Welcome to Gaia! ::

I am an American, and I agree with most of the things that you've said. I've often wondered about our obsession about our lineage. I have a friend who gets incredibly insulted if you insult the french because she's "french", or at least, she has some french ancestory on her dad's side. So many times I have wanted to correct her and tell her that she's not french, she is american. However, people look at me strange when I tell them that I am american because I'm very caucasian and obviously not of Native American descent.

As your South Park quote shows, it is completely possible to be derogatory no matter what term you use for a race. But if we want to talk about "Politically Correct" terms, lets talk about the Latin culture in my hometown.

I live in an agricultural farming community (or I did, before I left for college). There are a lot of immigrants from Mexico that come up to work the orchards. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you are from Mexico, does that not make you Mexican? But we cannot refer to people as Mexican, Mexican is derrogatory. Hispanic used to be the PC term, but we were recently informed that several hundreds years ago, Hispanic was also a derrogatory term, so they are to be called Latino/a now.
Confuses the heck out of me.

Frankly, I have no idea why we obsess so much about race in this country. Maybe it has something to be with it being such a melting pot from different places, it gives us a sense of identity that we've lost in other areas of our lives. Along with America not really having much of a culture of our own, we don't have the rich history and traditions that a lot of other countries have, we just steal them. So by saying that I am half english, a quarter German, and then a mixture of french, Irish, Swiss, Yugoslavian, and Romanian in the last quarter, I feel like I have a sense of identity, I know who I am because I know where I came from. Not that Yugoslavia has anything to do with me now, but that's not the point.

And America is obsessed with being politically correct. We don't want to offend anyone, so we try to avoid actually saying anything, because it's impossible to speak without offending anyone.

I don't know if that stayed all that coherent, it's late, and my ears still aren't working from the music at the party that my friends dragged me to.

I don't believe in "race" it is a term derived from the evolutionist of the early days God created a people like Adam and Eve were they probably looked Middle Eastern which is the most middle color of people of all of the Earth and off of them branched your blacks and whites and asians and such they were all in there genes and as for all of them living in the same place the Tower of Bable explains that were God got angry at the people of Earth and seperated them by there skin color and gave them all diffrent languages to confuse them so they wouldn't try to recreate it ^.^ there ya go I'm American too (not proud of it more connected to religion than to my country its not the best place in the world....)

Can we get rid of the word "race"? It is not race you are talking about but ethnicity, race implies like say the human race. So if you talk about a subject make cear of what you are talking of.

I'm from california, the racial mixing pot of the world practically. Everyone else sees us as being very open minded about people of different backgrounds. We even have homocentral San Fransisco. ((take offense if you care to.)) but I've lived here most of my life and I can tell you, everyone hates everyone here. So here's what I think:

Hate is a normal, athough evil, human instinct and no matter of ignoring words or what have you is going to stop it. The world is going to hate. You can be nice and be tolerant and it may help, but it will never completely cease.