In case you were wondering what misdeeds could theoretically cause an aggressively woke tenured college professor to lose her job, we now have an answer: pretending to be black. Jessica Krug, formerly respected professor in the George Washington University history department, is today herself history, after writing a now-famous Medium post in which she proclaimed, “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself” while confessing faking blackness for years. Krug, who specialized in Africana, now allows that she is white and Jewish and hails from the Miracle Whip–white suburbs of Kansas City. Photos suggest Krug was darkening her skin tone, curling her hair, wearing African-style cloth, and even sporting a nose ring. Previously she had posed as a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, during which period she apparently gave her name to police as “Jessica Kruz” and went so far as to claim she had been a salsa teacher. Observers say she danced like a white lady.

It’s easy to make fun of such pigment fabulists as Krug, former NAACP Spokane head Rachel Dolezal, and Shaun King, a suspiciously pale self-identified black activist whose detractors have dubbed him “Talcum X,” “Hueless P. Newton,” and “Martin Luther Cream” on Twitter. But the phenomenon goes both ways: Coming from the other direction are pigment-phobics such as Diana Ross, Beyoncé, Rihanna, and even Sammy Sosa. Black and white people are dying to switch places. Call it the “Sneetchification of America.”

If you haven’t spent many evenings reading stories to a toddler lately, allow me to refresh your memory. In Dr. Seuss’s 1961 story “The Sneetches,” a society of chubby yellow birds divide themselves into a ruling class, the star-bellied Sneetches, and an underclass, those without stars. A huckster named Sylvester McMonkey McBean comes to town promising that he’ll lift up the woebegone blank-bellied birds by putting them through a machine that stamps stars on their tummies. So all of the blank-bellied Sneetches line up to give McBean their money and emerge from the machine with the status signifier. But when everyone has a starred belly, the former ruling class of Sneetches is enraged about losing its class privilege. When McBean tells them he has a star-removal machine, they give McBean their money to have the stars removed from their bellies. In the ensuing confusion, Sneetches race madly in and out of McBean’s machines getting stars either added to or subtracted from their bellies, “until neither the plain nor the star-bellies knew / Whether this one was that one, . . . or that one was this one, /or which one was what one, . . . / or what one was who.”

McBean gets rich and everyone feels like a sucker, but they learn their lesson in the end.

In 2020, we’re still in the dashing-through-McBean’s-machine phase. The reverse-Krug is in vogue among black people who resemble photographic negatives of their former selves, perhaps via skin-lightening creams. I’m not talking about the situation Philip Roth explored in The Human Stain, in which a light-skinned black professor from the Greatest Generation named “Coleman Silk” passes as a white Jewish man for his entire adult life to sidestep prejudice; to “take the future into his own hands rather than to leave it to an unenlightened society to determine his fate,” as Roth wrote. I’m talking about black people who are hugely successful as black people, and yet are so attracted to whiteness that they look as though burglars broke in while they were sleeping and stole all their melanin. Black celebrities such as Lil’ Kim and Nicki Minaj exhibit much lighter skin tones than each had when she was a young adult. Rihanna’s epidermis is so pallid she looks like her own ghost. Former Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa is as pale as Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining. Beyoncé once did a Black Panther Super Bowl cosplay dance while sporting a skin color three shades lighter than at the outset of her career: the Tan Panther.

Meanwhile NBA players dress like parodies of white people (“Amish bookworm” was one wag’s assessment of a getup modeled by LeBron James), complete with nonprescription Clark Kent nerd specs (“I see better without them,” confessed superstar Russell Westbrook of the glasses he wore to postgame interviews). Some traced the nerd-chic look to Steve Urkel, an endearingly goofy black kid on the Nineties sitcom Family Matters who was . . . a walking stereotype of nerdy white people. (And was played by the actor Jaleel White; the stats guru and sportswriter Bill James once noted that in baseball, nearly all of the guys named “Black” were white, but practically all of the ones named “White” were black.) A leading hip-hop clothing brand is Tommy Hilfiger, who built his line around advertisements taking place in a fantasy WASP world suggesting an endless Connecticut of the mind, characterized by sailing, lacrosse, and floppy-haired guys named “Chad.” The Queens rap duo Mobb Deep extolled the brand in “Drink Away the Pain (Situations)”: “Tommy Hil was my n***er, and others couldn’t figure / How me and Hilfiger used to move through with vigor.” So: A black rapper calls a white guy “my n***er” — and everyone understands this to be the highest of praise.

White people adopt blackness, black people adopt whiteness. Ever since Snoop Dogg wore a rugby shirt on SNL in 1994, who can even say what signifies blackness or whiteness anymore? If race-based animosity is indeed America’s primary crisis, I’d say we’re moving through it with vigor. What I see much more of is race-based aspiration. Black women get their hair straightened; white women get their hair kinked. White kids listen to hip-hop and adopt black vernacular, and you wouldn’t believe how many black youths are into Barry Manilow. Okay, you wouldn’t believe it because it’s probably not true. Yet.