Mak Faene It occurred to me that all the people I dislike in the world are "white".   I have found that I never get good service at an Indian restaurant and that all the people who work at the ones that I've visited are Indian and rude.   Most of the people on the honour roll in my high school were Oriental.   All my favourite musicians are "black". In fact every brown skinned person I've ever met was good at music.   Every time I've been cut off in my car it's been by someone who's got red hair.   Only brown eyed women have ever broken my heart.   The only people that have ever stolen from me have been bald.   I don't know any people with freckles who use course language.   Sound ridiculous yet?   True as the statements above may be, the conclusions you draw from them, sadly, are your own.   This is to say that just because every person I've ever disliked, as many as that may have been, happened to be of a pale complexion; this does not arbitrarily mean to me that all "white" people are despicable. Same goes for every one of those statements.   Correlation does not necessitate causation. This simple scientific premise means that just because two things can be paired together in one regard (like two people of the same skin tone) does not mean that their behaviour will be the same as well. To think otherwise is illogical, yet unfortunately all too common.   Home from school one day, I was telling my mother about my day and now on the bus ride home a kid, a "black" kid, had made us all laugh about something or another. It never crossed my mind that at the time I'd felt the need to specify the individual's skin tone. In retrospect I can only imaging that it's because as a suburbanite "white" kid who knew only what he'd grown up around, telling a story about a "kid" by default was telling a story about a "white" kid. And since this story was not about a "white" kid but about a "black" kid I, for some reason, felt the strong need to differentiate the two.   For a school kid to think there's something different about he and another school kid based solely on that characteristic is pretty messed up if you ask me.   In my day to day life I hear people making the same specifics clear in their stories, as though it lends somehow to the character's implied personality if it's defined that they're Hispanic or Asian or Arabic. If you ever want to really invoke fear and a nasty defensive instinct in someone, just point that out to them if they're relating to you an anecdote. Ask them, "Why did you feel the need to tell me that the guy who ran over your dog was "black" as it clearly had no bearing on the story?" Just watch as they get really offended that you'd have the audacity to imply that they were somehow being politically incorrect. But I digress...   I just had to get that off my chest. I could now go into the whole deal about why racism is bad and why it's all an issue of ignorance and low self esteem on the part of certain groups of people, but you've probably heard it before. The racism issue is just so eighties anyway, right?   Fact remains, in my mind, that you probably harbour prejudice thoughts in your head right now. I know I do. Not "racist" (to make use of pop terminology) but prejudice; which is to say that I believe things about people or groups of people or things in general without any prior experience in the matter. But I'm trying to beat it. And every time I do reject, even in the slightest, what this societal structure has taught me, then I feel stronger.   A square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not necessarily a square. Correlation does not necessitate causation; please keep it in mind.   Thanks, I feel much better now.