Free Republic

The goal of the Essence Affinity Community is to provide a living experience focused on supporting students and allies who self-identify within the Black diaspora. Offered based on direct requests/feedback and in partnership with students of color, Essence allows students to feel comfortable to be their authentic selves. Essence is about developing the essence of who you are and not being defined only by the construct of race.

A George Washington University professor admitted in a Thursday blog post that she has for years been falsely claiming to be Black, when she is in fact White and Jewish. Jessica A. Krug, who teaches Black history at GWU, made the startling admission in a blog post on Medium titled, “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.” “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,...

George Washington University is looking into a confession by a professor of Africana studies and history that she has been pretending to be Black. Jessica Krug admits she was born a white, Jewish girl from Kansas City, not the Black Latina from the inner city she claimed to be in her books. Krug, whose work has been up for prestigious Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass book prizes, is now calling herself a culture “leech.” Critics say the author and associate professor made the admission not to clear her conscience but because she was found out. In a blog post, Krug...

Essence Magazine tweeted in memoriam of the late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) Friday, but included a picture of Rep. John Lewis (D., Ga.). "#RIP Rep. Elijah Cummings 🙏," the African-American women's magazine wrote in a now-deleted tweet that included a picture of the very much alive Lewis. https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-25-at-11.42.41-AM.png Getty's caption of the image says, "Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., is seen near the statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Capitol Rotunda before a memorial service for the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., in Statuary Hall on Thursday, October 24, 2019." In an earlier tweet, the magazine noted...

A conservative is not, by definition, a selfish or a stupid person; instead, he is a person who believes there is something in our life worth saving. Conservatism, indeed, is a word with an old and honorable meaning—but a meaning almost forgotten by Americans until recent years. Abraham Lincoln wished to be known as a conservative. “What is conservatism?” he said. “Is it not preference for the old and tried, over the new and untried?” It is that; and it is also a body of ethical and social beliefs. The word “liberalism,” however, has been in favor among us for...

Having grown up in the midst of many intelligent, down-home and courageous black women, I was appalled for 20 years by the silence of the women who were being demeaned and turned into sex toys so consistently in the worst hip-hop imagery. Where were the descendants of those black women who gave so much of the heat to the civil rights movement and made so many sacrifices for it? Why didn't anyone have the moxie, in the spirit of Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer, to take on the $1.5 billion rap industry? Perhaps because, in our culture at this...

  A Universal Mistake One of the most important of Ayn Rand's contributions to the field of epistemology is contained in the seventh chapter of her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology entitled, "The Cognitive Role of Concepts." In it she explains how the world we are conscious of is comprised of an infinite complexity of existents, events, and relationships and why it is not possible for us to comprehend this complexity simply by perceiving it. To understand it, we must "break it up," into manageable pieces we can identify and understand. This, Ayn Rand explains, is the role of concepts."The essence...