42 2GM Saturday September 5 2020 | the times
Wo r l d
Writing about demonstrations in Puer-
to Rico last summer, Jessica Krug, an
associate professor at George Washing-
ton University, accused those leading
the protests of being imposters.
Beneath her essay, a biography said
the author was “an unrepentant and
unreformed child of the ’hood” who
was perpetually involved in “the strug-
gle for her community in El Barrio”, in
Harlem, New York. She had also por-
trayed herself as African-American
and was a respected historian of coloni-
alism and the African diaspora who as-
sailed white supremacy in all its forms.
Dr Krug has now offered a correc-
tion. She is not from East Harlem. She
is actually white and Jewish, and grew
up in a suburb of Kansas City.
“To an escalating degree over my
adult life, I have eschewed my lived ex-
Will Pavia New York had been found out. For years he had
defended her from those who felt “she
wasn’t black enough”, he wrote. He
apologised “to all the black people I
allowed her to say and do wild shit to
because they weren’t from New
York or from ‘the ’hood’ as she
claimed to be.”
He had often thought
there was something “off”
about her, he wrote, includ-
ing “her clearly inexpert
salsa dancing” and “her aw-
ful New York accent”.
Akissi Britton, an assistant
professor of Africana Stud-
ies at Rutgers University,
said: “So many times she
accused me of not being
black enough in terms of
my politics. She would
point to her difficult
childhood to question
President Trump raised the stakes in
his law-and-order election battle with
Joe Biden by accusing his Democratic
rival of “appeasing domestic terrorists”
and praising US marshals who killed a
left-wing activist suspected of shooting
dead a right-wing protester.
Four officers fired on Michael Rein-
oehl, 48, as he tried to flee arrest for kill-
ing Aaron Danielson, 39, a supporter of
Mr Trump and a member of the Patriot
Prayer group. Portland,Oregon, where
Mr Danielson was killed, was braced for
further unrest this weekend as it
prepared to mark 100 consecutive days
since protests erupted after the death of
George Floyd.
Mr Reinoehl’s death coincided with
the release of a video interview in
which he claimed to have fired the first
shots of a civil war as the US summer of
protest took another dramatic turn.
Mr Trump, 74, hammered home his
message at a rally when he said that Mr
Biden “wants to surrender your nation
to the radical left-wing mob” and
“refuses to condemn Antifa”, a loose
group of activists the president blames
for much of the street violence.
He repeated his attack at a White
House press briefing yesterday, alleging
that “[Mr Biden’s] plan to appease
domestic terrorists is the exact opposite
of what I am doing — you saw that last
night. US marshals... took down the
Antifa member who murdered a man in
the middle of the street in Portland...
So I really want to thank them for their
strength and bravery.”
After a week in which the president
made political weather against a back-
drop of street disorder in several US
cities, Mr Biden, 77, accused him of
being “deplorable” over his reported
comments about dead US troops being
“losers” and “suckers”.
“I just think it is sick. It is deplorable.
It is so un-American. It is so unpatriot-
ic,” Mr Biden said after a speech in his
home city of Wilmington, Delaware,
that marked an attempt to shift the
national conversation back onto Mr
Trump’s handling of the coronavirus
and the economy.
Mr Biden said Mr Trump was “not fit
to do the job of commander-in-chief” if
Trump says Biden is appeasing
his reported remarks on troops were
true. “If these statements are true the
president should humbly apologise...
who the heck does he think he is?”
Mr Biden said that Mr Trump’s fail-
ure to act on reports that Russia put
bounties on US troops in Afghanistan
and his dismissal of brain injuries to sol-
diers in Iraq as “headaches” showed “he
has no sense of service, no loyalty to
any cause other than himself”.
The president’s campaign was boost-
ed when the 355,000-strong Fraternal
Order of Police, the biggest police
union in the US, endorsed him for
re-election. Patrick Yoes, its head, said
it was “proud to endorse a candidate
who calls for law and order”.
It outdid a press release by the Biden
campaign saying that “more than 190
law enforcement officials across the
nation” endorsed him. Their list includ-
ed many elected Democratic attor-
neys-general and sheriffs.
Mr Reinoehl died after trying to runand allegedly pulling a weapon on US
marshals and FBI agents who had
tracked him to the town of Lacey in
Washington state, south of Seattle.
He had recorded an interview for
Vice News claiming to have acted in
self-defence in shooting Mr Danielson,
who died on a Portland street last Sat-
urday after being shot in the chest.
“I had no choice. I mean, I, I had no
choice,” Mr Reinoehl said. “I could have
sat there and watched them kill a friend
of mine of colour. But I wasn’t going to
do that.”
He added: “Honestly, I hate to say it,
but I see a civil war right around the cor-
ner. That shot felt like the beginning of
a war.”
He said he had gone into hiding and
moved his children to a safe place
because shots were fired into his house
after the incident.
“They’re out hunting me,” he said.
“There’s nightly posts of the hunt and
where they’re going to be hunting.They made a post saying the deer are
going to feel lucky this year because it’s
open season on Michael right now.”
Mr Trump denied a report in The
Atlantic magazine that he avoided a trip
to a First World War US cemetery in
2018 because he did not want his hair to
get wet in the rain or view “losers”
buried there.
The magazine also claimed that on
the same visit to France Mr Trump
referred to 1,800 marines who died at
Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting
killed.
It further alleged that the president
has demanded that amputees not be
included in military parades because
“nobody wants to see that”.
It added that on Memorial Day in
2017 Mr Trump accompanied John
Kelly, his former chief of staff, to the
grave at Arlington cemetery of his 29-
year-old son Robert, who was killed in
Afghanistan. The president allegedly
said to Mr Kelly: “I don’t get it. What
was in it for them?”
Mr Trump described the article as
“totally false” while Mr Kelly refused to
comment. The president added: “And
to think that I would make statements
negative to our military and our fallen
heroes when nobody’s done what I’ve
done with the budgets, with the mili-
tary budgets, with getting pay raises for
our military. It’s a disgraceful situation
by a magazine that’s a terrible maga-
zine. I don’t read it. I just heard about it.
They made it up.”
The president peppered his 90-min-
ute address in Latrobe, Pennsylvania,
with jibes at Mr Biden for being “late” to
visit Kenosha, a scene of recent unrest,
“weak” as a senator and in the pocket of
both China and left-wing radicals.
To get around restrictions on tradi-
tional indoor gatherings Mr Trump has
established a new approach of inviting
supporters to events at regional air-
ports with Air Force One, the presiden-
tial plane, used as a backdrop.
“Did you ever see a man that likes a
mask as much as him?” Mr Trump
asked, to laughter, after urging his audi-
ence to “wear your masks, wash your
hands, all of those things” with the
Labor Day long weekend coming up.
Mr Trump said that a vaccine for
coronavirus would be available before
the end of the year.United States
David Charter Washington
‘Black’ professor admits that she is really white and Jewish
perience as a white Jewish child in sub-
urban Kansas City under various
assumed identities within a blackness I
had no right to claim,” she wrote in a
blog post.
She had not been living a
double life, she said. “I have
lived this lie fully, com-
pletely, with no exit plan
or strategy.”
George Washington
University said it was
“looking into the situation”.
Dr Krug’s fellow writers
and scholars were less reti-
cent. She “is someone I called
a friend up until this morn-
ing”, the author Hari Ziyad
said on Twitter. He said she
had confessed because shemy middle-class black upbringing.”
Yomaira Figueroa, an associate pro-
fessor at Michigan State University,
said Dr Krug’s claims about her back-
ground had been subjected to scrutiny
by several black Latina scholars.
“There was no witch-hunt but there
was a need to draw the line,” she said on
Twitter. “Krug got ahead of the story
because she was caught.”
Dr Figueroa added: “She made a liv-
ing & a whole life out of parroting black
Rican trauma and survival... The other
thing is that, let historians tell it, her
work is actually good. Chick is smart —
so why lie?”
In Kansas City, relatives of Dr Krug
told local television that they were not
aware of any trauma she had suffered:
she had attended a Jewish school and
then an elite private high school. They
said she had stopped communicating
with her family years ago.Macron lauds
A British expatriate hostile to Brexit
was honoured by President Macron
yesterday at a solemn event to mark the
150th anniversary of the modern
French republic.
Mr Macron addressed Matthew
Ridealgh, 59, a telecoms executive
originally from Ilford in Essex, first
among five people chosen to receive
French citizenship at the ceremony in
the Pantheon, the “temple” of the
French nation on the Left Bank.
“Matthew, Noura, Patricia, Cather-
ine, Rana, it is for you today to take up
the flame and to give life to the republi-
can promise in these times of squalls,”
the president said in a lyrical speech on
the values of the French nation.
The choice of a Briton at the head of
the naturalisation ceremony was a nodFrance
Charles Bremner Paris
Supporters of President Trump cheer as he arrives in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. He
Jessica Krug: “I lived this
lie fully with no exit plan”Michael Reinoehl
warned of “a new
civil war” hours
before he was
killed by police