Reminiscent of the Rachael Dolezal controversy, where a purported African-American Spokane, Wash. NAACP president was subsequently exposed as White, this week a professor of African and Latin American studies that had portrayed herself as Black revealed herself as White. Jessica A. Krug, in an article published in Medium.com on Thursday, revealed her life was "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.'
While attempts to apologize by calling herself a "culture leech," at first blush seems touching and even heartfelt, such apologies are woefully insufficient. Cultural appropriation is far from new. Indeed, pop-stars, politicians, and other celebrity icons too often implement it. Such identity theft is insulting and simply unforgivable. What is also troubling to critical race scholars like myself is how often scholars and others in society question and attack a basic premise of CRT work: that race is socially constructed. Despite the attacks, which likely will come in the comments to my musings here, history, and legal history in particular, is replete with such examples. In the context of citizenship and immigration law, for instance, one of my areas of focus, the work of Ian Haney Lopez in White By Law brilliantly documents how our society has used such constructions to punish some and reward others.
In modern contexts, we have witnessed everything from presidential candidates claim minority status to Grammy winners effectively steal minority attributes and associations in order to make themselves more appealing. As a scholar that has attempted to document and bring attention to the lack of Latinas and Latinos in the legal academy, I find such appropriation outrageous.
Dolezal' and Krug's story make me wonder how many others undertake such false identities. And in perhaps a more controversial stance, I also wonder how many claim such status for solely hiring and promotion?
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