"What race or ethnicity are you?"

Something that has always offended me. I hate the question. Why do they want to know? What does it matter? If "America" is "a melting pot for all cultures", then why should it matter what race an American is? It doesnt matter at all. You dont need to know if I am asian or hispanic or latino...you dont need to know if I am Indian or Korean or German or Irish...you dont. On MEAP tests I would only mark the "white" thing because it was required. They need to put a box for "prefer to not disclose" because it angers me every time I am marked as "white" or even "american". I am not proud of being "white". I am not proud of being "american" either. Americans are portrayed as so much more than they really are. And because of this, Americans believe they really are more. They are not better than anyone. They are not superior. Didnt we learn that with the Germans in WWII?? Yah, I think we did. What is wrong with Americans? They think they are here to save the world. That they are not. They cannot save the world pretending they are not part of it. Because THEY are part of what may be seen as "wrong" with the world.

And as for having to fill in the box next to "white", I hate that too. I dont want to be stereotyped. And also, wasnt it the "white man" who did all that to the indians who owned this country before the "white man" came and destroyed it all? And wasnt it the "white man" who did all that to their own kind years ago? People are not better than people. They cannot be your slaves. And you cannot take something away from someone just because they are different than you. If you think that someone can have a different flesh tone than yourself and be worth less than you, you dont deserve what you may already have. Because you are worth nothing if you cannot see that EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT. A little box labeled "white" cannot stand for who I am. Filling in two lines of my ethnicity cannot tell you who I am. I had no choice in those labels that the world can lay upon me. But I cannot let this go, unless the world lets their assumptions go of who I could be by looking at my ethnicity or the color of my skin. By making me mark the box labeled "white", that puts me into a catagory. That makes me just another average. That makes me "one out of" the white women. For all we know they could be taking those answers and decyphering that all white women of this age are like this. NO. I am not proud of it, and I am not just another one of the "white women". I am Ginger. I cannot be labeled by the color of my skin, or catagorized by my ancestory. It is wrong. I can only be catagorized by who I am, how I treat people, what I do for the world, what I stand for, and how I do things. NOT by some little box labled "white".