"A White professor says she has been pretending to be Black for her entire professional career"

(CNN)A professor of African and Latin American studies who portrayed herself as Black has now revealed she has been lying.

Jessica A. Krug, an associate professor at George Washington University, has written extensively about Africa, Latin America, the diaspora and identity, all while claiming her own Black and Latina heritage. But in an article published on Medium.com on Thursday, Krug revealed the truth: She is White.

"To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness," she wrote.

Krug acknowledged in her post that she had no right to claim these identities, saying that "doing so is 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."