Yesterday, an associate professor at George Washington University in the U.S. revealed that she was a white Jewish woman despite building a career on her Black identity (BBC). Jessica Krug’s case is reminiscent of Rachel Dolezal’s, another academic who was revealed to be non-Black despite claiming otherwise in 2015 (The NY Times). In a blog post she allegedly published ahead of public exposure, Krug said that she had claimed “first North American Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness” and had perpetuated the lie in both her professional and personal relationships. Media coverage was quick to make comparisons with Dolezal, however Krug was plain in stating that she had “built [her] life on a violent anti-Black lie”, whereas Dolezal continued to identify as Black (The Guardian).
Krug blamed her behaviour, a deception that spanned decades, on mental health issues and childhood trauma, although she emphasised that her history did not excuse her actions. She addressed her “unaddressed mental health demons” as her reason for assuming a false identity (Medium). Perhaps for this reason, Krug’s blog post brought to mind another woman accused of trauma appropriation: the narrator of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”. The narrator, on a superficial level, equates her personal trauma to the collective suffering of the Jewish people through Holocaust metaphors; in much the same way, both Krug and Dolezal lay claim to the Black experience.
In Sylvia Plath’s famous poem, her narrator writes a letter to “Daddy” (Poetry Foundation). She conceives of the eponymous “Daddy” as a German Nazi, a “man in black with a Meinkampf look” and visualises an engine chuffing her off “like a Jew” to “Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen”. The narrator has begun to talk like a Jew and “may well be a Jew”. The poem’s subject, a fascist patriarch, stands in as the universalised abusive man: he is a “brute”, a “devil”, a Nazi, and his reach so vast that he is “a bag full of God”. The relationship between the narrator and “Daddy” is unquestionably gendered. After all, “[e]very woman adores a Fascist”. The narrator ends up with a “vampire” who said he was her father, before finally freeing herself from the ubiquitous “Daddy” and the “vampire” (“If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two”).
In the poem, the world is a fascist regime run by a gendered God, or “[n]ot God but a swastika/ So black no sky could squeak through”. Women are abused, tortured and murdered subjects, so oppressed by the regime that they can’t even see the sky. The poem is one of Plath’s best known for a reason. In it, she takes on her dead father and her husband Ted Hughes (the “vampire”). Otto Plath, her father, was a German American, and his Wikipedia page states that he is most famous for being the probable subject of “Daddy”, which is certainly a way to be remembered. He also wrote a book called Bumblebees and Their Ways, which is a title of almost ironic innocence considering he was fictionalised as a Nazi.
The Holocaust metaphors in Plath’s poem have been the subject of extreme controversy because Plath was not Jewish. One could argue that she appropriated a collective trauma, and translated historical fact into artistic metaphor in a sleight of hand of shocking insensitivity. On the other hand, “Daddy” is not purely autobiographical. To reduce Plath’s work to solely confessional, quasi-stream-of-consciousness journal entries is patronising and an example of the kind of patriarchal violence she critiques in her poetry. Instead, “Daddy” could be read as Plath’s attempt to take on the brutality that defined the twentieth century and, in many ways, her own life. In the poem, she speaks for the oppressed, the victimised, and the abused. She envisions the ultimate patriarch, who has “a love of the rack and the screw”, with his boot in her face. In the final stanza of the poem, the death of “Daddy” warrants a communal, rather than a private, celebration: ‘There’s a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and stamping on you. / They always knew it was you. / Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” When the narrator murders her father, she also murders the twentieth-century-fascist, that uniquely male manifestation of power that stamped his boot across Europe.
Rather than directly and simplistically equating her personal suffering with genocide, the poem is a letter and a confession to a collective abuser. Like Picasso’s Guernica, which vividly depicts the bombing of Guernica in Spain by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (Encyclopædia Britannica), Plath’s poem is an anti-war manifesto. Like Picasso, she takes on fascism in her own disturbing, haunting, and ultimately murderous way. Both artworks depict a trauma they never witnessed and have no relation to. However, Plath’s poem differs from Picasso’s Guernica in that the narrator explicitly compares herself to “a Jew”. Rather than responding to, or even depicting, a collective trauma, she instead inhabits and allegorises it. Herein lies the problem.
Plath’s non-Jewish narrator identifies as Jewish in the poem and compares her trauma at the hands of abusive male figures in her life to the unspeakable trauma of the Holocaust. The narrator translates her trauma from a personal to a collective language; in fact, she latches onto one of the most extreme collective traumas in history. Even if we take “Daddy” out of a purely confessional space, the poem’s narrative still appropriates trauma. Even if we conceive of the narrative as entirely fictional, it allegorises an untouchable event. Guernica depicts a bombing, whereas “Daddy” explores a specifically racial trauma (see Footnote). In this sense, Plath’s narrator wants to become trans-Jewish in that she moves away from her non-Jewish identity and chooses to identify differently. However, unlike in the case of gender, this is a space that she is definitionally excluded from inhabiting.
My use of the phrase “trans-Jewish” obviously appropriates the experience of transgender people, another marginalised group, in a vicious regression of trauma. It reflects the language used by Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who became famous in 2015 after she announced her resignation as president of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Spokane Chapter in Washington after her racial identity was thrown into doubt (BBC). She has since announced her wish to identify as “trans-black” (NBC News, Daily Mail). In a 2017 lecture she gave in South Africa, Dolezal, along with her host, equated her experience of trans-racialism to the transgender experience of Caitlyn Jenner (Daily Mail). In her memoir, she writes: “Just as a transgender person might be born male but identify as female, I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t but expressing something I already was. I wasn’t passing as Black; I was Black, and there was no going back” (Daily Mail). This sentence is an example of a white, cis-gender woman appropriating both Black and transgender communities. Dolezal outlines the continued struggle of being a white woman trying to taken seriously as a Black woman. The question: why go to all this trouble of trauma appropriation and “trans-racialism”?
In her memoir, Dolezal comments that “Americans, by and large, were racist as fuck”. She notes that throughout American history, some light-skinned black people have “passed” as white in order to benefit from white privilege, however she stridently emphasises that she is “identifying” rather than “passing” as Black (In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World). She discusses the racial injustices and oppression that Black people have suffered in America, but also conceives of herself as a Black woman; rather than benefiting from her inbuilt white privilege, she consciously chose to forego it by presenting as a member of an oppressed minority group. Dolezal gives a number of complex reasons why she has chosen to identify as Black, including growing up around adopted Black siblings and wanting to create a cohesive family unit for them. She has been accused of fetishising centuries of Black suffering and appropriating collective trauma, just as Plath was.
Dolezal’s own parents came under fire for “outing” her (in their own words, BBC). They implied that Dolezal suffered from untreated mental health issues. As part of their public statement about their daughter’s claims to be Black, they produced childhood pictures of her and publicly implored her to address her own “personal identity issues” (BBC). They claimed that their daughter had become “disconnected from reality” by presenting herself as an African American woman, or coming from a biracial or multi-ethnic family, and expressed the wish that she could “receive whatever therapy or counselling she needs” (BBC). Despite Dolezal’s complicated justifications for her self-identification, her parents explained that her “trans-blackness” was evidence of a serious personal crisis.
Yesterday, Jessica Krug established an unequivocally casual relationship between her mental health issues and her appropriative claims to Blackness. She wrote that mental health professionals have assured her that her assumption of a false identity was “a common response to some of the severe trauma that marked [her] early childhood and teen years” (Medium). For Krug, Dolezal and Plath, the connection between trauma appropriation and mental health issues seems undeniable. Plath, of course, famously suffered mental health issues and died by suicide. Is there a link between Sylvia Plath, Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug? Is there a causal relationship between trauma-based mental illness and the appropriation of collective trauma?
What really stands out in Dolezal’s memoir In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World is the abuse she claims to have suffered. Raised by Christian parents, “God’s law required [her] to submit to male authority” (Goodreads). Once she was married, she believed that she needed to “yield” to her husband’s will, “even if that meant burying [her] own thoughts, feelings, and identity”; she also remarks that as a result of her parent’s emotional abuse, she “learned to censor and repress [her]self” and “cried [her]self to sleep nearly every single night during [her] tween and teen years” (Goodreads). She details the specifics of her traumatic experiences, including multiple sexual assaults, and her resultant PTSD diagnosis (NY Post, The Easterner). The emphasis on identity and, more specifically, the repression of identity, emerges as an enduring feature of Dolezal’s abuse, thereby thematically linking her personal trauma and her subsequent appropriation of collective trauma. Mirroring the history of Black people in the United States, she claims to have been attacked for her identity by those in power.
According to Dolezal, “Jesus Christ” was recorded as a witness on her birth certificate (The Easterner). The oppressiveness of religion in Dolezal’s upbringing is reminiscent of Plath’s “bag full of God,” as are her claims of being abused by both father and husband. Also like Plath, Dolezal’s trauma appropriation is expressed in language of pointed detail. Allegedly, the Dolezal parents’ choice of weapon was a baboon whip, which would leave scars behind, “pretty similar to what was used as whips during slavery” (The Easterner). The comparison is Plathian in both its sentiment and specificity; the same way the Gentile narrator of “Daddy” is a victim of the Holocaust, the white Dolezal is a victim of slavery.
Two of Dolezal’s adopted siblings, Izaiah and Ezra, have partly corroborated her story of parental abuse (Slate, BuzzFeed News). Although Ezra acknowledged that the Dolezal parents used corporal punishments, he denied that Rachel or the other siblings were abused (BuzzFeed News). Other sources have backed up the Dolezal siblings’ claims of punishment or abuse, theorising that the “cult-like fundementalism” of their “abusive, extremist family” was the source of Dolezal’s trauma and identity crisis in adulthood (Slate). Rather than focus on her childhood, Ezra chose to emphasise his adopted sister’s history of deception and its origin in her personality: “It’s like what psychologists call self-hating” (BuzzFeed News). In the same interview, he also remarked that Dolezal “made herself into a martyr on purpose for people to feel sorry for her and to help her”. Rather than a conscious fetishisation of Black suffering, Dolezal’s choice to self-identify of Black may be an unconscious expression of a pathological need to express a chosen identity after a childhood of perceived persecution.
In her role as president of the NAACP, and as a self-proclaimed “academic activist” (In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World), Dolezal spoke openly about the oppression of Black people in America. She translated her sense of personal oppression into a collective one, aligning herself with a marginalised and historically persecuted group, thereby validating her trauma on a vast scale whilst inciting the empathy of others. Similarly, Krug garnered recognition for her 2018 book Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom, which focused on the politics and culture of African and African diaspora societies (BBC). The book earned her a spot as a finalist for multiple awards, including ones named after Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. (The Independent). Both women inhabited and profited from faking Blackness.
It goes without saying that Dolezal and Krug are extreme manifestations of white privilege. They assumed the identities of Black women with the option to re-assume their birth identities at anytime, and thereby re-claim the privileges of whiteness in America. When Dolezal quoted the activist Dick Gregory to black talkshow host Loni Love, “White isn’t a race, it’s a state of mind”, the host replied: “I’m black. I can’t be you, I can’t reverse myself. That’s the difference” (The Guardian). The crux of trauma appropriation is that it is a manifestation of privilege, in which a non-oppressed person lays claim to the trauma of an oppressed group, thereby inciting empathy, but can drop the claim at anytime and return to their life of non-oppression. However, the relationship between personal trauma, mental illness and trauma appropriation is so distinct that it is seems reductionist to dismiss Dolezal or Krug as offensive examples of blackface. Yes, their self-presentation is an example of blackface, but that is not all they are doing. The journalist Decca Aitkenhead has wondered “whether Dolezal is locked into a family psychodrama being played out through faith and race” (The Guardian). Of course, this is exactly what Plath’s “Daddy” poem is. In the poem, the family psychodrama stems from the narrator’s relationships to her father and husband, and the drama is “played out” using metaphors of faith (“a bag full of God”) and race (“I may well be a Jew”).
Within the psychodrama of racial appropriation, the Black and Jewish experience becomes a metaphor for personal suffering that can be wielded by white or non-Jewish individuals for gain, be that economic, social or artistic. This transformation is no more or less than a translation of a personal experience into a collective one. However, like Dolezal or Krug’s blackness, it is a transformation that can be reversed. For Krug, her transformation from white Jewish to Black was fully reversed upon contact with mental health professionals. It is evident from her blog post that she is currently involved in the complex re-translation of projected trauma into traumatic reality; Krug’s life really is the “psychodrama” that Aitkenhead once branded Dolezal’s narrative. One can’t help wondering if Dolezal would also try to find her home in whiteness if she sincerely engaged in professional therapeutic processes. Based on her recent memoir, it is unlikely that we will ever find out.
Krug described her assumption of a false identity as “the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures” (Medium). Because Krug firmly grounds her actions in trauma, it is ironic that the violence she admits to enacting on Black culture stemmed from the violence that was enacted on her. What is particularly interesting is her claim: “I have to figure out how to be a person that I don’t believe should exist” (Medium). As a teenager, she fled from place to place, eventually assuming a Black identity and finding shelter in the Black community. It is possible that the “abuse within and alienation from [her] birth family and society” mirrored the marginalisation of African Americans in mainstream white society, causing her to appropriate a Black identity as her own during a trauma-fuelled personal crisis. Clearly “[n]o white person, no non-Black person, has the right to claim proximity to or belonging in a Black community by virtue of abuse, trauma, non-acceptance, and non-belonging in a white community” (Medium). Yet it was not just non-belonging in a white community that caused Krug, or Dolezal, or Plath’s narrator, to flee across the demarcated lines of racial identity: it was non-belonging in a self.
Krug herself emphasised that “[i]ntention never matters more than impact” (Medium) and that there is no excuse for her deception. Exploring the reasons behind her and Dolezal’s extreme blackfishing is not an attempt to exonerate them by any means. By playing out their respective psychodramas on a public stage, both women exposed the identity crises that lie at the heart of their appropriation of Blackness. Like Plath’s narrator being “stuck […] together with glue” after a suicide attempt, Krug and Dolezal responded to abuse by trying to stick themselves together with stolen traumas.
The worlds contained within “Daddy” and Dolezal’s and Krug’s creations overlap with our own. All three fictions are appropriative yet distinctly postmodern, forming a pastiche of trauma in which the multiplicity of perspective that defines the age of information is seized as a valid mode of expression. The three women seize traumas from different narratives and stick them in with their own. Not only do they appropriate racial, cultural and religious traumas, but they transform them into static symbols, severed from the actual people that experienced them. Within their constructed worlds, the Holocaust and the slave trade are accessible, depersonalised stand-ins for unapproachable personal traumas. As mentally ill individuals, Plath, Dolezal and Krug deserve our empathy, but as three white women whose personal crises became entangled in the collective traumas of other groups, they deserve our condemnation.
Footnote
My use of the word “racial” here is clearly an oversimplification. Judaism comprises both racial, ethical and religious identities. It’s been argued that [a]lthough Jews usually, but not always, share a common gene pool, they are not a race because any non-Jew who converts to Judaism will be recognized as being Jewish by all those rabbis who share a commitment to the same denomination of Judaism as the rabbi who did the conversion”. Instead, the Jewish people could be considered “a transnational mobile nation; what Russian Communists used to call ‘unrooted cosmopolitans’” (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/what-are-jews-a-nation-a-religion-a-culture-or-a-race/ The Times of Israel). As a non-Jewish person, it is not my place to work towards a definition of Judaism, however I appreciate that my language in the article presents only one side of a complex identity.
Further Reading:
