I guess we were all pretty stupid.

For years, we've been black, or white, or maybe Hispanic or Asian. Everything but pink with purple polka dots.

We fill in those neat little classification boxes on surveys or medical forms saying which of the half dozen or so groups with which we most closely associate.

At first glance, whether anyone likes it or not, race is one of our most visible traits.

But now it's a trait that, really, does not exist as a fine line outside of society's imagination, a conjured concept rooted in the injustices of history.

The work presented Monday night by Penn State Associate Professor Mark Shriver showed that we're all a little bit of this, or a little bit of that. That Irish complexion does not mean great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother McGovern wasn't African.

That may be too much of a simplification of the science Shriver presented -- but it is essentially the point. In our genes, our constitution at its core, everyone shares a little bit of each other.

And other than using biology to show the blatant stupidity of racism -- that people who think that way all have a little bit in them of the very things they ridicule -- it also shows that as a campus, we are maturing in the ways we think about race. In the ultra-charged post-Village climate, such a stepped-back, objective look at race would have probably proved impossible.

Because when differing points of view are at each other's throats, the last thing they want to hear is that they are all the same. For both sides.

It's not a protest over some small administration policy. It's not scathing diatribes against forced diversification in the classroom. It's an objective look at a truth about the situation, without the need for repeated rhetoric. A little bit of life for a new issue that some look at wondering from where the next right course for progress will come, and others look at as a horse beaten into the ground.

With the attention span college students have on most things, keeping it new with the constant influx of ideas from many varied disciplines like this is the way to keep an open dialogue going.

It's also nice to hear about a diversity issue without hearing that "D" word repeated over and over like a drum beat. It was an open discussion on the problems that split us apart and the reasons they really make no sense when you think about it.

Plus, it hits home to everyone. For example, that practical, "I'm white, so this really doesn't matter to me," really doesn't make much sense when you're not all European after all.