Whether Native American hoaxer BethAnn McLaughlin or African American hoaxer Jessica Krug, one universal law seems to pertain to those who, in order to give themselves advantages in life, pretend for years to be suffering minorities rather than privileged white people: Once onlookers finally figure out you’re a fraud, it’s killing fields time. Gotta saturate-bomb that fucker pronto.
Which is why Krug’s logorrheic lie-fest reads like a burlesque suicide note: On the one hand, she’s gotta go hard on the I wanna die I deserve to die thing, in hopes of generating sympathy for her guilt embarrassment anguish desperation etc. On the other, she’s gotta signal that she’s (in her own words) authentically cancelling herself – I mean now, totally, for real! I’ve got the pills in my hand!!
Only…
Maybe I’m sitting a tad short of actual suicide.
This is where – like so many criminals – Krug pushes the Mental Health button. I might not be a suffering black woman, but I’m for damn sure a suffering dissociative identity disorder victim. You wouldn’t want me to kill myself when modern psychiatry can save me from the twisted effects of my conveniently dead parents.
The problem people like Krug are up against is obvious: The reason so many people do variants of what she’s done is that it’s highly rational, self-advantaging behavior: The possession of a black identity in the academy (and in the arts, and in a few other professions) represents a profound advantage at every step of one’s career. It’s a narrow advantage, to be sure – as Michelle Obama recently pointed out, you can be a wildly advantaged black woman and still encounter racist disdain the live-long day – but a very important and real one. It will almost certainly take you places. There’s nothing nuts about grasping that fact and acting on it.
The other advantage – about which acquaintances who had occasion to observe Krug have spoken – is bullying self-righteousness. The sadists among us get off on constantly and unflinchingly walloping the people around them for their racism, lack of wokeness, white privilege, etc.
By “people around them” I don’t mean actual racists running around carrying flags on the streets of our cities. I mean the well-meaning liberal sorts who are the actual people that tend to be around the sadists. I mean Steven Pinker.
People who behave in these ways – appropriating a suffering identity in order to promote their career and indulge their sadism – are so blatantly repellent that we really must ask why, in the case of Krug, they thrive as long as they do. Her triumphal run lasted around twenty years. What the fuck are we missing that we allow people like Krug to rampage through our institutions – not to mention through our hearts and our souls?
Well, UD‘s GW is going to have to grapple with that one. Krug is deeply damaging an already compromised university — her story has been all over the global media for the last two days, and it has made GW an object of ridicule. You’re supposed to protect your school from frauds.
And by the way. GW students knew she was a fraud. Scan her Rate My Professors page.
September 4th, 2020 at 12:22PM
I don’t see anything on this RMP page that indicates that students knew she was a fraud. Plenty of them say she’s an incoherent rambler with a too-narrow interpretation of “World History,” but I don’t see anything saying she’s not who she claims to be. In fact, the few positive reviews she has come from people praising her non-“Eurocentrism” and encouraging “students of color” to take her course.
Also, I love this lady. All these people. They make academia so much more fun, and provide the useful periodic reminder that we are nowhere near as good at identifying excellence and moral goodness in others as we think.
September 4th, 2020 at 1:08PM
If a jerk like Jerry Falwell, Jr, or Senior for that matter, can pretend to be Christian, then a Midwest Jewish woman can pretend she’s African American.
Hell, I pretended to be sober for several years of my life. That until San Francisco’s finest caught up to my scam…
September 4th, 2020 at 1:08PM
Wonderful to see your name, Rita!
I should have elaborated. By “fraud” here I meant teaching fraud. Let me be more precise.
First of all, the few positive reviews La Bombalera receives are one of two types: The type you mention, which is simply the politically correct/appreciative thing of being happy a non-Eurocentric person with piercings all over her face is in front of the class. How pathetically ironic that is. What these students had is a Jew who attended Conservative schools and synagogues. Does it get more Eurocentric than that?
The other type – vacuously cheerleading – is, I’m afraid, liable to have been written by Krug herself, or associates of hers.
How insensitive of me to assume this!
No. How remarkable it would be of Krug to think that, having been outed as someone who lies on every conceivable occasion, and certainly on occasions pertinent to her career success, the rest of us would NOT assume she’s engineered a RMP lie! I mean, look at her other ratings. Brutal. Something would have to be done.
And as to GW students having outed her as a TEACHING fraud: Years of reading RMP comments have taught me that pedagogically lazy, inept, indifferent, narrow, defensive professors almost always teach the same way and yield similar critiques. Their students note that their courses are easy A’s. Insultingly easy A’s. They note that they learn nothing – that if the prof condescends to lecture at all, it will be on her very narrow scholarly interests and the students can fuck themselves. Students will note that the professor is often hopelessly disorganized in structuring the class (what is the paper supposed to be about? what are the grading standards?), incoherent, touchy, and even rude in responding to student questions, and rarely in her office during her office hours. All of these things were mentioned in La Bombalera’s RMP. WHY universities refuse to take RMP seriously when a prof’s results are this bad is beyond me. If GW had, the school might have been spared universal ridicule.
September 4th, 2020 at 3:28PM
Ah, I see what you’re saying. Well, she definitely does seem to be a terrible teacher from these comments, but I’d think her internal or “official” student evals would be similarly negative, and would be seen and considered by her chairs and deans. It just suggests that GW didn’t care how bad her teaching was, which is not *that* unusual, is it?
What if this is just an extreme and crazy version of dissociation from whiteness that will become much more common? This woman surely isn’t black, but the categories are a lot less stable than you imply here. Blackness is more restricted, but not-whiteness is open to flexibility. For example, UD, we Jews are not Europeans. We are Semites. We’re really more like Middle Eastern, ergo brown(ish), ergo NOT white. And Italians? Actually long-lost North Africans. Greeks? Really a lot more like Turks than Englishmen when you think about it, aren’t they? Russians? Europe itself denies their Europeanness. Maybe at first, there will be resistance against accepting these weaselly new self-descriptions, but we tend to give way before intense insistence about personal identification even when the insisted-upon identification seems to be totally implausible on the surface. Maybe Jessica Krug is a just a foretaste of the future?
September 4th, 2020 at 3:31PM
Whether the favorable reviews were actually posted by the professor or obtained in the Best Chicago Way might not be the main point, UD.
That she’s either getting praised for deviating from the course outline (I guess the term of art these days is decolonizing the subject) or getting lit up for dragging in her narrow interests is the key.
I believe it was Matt “Dean Dad” Reed who noted that, selection biases in Rate My Professors notwithstanding, if a few angry themes show up regularly, it’s something worth pointing to. Might be something for faculty members still active in university governance to suggest to administration.
September 4th, 2020 at 3:42PM
Rita: LOL.
First on the bad teaching – yes, the real scandal is that GW must have had plenty of very bad internal teaching evaluations for Krug, but as you and I know universities don’t care about bad teaching. (Some colleges care.) Krug had publications, and that’s all that matters.
On the disappearance of whiteness – yes – as I follow this inexhaustibly fun story, the phrase Bill Clinton was our first black president keeps coming to mind. Your description of an overwhelmingly … unstable world of races made me think of the terrible luck Jessica’s NYC neighbor had (see this account) to be Swedish. Because you must admit that by the time we travel as far north as Scandinavia we really have to think in terms of actual whiteness… no?
September 4th, 2020 at 4:08PM
Maybe! But ironically, of all Europeans, the Scandinavians are probably the least to blame for the alleged sins of whiteness. But sure, let ’em take the fall for it. Revenge for foisting Ikea on the world, I guess.