(June 14, 2007) — Coming from a biracial family, I’ve come to realize a lot of things in life that I may not have noticed if I was born to parents of the same race. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in life is that superficial boundaries such as race are insignificant walls that one puts up to keep themselves from others. I realized that people try the hardest they can to stay as close as possible to home. I have been raised to study the history of my ancestors and stay close to my roots— whether that be by learning recipes of my “Mayan tribal sisters” or by reading the age old Armenian alphabet on the back of fig preserves at “Masis Market.” However, in the course of these lessons, I have lived enough life to realize that with being an American comes the opportunity to experience and be educated about different beliefs and traditions than one’s own. Sadly, this opportunity is often neglected and ethnocentrism is taken to a whole new level. I recently took a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance with my humanities class and learned more than I expected to. My trip was cut short due to “technical difficulties,” and that’s when it all started. We happened to be lost and on the freeway exit and, lo and behold, a man selling oranges! Of course, the racist remarks started to shoot around, and one of them happened to be aimed at me. Why, you ask? Because I happen to be of Latin descent and so was the man who was just making a living on the corner of the street. Even worse were the prejudice remarks I encountered at the museum. It was irony at its best; racist jokes at the Museum of Tolerance. If you ask one of these students why they had something against the certain group of people, they’d give you a long and unnecessary explanation about why they hated them. But in reality, they have created a way to separate themselves from that group of people, because they were too ignorant to actually open up to them, or too afraid to go against their peers and tell them they were wrong to make the jokes in the first place. So why not just stop and love everyone? Obviously, it’s not all that easy. There are all these reasons to hate different people, right? Because their eyes are smaller than yours? Because they have different sexual preferences than yours? Or is it because their shoes are pointier than yours? How about you ask yourself this: does any of it really matter in the end? Of course, if you believe that people are different than you because of these superficial differences, then you’re most likely to answer yes. But I would hope that you’d realize that in the end, when you’re near your last few breaths, that you’ll start to realize you would have loved to have meet some of those people you put down in the past, because maybe underneath all those differences, you weren’t all that different.