I lived in America for thirty years, and I don’t know what was worse — the pervasive racism, or all these drooling idiots assuring me that America was a post-racial society.

For the last two decades I was there, I made it a point that no matter how grumpy I felt, I would always smile at people of color, queers and freaks, and particularly at mixed couples, who I feel get a particularly bad shake.

And I had a ton of positive experiences as a result. I still remember in the early 90s, I was walking through Spuyten Duyvil, a mostly-white enclave in the Bronx, and I smiled at a well-dressed Black women. She smiled back and said, with a slight southern accent, “You look fine!”

I was having a bad day — actually, it was a bad nine months of unemployment — and that really made my week.