I've formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies," she wrote.
"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."
Describing herself as a "culture leech" and a "coward" Krug acknowledged that it would be unlikely she could repair any relationships.
"I have thought about ending these lies many times over many years, but my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics.
"I know right from wrong. I know history. I know power. I am a coward. There is no ignorance, no innocence, nothing to claim, nothing to defend. I have moved wrong in every way for years.
"You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.
"I have built my life on a violent anti-black lie, and I have lied in every breath I have taken.
"I have not lived a double life. There is no parallel form of my adulthood connected to white people or a white community or an alternative white identity. I have lived this lie, fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy.
Krug has been teaching at George Washington University since 2012. Photo / Youtube
"I have built only this life, a life within which I have operated with a radical sense of ethics, of right and wrong, and with rage, rooted in black power, an ideology which every person should support, but to which I have no possible claim as my own." Krug said in the blog post she battled "unaddressed mental health demons" her entire life and that she first assumed a false identity as a child.
"When I was a teenager fleeing trauma, I could just run away to a new place and become a new person. But this isn't trauma that anyone imposed on me, this is harm that I have enacted onto so many others. There is nowhere to run. I have ended the life I had no right to live in the first place," she said.
"No white person, no non-black person, has the right to claim proximity to or belonging in a black community by virtue of abuse, trauma, non-acceptance, and non-belonging in a white community. The abuse within and alienation from my birth family and society are no one's burden but my own, and mine alone to address.
"Black people and black communities have no obligation to harbour the refuse of non-black societies. I have done this. I know it is wrong and I have done this anyway." Since the confession, Krug has faced a lot of criticism on Twitter by several African American scholars with whom she had contact during her career.
Jess Krug, professor at @GWtweets, is someone I called a friend up until this morning when she gave me a call admitting to everything written here. She didn't do it out of benevolence. She did it because she had been found out.https://t.co/kSNkVUzbtM
