Dear Mr. Vice President Joe Biden,

This is a formal notification of my official withdrawal of my support for your 2020 presidential campaign.

I caught wind of your recent gaffe, declaring that if ones such as myself do not vote for you, then “you ain’t black.”

(I hate the way he keeps saying “Come on, man!” to Charlemagne  because he thinks he’s mirroring hood culture)

Well Mr. Biden, I can assure you that I am indeed black, despite your declaration that my kind is a forgone conclusion.

I am what you might call a “different” sort of black woman, in that all my life I have been told by people that I don’t talk, behave or enjoy things that are typically “black.” I don’t twerk to black men who debase my image for all the world. I speak with a “valley girl” accent (because surprise! I was raised in the hot, dry valley of Southern California). I am not a hashtag warrior. And I don’t blindly worship black men–in fact, I have a particular penchant for swirling.

It is for those things and more that I have bucked and rebelled against anyone trying to put me in a box and take more for granted, or pressure me with social exclusion because I’m not black enough. I’ve been told by black people all my life that I wasn’t black enough, and I’ll be damned if I will let an old white man tell me that either.

I can’t completely blame you for your gross assumption of my fealty to the Democratic Party. My father, God rest his glorious soul, switched from Republican to Democrat when Franklin (thanks for the correction readers!) Roosevelt brought America out of poverty with the New Deal and won victory over the Nazis. My father, like the throng of his fellow African Americans, have since followed the Democratic Party with blind loyalty with no true examination and critique of its policies and officials.

So it’s for that reason I have withdrawn my formal support of your campaign. I will not vote for you. As a California resident, I know that won’t mean much. It is purely a matter of principle.

Does that now mean I’m jumping on the Trump train? Absolutely not. I find our current president a loathsome oaf. He has done some good things; yes. But I believe, at his core, he is not a good man.

My wish is that one day Americans can have more choices about who their candidates are, and stop treating the electoral process like a baseball game with fans of the winners or losers, and that we can take emotion and tribalism out of the equation and finally get the job done.