"Black" Like Me
To be fair, I do "identify" as Aretha Franklin, and if I have to pick a moment, when she was at Kennedy Center, flinging her fur coat while she serenaded Carole King.

Delish @meancharlotte (Charlotte Allen) piece at Quillette on Jessica Krug, the woman who was passing herself off as various shades of black and tan (black, Puerto Rican, etc.)

On September 9th, Jessica Krug, 38, abruptly resigned from her job as associate professor of African history at George Washington University (GWU). Apparently fearing imminent exposure, she had confessed in a post on Medium that she had passed herself off for more than a decade as being of black-African descent from an ever-shifting range of backgrounds.

In fact Krug is white, Jewish, and from suburban Kansas City. She attended a Jewish day school growing up and then the preppy Barstow School in Kansas City, where 12th-grade tuition is currently more than $22,000. Black scholars with genuine ancestral roots in sub-Saharan Africa were outraged by Krug's "playing with the color line" for career advancement, as Lauren Michele Jackson, an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University, wrote recently for the New Yorker. Indeed, Krug is one of several white women who have recently confessed to adopting false black identities for career reasons, then getting caught.

But the real scandal--not discussed much in the media--wasn't Krug's decade of duplicity. It was the eagerness of the GWU faculty, along with nearly every other academic with whom Krug came into contact year after year, to enable a deception that in hindsight seems almost laughably transparent. (Only after the truth came out did anyone seem to notice that her Puerto-Rican barrio accent as La Bombalera was unconvincing.) Krug traded in crude stereotypes both academic and ethnic--and they were stereotypes that present-day academia, keen to prove its "anti-racist" bona fides and to shower rewards onto anyone who can qualify as "of color," bought into as enthusiastically as any white nationalist forum.

As I noted previously, when you give special consideration to people, not for merit but for mere color and ethnic group, well, suddenly, let's just say there are going to be a number of people seeing the advantage in "discovering" their African "origins."

From Charlotte, check out some of Krug's "scholarship":

In what is surely the book's daffiest footnote, Krug decides that the 17th century warrior-queen Njinga (a national heroine to many present-day Angolans), who called herself a "king" when she led her troops into battle, was transgender--so Krug refers to her by the pronouns "they" and "them." Other presumed genderqueers with unpronounceable ethnic designations pop up here and there: the "palenquerxs" and the "Palmarinxs." The book concludes with a rambling peroration against "neoliberalism" "transnational capital," and law-enforcement brutality in locations ranging from today's Angola to Krug's own South Bronx "block," together with perhaps predictable laments over the deaths of Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro.

...Nonetheless, from graduate school onwards academia showered Krug's verbiage-heavy, thinly buttressed scholarly output not just with a fast-track teaching career but with thousands of research dollars: grants from Wisconsin-Madison and GWU, and also from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the US Education Department, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays cultural exchange program, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

...But Krug was more than simply a mediocre scholar who managed to hoist herself above the other crabs in the PhD barrel by combining postmodernist flimflam with a claim to an ethnic identity that would benefit from obvious racial preferences. (White Africanists have complained since the 1990s that they are at a competitive disadvantage in the academic job market.) She also took advantage of a growing insistence among academics that historians of Africa and its New World diaspora display an "activist" political agenda along with their scholarly chops. The stated aim is to counteract decades of perception of Africa as savage and backward.

...Ms. Krug said in her confession on Medium that "mental health issues" lay behind her adoption of a false black identity for so many years. Perhaps this was so; colleagues, neighbors, and dates described her as perpetually enraged at white people and those who didn't share her anti-white antipathy. Yet whether she was mentally disturbed or simply conniving, one thing is certain: She thrived because the relationship between her and the academic world that bought what she sold wasn't so much perpetrator-and-victim as symbiotic. Jessica Krug might have fleeced academia for a while, but academia was complicit and all too eager to make her what she was--or was not.