In response to Bethany's question "what is so important about skin pigment"? alot. Skin pigment can change alot about your life, culture, and, most importantly, society's reaction to you. Whether you realize it or not, alot of your actions are attributed to your skin pigment. A black guy that can play basketball "he's black.", an asian person that extremely mathematically talented "she's asian.", a white person that can't dance "she's white." Alot of the things you do and say are judged based off of your skin pigment, many things are pre-determined about you before you even say anything based off of your skin pigment, because that's what people see first and that's where people base many of their prejudices, and even after they've gotten to know you, even after they've gotten below the surface of skin color it's still used to determine the normality of some of your actions. Skin pigment is used to base the normality and validity of your actions. And, in response to your statement that "Uni isn't meant to be a typical cross section of Champaign-Urbana", I understand that completely, I understood that when I was one of three people out of my class in Jefferson to apply, but, in retrospect, just because Uni is supposed to be for the "academicallu gifted" doesn't mean that we can't have diversity, there is an overlap, because there are plenty of smart people of all different races that can come to Uni, so the fault is not only at Uni, the fault is not only on the ineffective, counterproductive Affirmative Action, the fault is at the Champaign-Urbana school district in general, and even beyond that, it's on school districts nation-wide, and, from what I understand, USEA is not for that, but it is to stimulate the effort and interest of people to be able to change this problem nation wide. Also, in response to the fact that these discussions are tearing apart Uni students, it's not, it's getting us to the point that we don't ignore our races and ethnicities so that everybody can be comfortable and happy, these discussions bring to the table the issues and thoughts that we all bottle inside so that we can all pretend that we're culturally knowledgable because we came to Uni. In all reality, critics of USEA's supposed division of Uni students fail to realize that we all think these things, it's not that because you go to USEA you suddenly just think these things, they've always been there and USEA is just empowering us to bring them to the table in a realistic and open forum.