Last week, I got pulled over by the cops for “not having [my] headlights all the way on.” Must’ve been a slow day. Regardless, the officer had to check my driving history and give me a warning. On the warning slip, there was a place to specify what race I was. Next to it, the officer wrote “black.”   I’ve been puzzled ever since. I thought, “Is it because I’m young, and it’s dark, and my hat’s real low?” I was certainly sporting some alarming “ethnic” insignia. Maybe it was the Biggie Smalls T-shirt or Souls of Mischief blasting on my stereo when he walked up to the window.   In any case, race becomes a touchy subject when other people code you as something you don’t identify as. That was one of the many subjects discussed in a Jan. 29 article in The New York Times titled, “Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above.” A group of students from this university were interviewed about their mixed-race identities and how they cope with issues such as intolerance and labeling.   According to the story, “Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.”    I suppose one day we’ll all be beige, the color of stairwells and hallways. Our hair will change from curly to straight every other day; it’ll be blond and black and red depending on the tides; our eye color will change hue; gender will disappear; we’ll all have the same parts, be the same height, weigh the same and wear the same clothes. History will disappear slowly out of our collective consciousness, and we won’t be able to profit on our differences at the expense of other types of people. Binaries will be nullified, and instead of a pluralistic, diverse society, we’ll live in a sterile, boring one.   Maybe in millennia this H.G. Wells pipe dream will define our society in new and interesting ways. The danger with this kind of discussion in the present, however, is that the complexities of multicultural racial formations can be used to exploit the lazy through the cliche of “Race doesn’t actually exist, see!”   Multiracial people can be used as scapegoats to further this way of thinking, and everyone can put on their best righteously indignant posture and call me a racist for bringing it up in the first place. How dare I? They just want to be judged by the content of their character!   I don’t believe that my character and the color of my skin can be divorced. They both inform one another. My white roommates pride themselves on their diverse Italian, Irish, Scottish and German backgrounds, just like I pride myself on my Puerto Rican background. Sure, I’d like to reach a point where we can all see past race and look at the individual without coding him or her with sweeping generalizations, but if the “judge” of my character is going to be a police officer who prefers that I use my high-beams in well-lit areas, then I’d like him to get my race right the first time: brown-ish.     Michael Casiano is a junior American studies and English major. He can be reached at casian at umdbk dot com.