Last week I received two letters on the same day, one from a reader and one from the Republican National Committee, both presuming I was as white as white could be. But now I'm not so sure about my whiteness.

"Dear Mr. Levine," the RNC wrote, "I don't want to believe you've abandoned the Republican Party. Have you given up?" They seemed confident I belonged in their ranks as a member of the whitest club in America. "In 2000," they boasted, "we withstood the heaviest onslaught of liberal special interestsÂ… ever." Won't I help them keep up the good work, they asked.

Feeling my melanin rising, I opened the next piece of mail, handwritten on a lovely little notepad depicting a covered bridge and signed only with an initial. It came in response to a recent story about school violence, penned in part by Tim Wise, an anti-racism activist. Wise pointed out, factually, that all the school shooters in recent years have been white kids. Just a day after this article appeared, 18-year-old white student Jason Hoffman wounded three kids in San Diego's Granite Hills High School.

"The recent article by Tim Wise," my correspondent wrote, "stating that the school shooters are all white is in error. The most recent shooter, Jason Hoffman, despite his name appears to be some kind of spic" -- sic.

Normally, I ignore such mail, but this one got me thinking. This reader, like the GOP, had also assumed I was white and therefore sympathetic to his point.

This put me in a dark mood. How white was I anyway? I was white for last year's census, even though nearly seven million Americans for the first time were able to check more than one racial box. But then last week some BBC documentary makers reconstructed the face of a 2000-year-old Israeli in order to show that Jesus, a first-century Middle Eastern Jew, looked like a first-century Middle Eastern Jew: a "dark-skinned, curly-haired man with a round, robust face and a stout nose," as the filmmakers put it.

Not exactly the usual portrayal of Jesus as The Ultimate Caucasian (blond locks, blue eyes, pale skin, patrician nose). He was now, the article implied, a lot less white than we thought. And, except for the desert tan, he now looked a lot more like me than he used to.

I was beginning to feel like an off-white person -- certainly a semi-gloss. Then David Horowitz mixed my paint can completely.

For the last month or two Horowitz has been trying to interest university newspapers in publishing his full-page ad, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks -- and Racist Too." His message to white people about the legacy of slavery: It ain't your fault; blacks already got reparations (i.e., welfare); blacks are better off here than in other countries anyway; and God forbid America should insult black people by fulfilling 136-year-old promises. Many college papers ran the ads, and the inevitable protests ensued.

Horowitz forgot to mention one simple fact in his anti-reparations screed. I offer it to him not because I think he deserves it but because he was an idiot not to think of it himself. If reparations are ever awarded to African-Americans, the cash will come from our tax dollars. Either tax-paying black citizens will, in part, be paying for their own reparations or there will be some mechanism for black Americans to opt out of paying themselves.

Instead of hiding his wallet behind a lot of patriotic rhetoric, all David Horowitz needs to do to get out of paying reparations is to prove that he's just a little bit black.

The "white pride" crowd will be happy to prove Horowitz isn't completely white if, as I presume, he's not a Christian. And being incompletely white has been one definition of "black" in America since way before even the beloved Civil War. So Horowitz may be saved.

But what will the real racial separatists do? It's too late for them to check more than one box on the census. But Horowitz can come to the rescue of white supremacists here. He is a regular contributor to popular magazines, so he might consider devising one of those little tests -- "How White Are You? Take this easy quiz!" -- perfect for USA Today, fashion magazines and the "kids' pages" on the Klan website. Just fail one simple question and, bingo, even a White Aryan Resistance member has proof he's as good as black now.

Of course, that may make these guys eligible for reparations themselves. But paying people to consider themselves black may be the most realistic solution to bigotry anyone has ever devised. In such a race- and money-obsessed country as ours, it's the only thing likely to work 100 percent of the time.