Wherein you, the readers, talk amongst yourselves.

The social barriers that many of our parents dealt with when they were in the dating world have been (more or less) lifted, but I can't count how many times a friend or acquaintance has told me that their parents or grandparents would die if they knew they were dating someone of a different race, religion, and/or ethnicity. Do your parents have open minds when it comes to your relationships or has it been a learning process? Are there people you just "can never bring home?"

Wherein you, the readers, talk amongst yourselves.

It's only human to harbor a little (or a lot) of intolerance here and there, whether you choose to display it or not. Do you ever find yourself having negative feelings about someone based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or religion? Why? Do you try to have a more open mind when you recognize your own prejudices or do you believe it's not a problem?

Something interesting from Saudi Arabia: Though the colors of the citizens here vary as much as they do in most other nations, there's very little racism. Instead, classism is the preferred prejudice. Xenophobia is also a major issue, with Saudis showing caution around foreigners of any type. But, again, if an immigrant has a nose for business, he'll have no problem ingratiating himself into Arab society. Oh, the many wondrous ways we've learned to exclude!

RACISM DIGS A HOLE TO CHINA "Most Chinese people with whom I speak on the issue of race say that they 'have nothing against black people.' But many of my friends and students do seem to ’buy in’ to some of the stereotypes of black people that have always existed. For example, a student recently told me that she 'is a little scared of black people' because they are big and strong. Others have said that their black English teachers were always kind but they often smelled bad. Still other students have said they have never really met a black person so they have no opinion of them. A few have even asked me about whether or not there are more black people involved in crime in the U.S. than white people."

Surprise, minorities: Hollywood doesn't like casting us as leads in films, even if that means completely shifting around facts to accommodate white actors.

Although director Spike Lee just dressed down the wizened Clint Eastwood for not including black extras in his WWII dramas, a new ABC News article takes issue with the way Hollywood consistently uses whites to fill major roles written for blacks, Hispanics and Asians. To wit:

In the new movie "Stuck," which opened last week, actress Mena Suvari plays a young woman named Brandi, who, after a night of partying, strikes a homeless man with her car, sending him through her windshield, and leaves him to die.

The plot is based on the real-life story of Texas woman Chante Mallard…

Mallard is African-American. Suvari, the blonde, blue-eyed beauty from "American Beauty" and the "American Pie" movies, is not. But she does wear cornrows to play the role of Brandi.

Also recently manipulated to remove minorities was 21, the story of an MIT "whiz kid" who went to Vegas and made a killing counting cards. In reality, the student is Asian American, but a white Englishman was cast to play him.

To get an explanation about why minority actors and actresses are being neglected in favor of whites, do what you do every time you have a question about this really demented world: follow the money:

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Richard J Peltz, a law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is suing two students in the school's Black Law Student Association, the association itself and one other person affiliated with the group. Peltz is alleging defamation after several of his pupils took to the law school's dean and demanded Peltz face punishment for his so-called "hateful and inciting speech" regarding affirmative action.

According to a memo sent to the dean, Peltz is accused of "ranting" about affirmative action; saying affirmative action helps "unqualified black people"; passing out a form on which he asked students to specify their race, claiming their answers would affect their grades; and "denigrating" black students in a debate about affirmative action. The memo then asked that the dean publicly reprimand Peltz, bar him from teaching any course black students would be required to take and to mark on Peltz's personnel file that he is "unable to deal fairly with black students."

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With colleges around the country being sued for exercising affirmative action and right-leaning activists attempting to demolish the practice completely, what's a college admissions board to do in order to maintain diversity while not facing lawsuits? Why, leave it all up to computers, of course!

Juan E Gilbert, an associate professor of computer science at Auburn, has created a software that he says satisfies the demands of both pro and anti-affirmative action parties.

The software works this way: A college decides how many applicants it will admit from that middle group. Then the college picks the criteria it will use to evaluate the applicants. These would generally include a range for acceptable SAT scores or high school grades, planned major in college, status such as first generation to go to college, intended major, race, gender and so forth. Then the software clusters all of these applicants into groups equal in total number to the number of projected admits. In doing so, the software groups applicants who share the same qualities together. Then the software selects one person from each group to be admitted, but this person is the applicant who is the least like others in his or her cluster. (Details are available on the company’s Web site.)

Gilbert said in an interview that this system offers key advantages. First, it removes bias from the equation, as an admissions officer can’t be accused of providing more or less emphasis to any criterion based on personal interests. Second, it assures that race and ethnicity are taken into account, but not given more weight than the Supreme Court would permit. “It does what we as human beings can’t do on a large scale,” he said.

Auburn will begin using the software for its admissions beginning next year. After that, the revolution of the machines. Bow to your MacBook!

If you ask most North Carolinians about their political prejudices, they'll say that they're pretty open-minded. It's the other people they know who need to brush up on their tolerance. A recent poll said 91 percent of North Carolina voters said race would not affect their decision in the May 6th presidential primary, but 54 percent said they knew someone who would never vote for a black candidate. Similarly, 79 percent said that gender made no difference to them, but 63 percent copped to knowing someone who wouldn't vote for a female candidate. Sure, they're all perfectly tolerant, but they, uh, know this guy who, uh, probably would never vote for a black man or a white woman… These "prejudice polls" are so reliable. [LAT]

A new book we've not read about culture in the United States argues this famous paradoxical maxim: the more things change, the more they stay the same. To clarify: statistics show that millions of Americans are gradually proving that they want to live around people that look, behave and believe like them. Despite what you may think, studies say it didn't used to be like that.

Bill Bishop, the author of The Big Sort, cites one major example we imagine typifies those used throughout the book: "In 1976, less than a quarter of the American people lived in so-called 'landslide counties' – that is, counties in which the spread between the two major presidential candidates was 20 percentage points or more. By 2004, nearly half of us lived in this kind of politically tilted territory."

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You'll recall that some people have problems mentally separating African-Americans from apes, and that that link can lead to some negative things for blacks, like imprisonment, slander and being killed. Now, black dogs have become entangled in a similar though more peculiar web, in which prejudice, color and the animal kingdom all coincide.

To the uninitiated, the idea seems so strange — doggie discrimination? But among those in animal rescue circles, the phenomenon is commonplace enough to have earned its own name: "black dog syndrome."

"There's not a lot of that type of statistics on many aspects of sheltering," says Kim Intino, the director of animal sheltering issues for the Humane Society of the United States. "But I think that every person that has worked in a shelter can attest that in shelters animals with black coats can be somewhat harder to adopt out — or to even get noticed."

No, this article isn't biting satire – we checked – but it could be. Take, for instance, what happens at some kennels when black dogs go unnoticed for too long: "they tie pink ribbons around the necks of the girls, and fasten big bow ties around the necks of the boys." Doggie bling! "In our kennels, the black dogs are all decked out," says the head of the Los Angeles SPCA. Who knew kennels had so much in common with rap videos?

Other Swiftian passages include:

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