I think the question confuses race and culture. There is a normal tendency to associate primarily with people with whom you share some beliefs and values and customs and so on, but these characteristics are not fixed or unchangeable. Cultures learn from each other, people change their cultural values or create new cultures, and that kind of fluid, interactive situation is appropriate to the concept of culture. That's not race, though.

I don't think race is hardwired, because I think race changes its meanings as contexts are different. Now I would argue there is no longer as categorical an attitude towards, say, black people, as there used to be, in the sense that more and more exceptions are being made to what may be still the prevalent stereotypes. So the situation is definitely changing. What hasn't changed enough is the tremendous difference in wealth between racial groups, particularly the net worth of families, which makes a big difference. So there are structural inequalities that are still with us that we have hardly begun to overcome at all. In fact, they don't seem to be closing; that's the problem. So you can have an Oprah, and you can have a Colin Powell and you can have a Condoleezza Rice, but you can still have a lot of people who just don't have any opportunities, because they don't have the economic resources to go anywhere in this society.

I agree that there's a confusion of culture and biological features and this is at the heart of the idea of race all along. But when you look back at history, it doesn't confirm that we only gravitate towards people who are physically like ourselves. The American Indians, for example, accepted or embraced Europeans. Everywhere in the world intermarriage among various peoples who are very different from one another physically occurs. In England today in the Midlands area, there are a large number of white women who are marrying Africans - mostly students who have come to study in the university. They are forming whole new communities of mixed people. There is no natural human tendency to separate ourselves from others because they look different from us, and this is something that we have to learn.

I always refer to that song in South Pacific that says you have to be taught to hate. It's true, as George says, when you speak the same language and share the same values, there is a tendency to want to be with people who are like that. That's why ethnic populations all over the country tend to live together. But look at what's happening in the world today. Americans who travel in different parts of the world tend to find that when they encounter another American, they're quite happy to do so, and it doesn't matter whether that American is black or white. Our young people in the military all over the world are also experiencing that people who look like you may not have your culture at all. There are lots of people in the Middle East who look like black Americans and they have nothing in common. A young man I know saw what he thought was a "brother" in a neat suit walking down the street in Baghdad and he went up to him and said, "Hi bro," and the guy looked at him strangely. Here is this brown-skinned man with kinky hair who actually spoke English, but didn't recognize the forms of communication and interaction that black Americans have when they say, "Hi bro," or whatever to one another. Black and white Americans all over the world are finding they have a lot more in common with each other than with people who are physically similar to themselves.

I also have to disagree with the questioner. This question assumes that we all have an identity that we use all the time. Therefore, we can go through the process of selecting people who also have similar identities that they use all the time, and these identities can be put into one community of like identities. But the question I would ask is, (1) is there an identity that any person uses all the time, and (2) is that identity race?

First, I think it's absolutely true that people who have similar identities, similar interests, gravitate to one another. For example, I'm a tennis player. When I go on vacation or some place where I know very few people and I see another person who is playing tennis, I gravitate towards that person because it's the thing we have in common. When I lived in Germany, one of the things I did, because my German is terrible, is I tended to gravitate towards people who could speak English. Why? Because we could talk. Some of them were native English speakers; some of them were Germans who spoke English very well. The point is that it was the English, the linguistic part of my identity that we had in common and identified with.

The assumption in this question, which is a bad assumption, is that race is the most important part of a person's identity and that's it's the most important part all of the time. I would argue that that's not true at all. In fact, I would argue that in some cases, race is so far down the line of important parts of your identity that depending on the particular circumstance, it becomes superfluous. One might ask, during the Second World War, when the English faced the Germans, did they say, "Hey, we're all the same race so we shouldn't have these kinds of problems"? What about wars in various parts of Africa where people do horrible things to their enemies. I doubt the fact that they were the same race gave them much pause.