Everyone on campus wants to be culturally aware, ethnically and culturally sensitive to culturally and linguistically diverse students on campus. We have the Peer Diversity Educators, we have MOSAIC (Making Our School An International Community), Student Development and Diversity, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Diversity Resource Room. We are extremely careful when choosing terminology. We say person of Spanish origin, African-American individual, typical white mainstream, Caucasian, and my personal favorite, people of color. We obsess over using "politically correct" terminology and we even dish out money on the basis of skin color as a prerequisite.

We rush to go make friends with the new "ethnic" kid in class, even if we have no common interests with them, because then all our friends will know we're not racist. The folks at UW-Madison photoshopped a noticeably darker face into a pale-faced crowd photo for promotion brochures, just to show how tolerant and welcoming they are of dark faces. Yeah, a little too welcoming. What made you talk to that new kid? What made UW-Madison single out that photoshopped man? Right. It was the color of their skin, and only the color of their skin.

Race is still on the forefront of our minds. But wait, I thought we weren't supposed to judge or label people by the color of their skin. We ensure we avoid this so much that we swing to the other side of the racist spectrum. Non-"white" people are still exalted as requiring special labels that are different from ours and needing The Diversity Room accommodations . They are still seen as different from us, but this time in a different way.

What does this do to our perception of race? If we are sensitive to race, doesn't this imply that it's on our minds as something important to categorize people by? But I thought they said we're all the same, right? Symbolic Interactionist theory states that our language is a group of symbols that divide up our world into catagories, and this produces a socially constructed reality. In the English language, if we call two things by two different labels, then they are recognized as having some important separating characteristics. They are called something... else. They are... not us. Our labels for races imply that they are different. If we threw away our labels, we might not even notice they are different. We wouldn't even care.

So let's see here... culturally diverse students. What exactly is culturally diverse about a non-"white" person, and not diverse about me, a "white" person? Is it that their ancestors came from a variety of different places? Well, so did mine. My ancestors came from northern Germany, southern Germany, England, Scotland, and France. Wow! I'm diverse too. So that can't be it. So...is it their skin color? Are they culturally diverse because their skin color deviates from mine? In this case, we are again placing these people in reference to "white" people, as a subcategory to the default standard. I can't help my pale skin, and I feel pretty uncomfortable thinking of another group as diverse from me. I don't want to be the standard. People working for MOSAIC and for the Peer Diversity Educators should never use such degrading terms.

Let's think about this white and black thing. We can't say black on legal documents, but we can certainly have white. Why is this okay? Instead of black we must say, African-American. But we can still just call me white. Calling me white categorizes me by the color of my skin, something that I could not help being born with. This is judgemental. It's putting me in terms of the absence of melanin I have in my skin, how non-colored I am. This is actually just as racist as it is now considered to call non-"white" people black, or colored. So because I was never allowed to feel discriminated against due to my ancestors, you can just call me white, and I should feel happy?

A more correct term for me should be German-American. I should prefer European-American, German-American, Person of Western European-Decent, or better yet, Person of Northernand Southern-German-American-Ancestry...Individual. Just for consistency's sake. That is a lot more culturally and ethnically sensitive thing to say. Calling me white covers up my culturally and truly ethnically diverse heritage, a judgmental and racist act that I call into question. Let's get this straight, if you're going to call them African-American, call me European-American. If you're going to call me white, just call them black. Even if my ancestors exploited other groups through no fault of my own, believe it or not I still have the right to refuse discrimination based on the pale color of my skin.

Maybe we should label people according to the proximity of cultures. Whose heritage is closer to its roots? My current culture is more similar to that of my ancestors' German culture than is most "black" people's current culture to traditional African culture. Their culture is pretty much the same as mine, which is closer to German culture, if anything. So, should we call them African-American? No. They are more American, or European-American, now, if anything.

How about the phrase people of color? Is this the most ethnically sensitive term? No, this term is grossly inaccurate as well. Many more colors show up on the faces of "whites". Normally, we are sort of peach-colored, not white. When we blush, we turn red. When we are cold, we turn blue. When we are sick, we turn yellow and green. Some of us have freckly spots all over, and sometimes you can see stripy veins too. When we faint, we are even lighter-colored than normal.

But on the flip side, a non-"white" person largely stays one color during all emotions, due to increased melanin which masks blood activity. Are they really a person of color? It looks like I might be the person of color here. The shades of their skin, black or brown, aren't even on the color spectrum! Ask an art major. Black is actually the absence of color, while white is a combination of all colors. I should be the real "person of color" instead.

Besides being inaccurate, the term "people of color" again places many groups into yet another subcategory from the "white" group, otherwise named as the standard "people," from which all groups are measured as a deviation. It is very degrading and eliminates all individuality. Am I different from a man? Yes, most importantly my vagina is what is different. Maybe one should call me a "person of vagina," since that is apparently the most critical feature about me as a person, right? Those in power are those who decide labels for people, and if they have the power, they will add a prefix or suffix to their own name. Hence, we have men, and we have women. We have males, and we have females. We have Americans, and we have African-Americans, and Asian-Americans. We have people, and we have people of color. See a pattern here?

Obviously discrimination is still rampant. Maybe if we can forget the silly politically correct terms, stop stressing how different we are (called diversity), and stop trying too hard to appear tolerant, maybe we can actually become our ideal colorblind selves. Maybe one day we can actually being to think of them as the same.