What do you prefer to be called?

i saw this posted on Post Secret today and it got me thinking. i've always thought that both the race and gender boxes on surveys and applications should be done away with. i don't think any racial equality will appear until people are forced to make decisions that aren't based on their preconceptions.

Race is a fairly ludicrous idea in and of itself. While certain traits and diseases are more prevalent in groups from specific geographic areas, nothing distinguishes race on the genetic level. A sample of a person's blood will not reveal their "race." It's a human and societal construction.

Race labeling has always been a complicated and often nearly arbitrary practice. Black? African-American? Colored? What about for "whites?" While some people are pretty pasty, "white" people can range from dental white to olive dark, just as "blacks" can range from dark of night to the lightest caramel. People come in a variety of beautiful colors.

So how have we labeled "whites?" Well, "white" is a popular one found on forms, but so is "Caucasian" and "Anglo-Saxon." If you are "white," have you ever stopped to consider why you would be named for a group of people from the mountains of Georgia in Eastern Europe? One German scientist in the 19th Century decided that German skulls resembled one skull from the slopes of a mountain in the Caucuses and concluded that, "I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (birth place) of mankind."

Does this sound like any basis to call all people who fall into the "white-ish" skin tone range Caucasian?

How about Anglo-Saxon? Interestingly, Webster's New World Dictionary that touts itself as "defining American English for fifty years," as well as being the official dictionary of the Associated Press and containing over 12,000 "Americanisms," does not contain an entry that describes this term as applying to all "white people" or anything even close. Wikipedia's dictionary lists 4 definitions and the first several match up with Webster in describing it as a term that refers to a language or the people who originally inhabited Germany. Wikipedia does include an entry that indicates it could refer to someone of British or Northern European descent or a "white" person, but indicates this is only true in the US. i know many people of purely Irish descent or Spanish or Italian or Portuguese would not include themselves in this category.

i think if more people understood the nature of race, or maybe i should say, the mythology of it, and how labels are derived, i'm not sure anyone would identify with a race, or a skin color.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that he dreamed of a day when his children would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. As long as race and skin color judgments are included on job and college applications and the US Census, we'll be lucky to see that dream come true for his grandchildren.