You know…I don’t know the first thing about being black.

I’m whiter than Angel Food Cake and, except for when I lived in a foreign land, have never even lived much around people who are a whole lot darker than Angel Food Cake. My current abode is in a town known for its diversity, and it’s pretty diverse, but white people are still pretty thick on the ground. And even if I were the only white person in all of Prince Georges County, I would still not know about being black.

Because I would still be white, you see.

But here’s what I do know:

Being told who you are, what’s wrong with you and your life and your loved ones and their lives (with the added bonus of unasked for and nationally broadcast advice) by people who clearly have no idea what your life is like is a fucking pain in the ass. I may be White As White Can Be, but I am a woman, and women tend to hear this sort of thing as a matter of course, regardless of color, and so at least I have a little insight into that part of it.

If I had to hear from national leaders that me and mine don’t know how to work, or are forever gobbling up the nation’s food stamp supply, or have too many babies, or let the Democrats abort too many of our babies, or that we are being kept on a political plantation by means of a political party’s wiles and our own native gullibility — when me and mine have an actual history of actual plantations and actual slavery and actual violent control of and sundering of our families — well, I don’t know what I would do. Because I have never had to live with that. Because however enraged I may get with the blatant, noxious, dehumanizing racism that has been pouring out of the mouths of GOP figures like so many sewers over the past few months — it’s never about me.

But I’ll tell you what: It sounds exhausting. And I simply cannot imagine having to face it every day.

Post-racial America, my Angel-Food-Cake ass.

Oh, and happy Black History Month.