WASHINGTON, D.C. — A white college professor has resigned less than a week after confessing that she has been masquerading as Black for years.

In an article on the website Medium published on September 3, Jessica Krug, a history professor at George Washington University, wrote, “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.”

“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,” Krug wrote, adding that her backstory changed over the years, from “first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.”

“I have not lived a double life,” she added. “There is no parallel form of my adulthood connected to white people or a white community or an alternative white identity." 

Krug blamed her lies on mental health issues related to trauma she experienced as a child and teen. 

“But mental health issues can never, will never, neither explain nor justify” her actions, Krug wrote. 

Krug said she’s prepared to pay the price for her deceit.

“I should absolutely be cancelled,” she wrote. “No. I don’t write in passive voice, ever, because I believe we must name power. So. You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”

On Wednesday, GWU confirmed in a tweet that Krug had resigned from her position "effective immediately."

The school will also provide counseling services for those who may have been affected by the situation, per an email from Columbian College of Arts and Sciences Dean Paul Wahlbeck.

While Krug's bio on the GW website has been removed, Krug was previously described as “a historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora, with a particular interest in West Central Africa and maroon societies in the early modern period and Black transnational cultural studies." 

Several days before GWU confirmed Krug would no longer be teaching at the institution, the school's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences — the department where Krug taught — recommended that she be removed from her position permanently. 

"The members of the faculty of The George Washington University Department of History are shocked and appalled by Dr. Jessica Krug’s admission on September 3, 2020 that she has lied about her identity for her entire career," a statement on the school's website read. "With what she has termed her “audaciously deceptive” appropriation of an Afro-Caribbean identity, she has betrayed the trust of countless current and former students, fellow scholars of Africana Studies, colleagues in our department and throughout the historical discipline, as well as community activists in New York City and beyond.

"The discipline of history is concerned with truth telling about the past. With her conduct, Dr. Krug has raised questions about the veracity of her own research and teaching. Accordingly, the department calls upon Dr. Krug to resign from her position as associate professor of History at GW. Failing that, the department recommends the rescinding of her tenure and the termination of her appointment," the statement concluded.

The school and Krug's colleagues were not the only ones in the dark about the longtime teacher's double life. According to a report from CNN, Krug's estranged sister-in-law said both she and her husband were "shocked" and "hurt" by the revelation, saying they found out Krug had been lying about her race when they received a call from a reporter. 

"We had no clue, we are shocked right now and hurt. Our name is ruined," Krug's sister-in-law, who did not wish to be identified, told CNN. "It hurts because she slapped everyone in the face, not only her family, she slapped every Black woman in the face."

"There's no way she's Black, I can tell you that, there's no member of the family that is Black," Krug's sister-in-law continued, adding that Krug is not welcome in her brother's home. "Our last name is tarnished, and all my husband and I want to do is cry our eyes out right now. I can only imagine my father-in-law rolling around in his grave."

Krug wrote that she’s laying out a timeline to determine all the people she’s hurt and wants begin working “to restore, to address, to redress.” She also said she knows that won’t be easy.

“I don’t know what to build from here,” she wrote. “I don’t know that it is possible to repair a single relationship I have with another person, living or dead, and I don’t believe I deserve the grace or kindness to do so.

“There are no words in any language to express the depth of my remorse, but then again: there shouldn’t be. Words are never the point,” she continued.

Krug said she wanted to come forward before but “my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics.” She didn’t say what prompted her to speak up now. 

Hari Ziyad, a Black author and screenwriter who said they were friends with Krug up until Thursday, tweeted that the history professor only confessed because “she had been found out.”

Krug’s latest book, “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” was written with financial support from culture institutions such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Guardian reported. 

In the book’s acknowledgments, according to The Guardian, Krug mentions: “My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist. My brother, the fastest, the smartest, the most charming of us all. Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.”

Krug, who told people she was from the Bronx and reportedly had an apartment in Harlem, also went by the name Jess La Bombalera in activist circles. In June, she spoke using that alias via Zoom at a New York City Council meeting about police brutality. In the video, she criticized elected officials who strike the “pose” of criticizing the police while also calling out “all these white New Yorkers who waited for hours with us to be able to speak and then did not yield their time to black and brown indigenous New Yorkers.”

Krug’s admission is reminiscent of the story of Rachel Dolezal, who was an NAACP chapter president and professor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University. Dolezal had been claiming to be partially Black, but in 2015 her parents revealed to reporters that their daughter was actually white.