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In an absurdist confessional set piece, George Washington University professor Jessica Krug came clean about a long-running scam that lay at the foundation of her career: The scholar, who had claimed an Afro-Latina identity rooted in the Bronx, is actually a white woman hailing from the suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri. Krug likely announced this shocking news under threat of exposure from her GWU colleagues rather than as any sort of principled act of conscience. In any event, the ploy didn’t salvage her position—she resigned her post late last week. 

As with the notorious case of Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who leveraged a fabricated Black identity into a local leadership post with the NAACP, Krug’s case invites all sorts of speculation about deeper psychological motivations and the sometimes ghoulishly performative nature of identity-mongering in the American academic-cum-activist world. But as New Republic staff writer Nick Martin notes, fixating on the pathological nature of a story like Krug’s bypasses a much larger and more discomfiting truth: The business model of white theft and identity appropriation is inextricably bound up with the history of the modern American university. Institutions of higher learning express both a culture’s professed ideals and its prevailing disparities of power and opportunity, and that was especially true of a U.S. university system founded on slave labor and allied presumptions of white superiority:

The University of North Carolina, the oldest public college in the nation, was, much like many universities in the South, built with the labor of enslaved Black people. So, too, were prestigious Ivy League institutions, like Brown, while presidents at Princeton and Columbia and countless others owned slaves through the Civil War. As Massachusetts Institution of Technology history professor Craig Steven Wilder wrote in his 2013 book on the subject, “The academy never stood apart from American slavery. In fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.”

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From this self-conscious posture of cultural dominance, white American scholars produced rationales for white supremacy and new disciplines of racist pseudoscience across many generations. What’s more, Martin notes, the colonial-minded cast of academic life in America stretched into actual material and physical conquest. Enterprising white academics

sought to retrieve every physical ounce of … varied and unique cultures and communities, for the sake of proprietary knowledge and profit. This is how both modern museums and land-grant universities came to be. Signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the Morrill Act, not so dissimilar from Harvard’s Indian College, was a money-making affair, with the stated desire of “turning land taken from tribal nations into seed money for higher education,” as High Country News wrote earlier this year. When the dust settled, 11 million acres had been, often violently and illegally, wrested from Indigenous nations and placed under the management of university endowment funds. To date, the land transfer has netted these endowments at least a half-billion dollars.

As the land was distributed, the universities sought to take also what accompanied these spaces, namely the remains and cultural items that the displaced Indigenous peoples had stewarded and protected until this stage of colonization. Under the guise of fields such as archaeology or anthropology, white professors at these schools scoured Indian Country, digging up remains that had been respectfully buried for thousands of years. As explained in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory in an article on the shifting ethics of reburial and repatriation, by the middle of the nineteenth century, “the majority of Euro-Americans thought Native Americans incapable of becoming civilized.”

This sobering past supplies the broader backdrop of social power that individual racial hucksters like Jessica Krug are able to exploit for their own twisted personal ends. Rather than obsessively lurid details of their minstrelsy acts, Martin writes, we’re far better served by asking just “why people of this ilk all seek validation and cover through the academy—and why the academy always provides it.”

—Chris Lehmann, editor