Sep
6
A Racist Critique of Jessica Krug
“Unacknowledged privilege is still privilege.” — Michael Harriot, columnist and self-described “World-renowned wypipologist”
Jessica Krug is an author, professor, and “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora,” who has written for various academic journals and other publications. She has been described as an uber-militant activist against racism and gentrification. She is also, as she was recently forced to confess, a white Jewish woman from Kansas who has been living and working as a Black (or Black Rican) person for many years. Sound familiar?
I found this out via an article at The Root. (The Root is an African American-oriented online magazine with the tagline: “The Blacker the Content the Sweeter the Truth”.) My interest in bringing this up is as much (or more) in regards to what the writer of the article, Michael Harriot, said and implied, as it is about Krug herself.
I don’t blame those in the Black and Latinx communities for being angry with Krug. She pretended to be of a culture and people that she wasn’t and capitalized on the fraud to build her career. Yet, Harriot insists that he isn’t angry about it. He just pities her because she’s white. He begins by saying,
“I admit that I don’t know how to feel about this story… because I am a human being… because I am Black.”
Continuing a little further down, he shrugs…
“[T]his is what white women do. White women were aiding and abetting the strongarm plundering of Black America for more years than I have fingers to count.”
OK, well, lest there be any doubt what worldview of history, race, etc., that he’s coming from, that’s a pretty good indication right there.
“I know I am supposed to be mad. I should probably call her a “Karen” who benefitted from colorism and her whiteness at the very least. When Krug writes that she has “not lived a double life,” she apparently doesn’t count the fact that she was fortunate enough to benefit from everything whiteness offered, including constructing a life founded on the education system that only offers an ejector seat for many of the same Black women she cosplayed. I’m sure the fact that she pretended to have African roots played no part in her receiving a professorship teaching African history. There’s no way of knowing if actual Black people applied for the job.”
Harriot may not be angry, per se, but it sure sounds like he’s at least a bit annoyed.
By the way, while he gently berates Krug for not acknowledging her white privilege, he misses the “best” part. Ironically, she got jobs and grants because she was (supposedly) not white! In other words, it was her non-white persona that allowed her to build her career as a respected — though, not well-liked by her students — professor and writer. So, apparently her white privilege allowed her to take advantage of brown privilege. Doubly diabolical!
““There is no parallel form of my adulthood connected to white people or a white community or an alternative white identity,” Krug explains, apparently unaware of how her white womanhood may have given her the inherent confidence needed to flimflam the whole world. It’s like saying: “The fact that I was born and raised in a den of thieves has nothing to do with the fact that I am one of the greatest burglars of all time.””
Given what Harriot has already expressed, you know that that particular analogy was no accident. Also, he may as well just call her a “white she-devil” and be done with it.
“Even though I am fully aware that she probably paid for her mental health care with the dividends from her cultural theft, I cannot be mad at Krug’s invisible con artistry.”
Yes, he can and should be. The “con artistry” was wrong, regardless of her true ethnicity, her supposed reasons for doing it, or whether or not it directly affected him. (It occurs to me that some people of a particular persuasion would get upset with me, a white man, telling a Black man how he should feel. Or, something like that. But, before the world went crazy, we used to call that simply giving an opinion or unsolicited advice, and one’s race had little-if-anything to do with it.)
Harriot explains that he is “unangered” and forgiving of Krug’s fraud “[b]ecause I am Black and Jessica is not…. I pity this woman.” When giving examples of the benefits of growing up Black that Krug supposedly never experienced, he includes “perfectly-sweetened Kool-Aid” and “split[ting] a piece of watermelon with a favorite cousin,” as if white people don’t drink Kool-Aid or eat watermelon. (Someone must have implanted those memories in my mind, then.) Is he actually resorting to racial stereotypes, here? He also mentions a mother’s bosom “smell[ing] of cocoa butter and Holy Ghost.” What the…? Is this a metaphor, or an odd memory as seen (and smelled) by a child?
“Her version of Blackness is a caricature of triangular trade leftovers and white-knuckled fist-clenching from which she fashioned her flimsy costume. Her Blackness was an impressionist oil painting of a plastic fruit bowl. It was not real, just plain and blood and sneering.”
Sure knows how to turn a phrase, eh? He says more here, but it includes a certain N-word that I am not allowed to even quote, lest I be pilloried as a racist.
“The reason why Jess’ antics didn’t upset me is that I am a human being. Because I am Black. Because I don’t care.
I truly believe that the sum of all white fears lies in the belief that we will one day return the neck-noosing, the face-shooting, the resource-hogging and all the other oppression white people have conjured up over the years. This is the basis of their fearmongering and resistance to equality.
However, they don’t understand that Black people collectively have one gift above all else.
Why don’t we know how to tie nooses? How come we don’t want to reciprocate their pillaging with plundering? Why haven’t we grabbed our own machetes and returned the spilling of throat blood? The answer is this:
Because we are not like them.”
Don’t know how to tie nooses? Surely this is hyperbole. Black people never pillage & plunder or spill blood in anger? Riiiiight! Is he totally ignorant of the rioting, looting, vandalism, arson, and killing being done by Blacks (and others) now in the name of BLM and supposedly getting justice for wrongful deaths of select Black people? Does that not ring a bell?
Harriot continues…
“And they can never ever be like us.
All the bamboozling and costuming cannot replicate Blackness. The surgeons cannot inject it into her lips and no choreographer can teach it to her hips. To be Black is a beautifully glorious un-mimicable thing that feels like writing the perfect cursive letter ‘S’ while riding on your grandaddy’s back on Christmas morning.
Mad?
Why would anyone be mad?
Jessica is a white woman.
You cannot wish worse upon her than that.”
Wow. I mean, he’s right about that first part, though his racial pride borders on the extreme. But that last bit? Just, wow.
If a white columnist said that there is nothing worse than being a Black woman (in similar tone and context), I gay-ron-tee you there would immediately be accusations of “RACIST!!” But, of course, in the playbook used by Harriot and those likeminded, he can’t be racist, ‘cuz he is a member of an oppressed minority. And the Leftist/Marxist, CRT culture (e.g., The Root and its more typical readers) not only let him get away with such bigotry, they applaud it.
