There is a symbiotic relationship, surely, between what the academy and the cultural elites expect of black or Latino intellectuals today and how Krug performed. She was able to get into woke publishing circles and to win the praise of privileged students because she gave them what they wanted: a performance of authenticity, a denunciation of whiteness, a marshalling of her identity (in this case a fake identity) to the end of titillating a cultural elite that now loves nothing more than to be told how foul and destructive whiteness and the West have been by people who have apparently experienced their ‘structural oppressions’. Krug played the game; the more important question is: who invented the game?The invention is probably emergent, even with vanguardists of various types urging it along, and its organizing theme is "my transgressiveness is OK, yours is not." It's not going to end well. A bad outcome is more likely, the longer the practitioners of critical race theory (two lies for the price of one) keep racializing practices that confer evolutionary advantages on their adopters. What good does it do to "decolonize" education if students leave grade school without a grasp of counting, or of subject-verb agreement?
Perhaps the Krug episode (which is one of several recent attempts academicians have made to pass as a protected class) will get the gatekeepers of culture studies to act responsibly. Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan found a statement from a Duke University Press editor who is angry. "I have been sickened, angered, and saddened by the many years that she deployed gross racial stereotypes to build her fake identity, and the way that she coupled her lies with a self-righteous policing of racial politics within the Black and Latinx circles that she intruded upon." It's often the case that the most recent converts are the most zealous congregants. More importantly, though, those "gross racial stereotypes" are the very "authenticity" and "transgressiveness" that are OK when carried off by somebody with the right heredity. It's instructive to note how easily that authenticity becomes ... the propaganda of centuries of white supremacy.
There is the personal pain of having someone impersonate your own identity in the most racist way possible, through caricatures and stereotypes. There’s also the shameful sense that, as someone who labored to support her work as her acquisition editor, I helped publish the work of someone who, early in her career, took funding and other opportunities that were earmarked for non-white scholars.Ah, the zero-sum nature of set-asides: affirmative action, or the Klan, are two manifestations of the same error. Where Jim Crow rules, people will attempt to pass as white. Where diversity and inclusion rule, people will attempt to pass as whatever bundle of "as a ..." is currently being funded. And turning a lack of impulse control, or restraint, into a status marker is a good way to lose the argument.
Many of us who promoted her work in one way or another have also struggled in trying to consider the relationship between Krug’s scholarship and her wrongdoing. There are times when a scholar does harm that can be seen as unrelated to their scholarship. In this case, Krug leveraged her deception to enable and promote her work, in ways that are not quantifiable or always specific. As others have pointed out, Krug’s scholarship may not have ever existed without the funding that was inseparable from her two decades of lies.
Stop the particularism. Stop the set-asides. Stop funding the epistemic closure. When success in higher education involves "cultural and linguistic code-switching because of the dominant culture within the university" that's a feature. Higher education is receptive to anyone who adopts the discourse practices and methods of inquiry. If it is not, it will be displaced by other institutional arrangements that do. Thus far, I haven't seen any promising developments along those lines.
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