What would be your prefered way to describe race?

Speaking just for myself, the way the person in question wants to describe it.

OMG, Anthony Weiner's sexts just made me laugh out loud (via the Daily Show).

Your query and ita's mention of Morena Baccarin remind me of a drama a few years ago--I was at a conference and they wanted to do some work around race, and asked all the "people of color" to stay in one room and the people who identified as white to go to another room. And a friend of mine who is Brazilian (but if you didn't know that, would assume is just white, and her accent is American) stayed in the PoC room and some people flipped out. It was interesting (not helped by the fact that that friend had at various times been not the most racially aware/sensitive).

A Facebook friend of mine admitted to reading the Weiner sexts and commented, "You, sir, have the game of a 15 year old."

My favorite dirty phone call story is the one where I thought the person was someone I was expecting to call saying "talk to me about your dog," so I launched into a description of the dog's (I was dogsitting) cough and the measures I had been taking so far, then belatedly realized the caller was a boy and not a middle-aged woman and had actually said, "Talk to me while I jerk off."

I always wondered if he was freaked out by me, or jerking off anyway.

Oh flea, that is the second time you have made me laugh out loud recently (the first was "peaches".

Until I went to college, I though all Hispanics/Latina were white because they started out in Spain and Portugal. To be fair to me, there were only 2 families in my school who were not white, but a lot of darker Italians, who were consdered white. But, I watched Chico and the Man, so I am not sure what I was thinking.

I had a friend from college who said he was very popular in his banking job because he was white (blond, fair) and Puerto Rican, so they could count him as POC while still having another white guy in the room.

Until I went to college, I though all Hispanics/Latina were white because they started out in Spain and Portugal. To be fair to me, there were only 2 families in my school who were not white, but a lot of darker Italians, who were consdered white. But, I watched Chico and the Man, so I am not sure what I was thinking.

There were a few Cuban and Puerto Rican kids in my high school, but I never really thought of them as anything other than white -- if the Italian kids were white, then it seemed to me that the Puerto Rican and Cuban ones were, too -- until we were taking the SATs and one girl raised her hand to get the form to apply for a Hispanic scholarship thing. I guess that, in my mind (not having really analyzed it at that point), "Hispanic" meant people who have accents, and these kids were all at least second-generation American.

I am old enough to remember seeing "Hispanic" as a racial/ethnic category suddenly appear on school forms. And now "mixed" is offered as an option, but they only allow you to select one other category, so you can be "mixed black" or "mixed Asian" but not "mixed black/Asian."

OK, creepy solicitor moment: someone voting canvasser just knocked on my door and addressed me BY NAME. Freaked me out so much I just shut the door. Do NOT want strangers WHO KNOW WHERE I LIVE addressing me by name.

And that train of thought led me to this Sopranos quote:

Tony Soprano: My wife thinks I need to meet new people.

Dr. Jennifer Melfi: So?

Tony Soprano: C'mon, you're Italian, you understand. Guys like me we're brought up to think that Merigan are fuckin' bores. The truth is the average white man is no more boring than the millionth conversation over who should have won, Marciano or Ali.

Dr. Jennifer Melfi: So am I to understand that you don't consider yourself white?

Tony Soprano: I don't mean white like Caucasian. I mean a white man like our friend Cusamano. Now he's Italian, but he's Merigan. It's what my old man would have called a Wonder Bread wop. He eats his Sunday gravy out of a jar.

Huh. Having gone to public schools first in NYC and then in Milwaukee, it wasn't until I went to university that I was in a majority white school. I sometimes forget that that's not the norm. My world now is a lot whiter than it was growing up, actually.