The first rule of tanning is to pretend you didn’t spend hours tanning.

Earlier this year, a senior Trump administration official told The New York Times that the president’s famous tan was owed to “good genes” — not, as former aides have claimed, a result of hours spent begoggled in a tanning bed.

I know his orange skin is a beloved joke. But I promise you he takes it seriously, just like the millions of people who spend their time and money soaking up ultraviolet rays.

Tanning is a popular ritual. It’s a relatively inexpensive way for fair-skinned people to look sexy and healthy. A person born with dark skin can see those benefits as well, but also, they get the cops called on them for hanging out in a coffee shop too long. When you hear the term “white privilege,” what you have to understand is one of the privileges is the ability to change your skin color and suffer no loss of status.

The anonymous White House official clearly wanted it known that his boss is not a vain man who fusses over his appearance. Only Hollywood swells worry about their wrinkles. No, the president’s glow is natural. The man was born attractive and healthy; he can’t help but look sun-kissed. He has good genes — the best — the kind that turns a 72-year-old white man golden.

I tan pretty well, so I must have good genes, too. An hour in the summer sun and I’m lightly toasted. But I don’t seek out rays. I love a dark, cold movie theater on a hot summer day. I wear hats and slather myself in sunscreen and make sure my skin stays marshmallow white. I was told as a kid to stay out of the sun by my mother. If I was meant to be brown, she reasoned, God would have made me look like her, or her side of the family. I’m a piñata: white on the outside, Mexican on the inside.

Tanning is sort of like benign racial tourism.

Tanning oil was invented near the end of the 1920s. Previously, the rich prized flesh white like marble. But then, suddenly, it became fashionable to look like you spent your days leisurely lying about in the sun, stretched out like a cat on a sprawling Long Island estate.

I imagine, back then, there were plenty of white people who tanned during the day and then, later, wore blackface for a laugh at a party. Not that I’m directly comparing tanning with blackface. I mean, it’s not apples and oranges. More like apples and avocados? Distant cousins? Blackface is a form of mockery and triumph, a costume that tells a specific American story: We can wear the skin of our property and make merry. Tanning is sort of like benign racial tourism.

For a few months, a pale person can look in the mirror and make-believe they’re from some faraway exotic land. A face like caramel until winter. Or until skin cancer.

I grew up ashamed that part of my family was brown. That was the color of housekeepers and dishwashers and drug dealers. I wanted to bake by the side of the pool with my friends, whose parents looked the way lawyers looked on TV. Instead, I would tan.

My mother was always mystified by the white women who would eyeball her suspiciously while we shopped at the mall, but would spend so much time and money cooking themselves until they turned the color of the people they loved to scapegoat. But, to my memory, she never dwelt on those people. In a way, she didn’t want me to tan because she wanted me to be proud of being white. It was that simple. Let me tell you: Being white has plenty of upsides. I remember being drunk in my early 30s and lighting up a cigarette on a subway platform. The cop who busted me apologized profusely as he wrote me a ticket; he then waited with me for my train.

There is an entire segment of the population that refuses to believe that white privilege exists. I am not one of them.

These same people are also very proud that their ancestors invented America. That’s correct. They simultaneously think they aren’t special and are the most special. I can’t think of any better evidence of white privilege than being allowed to think you own every side of every argument.

I’ll point out, too, that white privilege knows no political affiliation.

For instance, a few months ago a New York Times crossword included the racial insult “beaner” as the answer to the question “Pitch to the head, informally.” At the time, I knew this was a slur. I always thought it was an amusing one because it kind of suggests Latinos produce beans from their bodies, the way the Easter Bunny lays eggs. The crossword editor offered what I thought was a weak apology that ended with the following quote: “I had [n]ever heard the slur before — and I don’t know anyone who would use it. Maybe we live in rarefied circles.”

He doesn’t, of course. Trust me. I’m a racial Trojan Horse, and I have smiled while my enlightened white friends, good liberals, speak in broken Spanglish while chugging margaritas. I have even played along because I’m white and a human being and I’m sometimes afraid we’re all doomed by biology to quack along with the rest of the flock. We want to belong so badly that we oftentimes aren’t careful about who we join.

I prefer my racists to hate loudly so they can’t sneak up on me. It’s the nice ones, the educated and sophisticated ones, who say the right things and retweet the right links that you have to worry about. I’m no better. I sometimes feel I have twice the hate in me. There have been moments in my life when I’ve wished I could run headlong into a giant buzzsaw so that both halves could shout cruel, angry racial epitaphs at each other.

I applied to two Virginia state colleges in the early ’90s, and I got into one. Both universities asked me to check a box to indicate my ethnicity, and in both instances, I checked the box that read “white” because I am a white man. There wasn’t a “mutt” option.

A year or so later I had become close friends with a woman who was the first biracial person I had ever met outside of my family. She was an African American whose grandma, her “Oma,” had spent her childhood in Nazi Germany. She said that I could have received financial aid had I mentioned that I was, in fact, an ethnically diluted white man.

I am not a hero. I regret not having exploited my Mexican-American roots, even though I knew there was someone out there who also may have had a white father and a brown mother, but who lost the lottery and ended up brown-skinned. A person who would one day get compared to terrorists, criminals, and “rapists” by the most powerful man on earth, simply for political sport.

I checked the “white” box because, for a time, I just wanted to fit in with people who love tennis and casseroles, and who can brag that the republic stands on the shoulders of their great-great-great-whomever. History is written by the victors, and the victors love to hit the delete button on anyone who did any good who doesn’t look exactly like themselves. I write about my mixed ethnicity now because I am both well-meaning and cynical. I’ve also come to accept that I am a white man who feels both guilty and relieved that he got the “good genes” from his father, a man who spoke fluent Spanish.

I am not anti-tan. I get it. It’s still a fashion. I have just learned to live with contradictions.

Virginia made national news this past winter when it was revealed that a disturbingly high number (though one is enough) of high-ranking Democratic elected officials posed for photos wearing blackface in the ’80s. I grew up next to an old man who kept a lawn jockey ornament on his porch in Northern Virginia. This was also in the ’80s. A knee-high statue of a black man; a racist plastic flamingo. As a very young child, I thought the lawn jockey was an elf, maybe? I learned the truth as I got older. This old man had to have been born in the 1920s when there were still old-timers around who fought in the War Between the States. I remember someone painting his lawn jockey’s face white once. That person remains a hero, whoever and wherever they are.

It is tanning season. My Instagram feed will soon be filled with poolside selfies. I will spend the summer in the shade, but many of my white friends will be out browning themselves. I like to remind them to wear sunscreen with a high sun protection factor.

I am not anti-tan. I get it. It’s still a fashion. I have just learned to live with contradictions. I am white, except when I am not. I am my mother’s son, even though I don’t look like she does. The man who wrote “all men are created equal” also owned actual human beings, as if they were animals. These are both truths. I don’t think one truth cancels the other out. They can coexist. One is beautiful, the other ugly beyond words. America was born with a crack right down the middle; many of us reside there.

So go ahead and tan! No one needs my permission, but these are the times we live in — an era where everyone’s opinions are sacred. I’ve got more: I don’t think we should make fun of the president’s appearance. I think he’s showing us his real face. The one that makes him comfortable. It takes a kind of subconscious bravery to wear your envy. He doesn’t know it, of course. He would crawl out of his own skin and wear another if he could.