I am, perhaps, one of the least racist people you may ever meet. I harbor no active feelings of superiority, inferiority or urges to discriminate based on genetic or cultural ancestry. I'm highly interested in minds, not skins.

But "active" is the crucial word. We move through stereotypes and deep-seated cultural assumptions daily. I, like you, swim in centuries of segregation's backwash. Even here, in the glittering liberal bastion of the San Francisco Bay, we are surrounded by media and organizations reinforcing and exploiting the truly minimal differences between people rather than celebrating our overwhelming connectedness as a species.

We're conditioned to pre-assume race and the stereotypical qualities it supposedly confers. We're surprised when the black man speaks differently than we expect, when the white girl wears corn rows, when our new coworker is not at all what we pegged them as on their first day.

It's extremely difficult to let go. Your mind wants to catalog and assign. It's simply what it does.

About two years ago, Ania and I made a pact to help each other weed out the mental concepts which permeate our base cultural frameworks. A prime bugaboo: unnecessary descriptors.

"I was talking to this Chinese guy today about cat food."

"So, Michael and I... he's black... went over to Lewis' house."

"There is this Mexican barrista who makes unbelievable soy steamers at Ritual Roasters. Plus, she's cute."

When either of us hear the other use these worthless terms, these box-makers and border marks, we ask, "What's that got to do with the story?"

It may be useful to point out ancestry when it's crucial to the tale. A friend who knows Eastern medicine because he grew up in a Chinese household and learned from his great-grandmother, for instance, or when describing someone who remembers the segregated south from personal experience. In cases like these, it's valid information, not a simple social reinforcer to appease our mental needs to visualize and categorize.

It's very rare for me to describe someone in racial or heritage terms now: white, black, Asian. If I need to describe an individual I will use simple phrases describing general physical qualities: dark-skinned, light-skinned, bearded, short, tall, curly hair, blue hair. People rarely ask the described person's race... they assume I would use that as a descriptor if it differed from my own. Several people have later exclaimed, "I didn't realize he/she was black/Japanese/Mexican/Martian!" My response is usually something akin to, "Oh... neither did I!"

Yesterday, I met a new neighbor for the first time. Ania had previously met her, telling me about her off and on for several weeks. A few hours after meeting her, I had a sudden realization of just how much cultural baggage surrounding race the two of us have managed to cast off:

• Ania never described her race or physical appearance to me. I never asked. The mental set of data I had to represent her was built solely of what Ania had told me about her actions, and my mind was content with this.
• When I met her, I had no mental preconception of her physical appearance. I did not even think about it while meeting her, only about what Ania had described her as doing. It was the things she had said or done which defined her for me.

I had no box prepared for her.

People are no longer known quantities, pigeon-holed safe bets.

They can be anything and everything in the world, and the world itself is now infinitely larger.