Watch Who You Elevate

By Marc W. Polite

Greetings, everyone. Well, 2020 is certainly looking to be the year of lessons, isn’t it? Today, news broke that is affecting the activist community- and many people are discussing it.

Jessica Krug, a white woman who pretended to be Black has confessed today in a Medium post about the years of pretending that yielded an illustrious academic career.

This is a Rachel Dolezal situation all over again. There’s room for condemnation, no doubt. But, let’s analyze this for a moment.

With the popularity of anti-racist scholarship being all the rage, we have to ask how many Black scholars were edged out, to make room for Krug and those like her? While she was able to parlay this act of racial cosplay into a whole career, how many Black scholars don’t get half a chance at that, based on their contributions?

When activism and scholarship become another lane to get a bag, it leaves room for grifters and pretenders.

Especially in the context of the real social issues that we are all facing at this moment, it looks like collectively, we’ll have to be more careful about who we elevate.

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