When I saw the headlines that Jessica Krug aka ‘Jess La Bombalera,’ an esteemed professor of history at George Washington University, was in fact a white woman who had posed as an Afro-Latina woman for her entire career—I was not surprised at all. 

I am a pretty active Facebook user. I have a wide variety of friends, both personal and colleagues in media and academics. I enjoy a friendly debate here and there on political issues, hip-hop, or sports. It’s rare that I remember a Facebook argument but there was one that always stuck with me. 

In 2016 Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” As a long-time fan of his, I was pretty happy about this. When acclaimed author Kiese Leymon posted on Facebook that Dylan did not deserve the prize, I posted a comment disagreeing with him, touting Dylan’s long history of social commentary and dedication to the civil rights movement.

Out of the blue, I was verbally attacked by someone with a peculiar Facebook name: Jess La Bombalera. She claimed that Dylan was “an old irrelevant white man” who had nothing to do with the modern-day protests in the streets. She told me that the kids protesting in the streets weren’t playing Dylan but Future and Migos, who were more relevant to the protests. She said that the Nobel Prize should have gone to a woman of color. 

I tried to defend Dylan by pointing out that he had made songs like “Blowing In The Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” that directly relate to the situation today, and that Dylan had addressed police brutality and racial profiling on his song “Hurricane.”

Jess La Bombalera took this as an opportunity to attack me personally. I wasn’t a “real revolutionary person of color” if I respected an old irrelevant white man like Bob Dylan. I told her my background—that my father was a Black man from Jamaica, that my mother was a white anti-apartheid activist from South Africa. She then attributed my respect for Dylan to my whiteness and questioned my white mother’s motives fighting apartheid in South Africa.  

She went on to try to out-Black me by telling me how many Black Lives Matter protests she had attended. She asked me how many protests I had taken part in. When I told her “none”—that I was a journalist and author who wrote the book “Inside the CIA’s Secret War in Jamaica” and wrote protest music—she trashed my book and music as being irrelevant. 

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It’s not often that I check a person’s page during a disagreement on Facebook, but I had to find out who this person was. Who had the audacity to question my Blackness?

Jess La Bombalera had some sort of revolutionary symbol as her profile picture. I’d never met a Latina woman who was called Jess. They would usually go by Jessica. I’d also never heard of any Latinos calling themselves ‘La Bombalera’—it seemed like a wrestling name that an upper-class white girl from Scarsdale would use. 

On her page, I found out Jess La Bombalera’s real name: Jessica Krug. I saw a picture where she looked like a white Jewish woman with a tan. As a biracial man with many biracial friends, I have a good eye for identifying my biracial brothers and sisters. She wasn’t one of them.

When I Googled her last name ‘Krug,’ I didn’t find any ‘Afro-Latinas’ but Ashkenazi Jews. The picture, the last name, and her overcompensating for Blackness let me know one thing. This woman was not Black. Not Latina, not even biracial. This was a full-fledged white woman.

I called her out on it and told her she wasn’t a person of color. She claimed that she was 100% Afro-Latina and derided me for being half-white. At this point Kiese Leymons threatened to delete the thread over fear of a racial identity war. 

Not only had I been attacked by Jessica Krug for being a sellout for liking Bob Dylan, but a group of other people had chimed in to defend her and attack me. It seemed like Krug had some influence on prominent Black and Latinx academics. Here she is testifying to NYC City Council in July 2020 in full, glorious Ebonics.

After that, I would see Krug post a lot of anti-white content on people’s posts in the Black academic community. I wouldn’t interact with her in fear of being bullied by her and her online followers. 

Still, I would be baited into debating her once again—this time defending a Pulitzer Prize winner. When acclaimed author Junot Díaz was accused of sexual misconduct, Krug was one of his most vocal critics.

I saw Krug bashing Díaz on several pages of our mutual friends as a rapist and sexist. Díaz had been accused of kissing author Zinzi Clemmons without solicitation. Díaz denied kissing her, yet Krug used this allegation to deride Diaz as a rapist.   

I agree that unsolicited touching is a terrible thing, but I thought that Díaz was getting lumped in with sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby for misreading signals. I believe the situation should have been transformed into a teachable moment about unwanted touching and nonverbal signals—not a cancellation of one the few voices of the Latino-American community that speaks up for the poor and disenfranchised. 

When I defended Diaz, Krug attacked me for being sexist, defending a rapist (Díaz was never accused of rape), and being just as bad as the ‘white male patriarchy.’ When I said that Díaz did a lot for the Latino community through donating time and literature, she told me that his work was sexist, did not represent the Latino community, and like Bob Dylan with the Nobel, did not deserve the Pulitzer Prize. 

Now the world knows what I have known all along. On September 3, Jessica Krug wrote a Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.” She revealed she had been posing as an Afro-Latina Black woman her entire life, disguising her true identity as a wealthy suburban Jewish white woman from Kansas City. Furthermore, her Medium post doesn’t seem to be the result of a guilty conscience, but rather an attempt to ‘get ahead’ of the story after several university students began questioning her Blackness.

Krug didn’t just antagonize me. Since her admission, countless stories have surfaced of her screaming “white trash” at joggers, stealing her white neighbors’ packages and then trying to goad them into calling the police—no doubt for more ‘oppression points’ and maybe a viral video—and threatening to “stomp” on a tiny black poodle. One student on RateMyProfessors said that "If you ask her the history about WWII, Nazi Germany, Cold War, or something like those, she will only answer you the history about the Caribbeans and Africa."

It gets worse. A video recently surfaced of Krug at a Columbia University panel (the full video has been removed by Columbia, although an edit remains online here) romanticizing the brutal machete murder of 15-year-old Lesandro ‘Junior’ Guzman-Feliz. Even though Guzman’s death at the hands of gang members was a case of mistaken identity, Krug seems to justify his death due to his involvement in the NYPD Explorers—a youth program I’ve seen up close in the Bronx that helps Black and brown kids avoid gangs and trouble.

“[Junior] was an Explorer, which is a program that the NYPD has to bring youth in to eventually work for them,” Krug said. “When people talk about ‘snitches get stitches’...that kind of violence towards people who are collaborating or working against their communities, we have to consider a radical moment in 2018 in which people are using machetes to hack apart a 15-year-old boy who’s working with the police.”

Krug continued: “The loss of innocence is the story we mourn, and it’s so much more difficult to understand what kind of freedom we could achieve by being willing to confront those who are working against the interests of the community.” Applause.

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No wonder Krug was so triggered by Bob Dylan. Perhaps her white mother played him in her house a lot and in order to reject her whiteness and become Black, she had to disown Dylan. To show how pro-Latina she was, she had to lead the Facebook charge to cancel Junot Díaz. In order to show her Blackness, she had to diminish mine. 

Fuck Jessica Krug. She is a piece of shit who used a fake Black identity to shit on other Black people and question their identity when she knew she was a complete fraud. 

I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m just disappointed in my Black academic colleagues for accepting someone who was so obviously fraudulent for such a long time. They must be held accountable too—was her self-hating anti-white talk the only prerequisite to being accepted as a Black intellectual?

Krug’s 2018 book Fugitive Modernities was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman book prizes. She wrote for Essence. She was a tenured professor. The truly terrifying thing is that Jessica Krug had real influence on the way Black and Latino people think.

To me, Krug is way worse than Rachel Dolezal. Krug not only pretended to be Black, but purposefully caused tension between Blacks and whites—trying to get Black people to hate white people as much as she did, when she really just hated herself.

So fuck Jessica Krug and everybody like her. Krug owes me an apology, she owes Junot Díaz an apology, and she owes Bob Dylan an apology.

Follow Casey Gane-McCalla on Twitter.