White privilege. Despite my pale, freckled, Irish and Swedish skin (trust me, it doesn’t get much paler than this), it’s not something I really think about on a regular basis.

At least until I go home to Massachusetts. My aunt, whose skin is just as pale and freckled as mine, is a professor at Tufts, teaching classes such as “African American History since 1865” and “Class, Race and Gender in the History of U.S. Education.” She dedicated her education and career to learning about the events that have created white privilege (she acknowledges, ironically, that she occupies a position of privilege as a professor at a majority-white university).

So every time I come home, I am reminded — reprimanded, almost — of the white privilege that my life has been steeped in. My family not only acknowledges our white privilege, but constantly points it out to each other so that we do not take our opportunities for granted.

When I made my debut in the Opinion section, I advocated a different type of diversity: diversity of thoughts and ideas. Since then, I have avoided that topic, as I consider it too much of a cliché, but a few years later, the time is now ripe to revive this concept with a new twist.

No matter who they side with, those who fail to consider the diverse array of perspectives in composing their arguments are destined to produce poor sketches of their own arguments.

With a name that has become a synonym for vitriolic battle rhymes and militant politics, luminary rapper and noted political activist Immortal Technique is used to controlling a crowd. This Friday, the night before Halloween, belongs to Technique, who will take the stage in the Appel Multipurpose Room on Friday night before a tight group of 300 students, expounding on his political philosophies and explaining his most divisive songs.

“My political views have a historical reference point,” said Technique (born Felipe Andres Coronel) in an e-mail statement. “They have a combination of what I know to be true because I have seen it and what I know to be false because I have lived it.”

To the Editor:

Re: “A Long Way Come, A Long Way to Go: Race Remains an Issue at Cornell 40 Years Later,” News, April 16.

In her thought-provoking article on diversity issues at Cornell, the author quotes me as saying that a focus on “numbers” (of minority faculty — or minority staff and students, for that matter) is not enough, and that in fact it can be misleading. I went on to add a practical proposal that the author was probably not able to include in her story.

To the Editor:

Re: “A Gag Order on Race in Architecture: Talking about culture instead of experience,” Arts, April 21.

To the Editor:

Re: “A Long Way Come, A Long Way to Go: Race Remains an Issue at Cornell 40 Years Later,” News, April 16.

In this article, the author commented: “... 40 years later, the more things change the more they stay the same.”

Really? What about all those Cornell students and faculty members of Asian descent, minorities all, about whom the author, somehow, failed to report? Are they just “chopped livah”?

To the Editor:

Re: “Professors: Concept of ‘Race’ Biologically Moot,” Science, Feb. 18

In yesterday’s Sun, Erin Sulzman describes a panel of biologists and other scientist discussing race and the fact that race is no longer a viable scientific category, despite the fact that it remains a social category. The piece is informative, but one statement leaps out to me, a graduate student in anthropology, as inaccurate: “While race is standard fare in anthropology classes, it has become an uncommon word in science.”

200 years after Darwin’s birth, a panel of scientists concluded that race is no longer a biological issue. Part of the fourth annual Darwin Days, the Feb. 10 panel discussion in Goldwin Smith’s Lewis Auditorium was moderated by Prof. Warren Allmon, earth and atmospheric sciences, who directs the Paleontological Research Institute in Ithaca.

Allmon invited the panelists to explore the relationship between evolution and race. While race is standard fare in anthropology classes, it has become an uncommon word in science. Scientists do not tend to think about race from an evolutionary point of view, the panel agreed.

Fifty-thousand dollars. That sum of money could not pay for four years of tuition alone at Cornell University, and an individual person donating that much could not even get half of a classroom named in his honor. It is enough money though, to cause some people to raise a fuss when the Veritas Fund for Higher Education donates it for the promotion of intellectual diversity.

Basically, intellectual diversity is the novel concept that one should understand a diverse variety of viewpoints. That’s hardly a radical or conservative notion. When someone does not have an intellectually diverse viewpoint, you can often tell by some of the silly arguments they make.

After an exhausting and masturbatory twenty month long election cycle, thank god the end is finally in sight. Obama and McCain are approaching the last mile of this marathon, and despite a flurry of new attacks and policy proposals, Obama has cleared the hurdles placed before him.