Krugged

I am guessing that will become a new verb. Anyway, I have refrained from saying anything about the bizarre tale of Jessica Krugman because I didn't think I had anything particularly to add to the discussion. On reflection however, I think I do.

As readers presumably know, this is a historian of European Jewish heritage who grew up in Kansas City, but spent her professional career pretending to be of African heritage. Her scholarly work concerned the African diaspora, and by all accounts I have read it was well regarded. 

There is much about this story that is somewhat puzzling, and also revealing. One of the more disconcerting aspects is how ineptly she performed the fake identity. For one thing it kept shifting. First she was of North African heritage, then Afro-Caribbean, but shifting from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico. Then she got even more specific and had grown up in the Bronx, specifically in the Bronx River Houses. She invented a personal history built out of negative stereotypes. Both her parents were crack addicts, her mother was a sex worker, her brother was killed in gang violence. She adopted a persona she called Jess la Bombalera ("the bombshell") in which guise she testified to the New York City Council using an unclassifiable fake accent (to me it sounded more like Italian than anything else) and a street fighter persona in which every third word was either "fuckin'" or "bullshit." 

As I might have mentioned here at one time or another, for 15 years I was director of research and evaluation for a Latino community based organization that provided public health and community mental health services. Nobody ever once had a problem with me being in that position even though I am not Latino. In fact I benefited profoundly from the opportunity to learn about and come to understand the disparate but entwined histories and cultures of Latin American nations, peoples and cultures. As I learned the Spanish language at the same time, and how it both varies from region to region and among ethnicities, and how the experience of Spanish colonialism along with the language both unifies and divides, my outside perspective gave me a kind of understanding that often surprised people who lived within those cultures. I discovered things they had never really thought about.

While I felt that I was adopted to some extent by the Latino community, it never would have occurred to me in an eternity to pretend to be something I'm not.  (I don't particularly like Latinx, it's unpronounceable and it isn't any form of Spanish, for one thing. I'm not alone in that.) What possible reason would I have to do that? It would just devalue my discoveries and growth, and the good work that I did. 

Having historians who are not of African descent, as well as historians who are, study and write about African and African diaspora history, creates value. When historians, sociologists and anthropologists study and interpret across cultures, our understanding and our discourse are enriched. White Jewish historian Philip Foner, for example, is a prominent scholar of African American history. In fact that is the essential nature of cultural anthropology: people from one culture embedding themselves in another and trying to understand it both from within and without. Obviously African anthropologists can study non-African cultures. (I presume they have but I haven't read much anthropology since college.) A historian of African descent studying European colonialism or slaveholder culture would be a big win. Again, I assume that there are plenty of examples. Anyway there should be.

The perspective of a Jewish historian on the African diaspora seems almost too obviously valid and valuable. Why on earth would one not embrace that? But a part of its value would lie in people knowing that's what it was. Everybody knows that Foner was the child of Jewish immigrants from Russia who grew up in the Lower East Side. Scholars of African heritage certainly do tend to be interested in studying the history and experience of people of African descent, and problems of racism -- also increasingly intersectionality, with an interest in gender and sexuality as well as race. But there are plenty of exceptions.

So again, why she did this is very mysterious, but it was extremely offensive and harmful. What a terrible waste.