at best describes you: Asian, Black or African American, Native American, Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, White or Caucasian, Hispanic or Latino. Every college student has been faced with these discriminatory check boxes at some point.

It makes sense for college applications to want to compartmentalize our ethnicities into simple groupings.

After all, demographics are easier to report when there’s only five or six categories.

However, a person’s identity isn’t something that can (or should) be boiled down to a generalization.

At 1 p.m. today in the East Dining Room, there will be a discussion on diversity in the Hispanic/Latin community. An important topic is the difference between the Hispanic classification and its Latino counterpart.

Both terms are typically lumped together, or Hispanic is used as a blanket term for all Spanish-speaking ethnicities.

Not only is this inaccurate, it’s also demeaning.

According to Hispanic-Culture-Online.com, “Hispanic” refers to people from countries that Spain colonized, whereas “Latino” refers to people with Latin roots, which could encompass any country colonized by the Romans.

Clearly there’s a difference, but most government documents simply use the term Hispanic.

The United States has always been known as a melting pot of cultures.

Usually this is regarded as a positive sentiment, suggesting that people of all ethnicities can find a home here and bring their unique customs into the community.

But perhaps the melting pot has been stirred a few too many times, because now we’re losing our cultural identities.

Hispanics and Latinos aren’t the only victims. Irish people are White. Samoans are Pacific Islander. Koreans are Asian.

Any smidgen of individuality has been decimated.

How can we maintain our personal identities in a world where we’re so unceremoniously grouped into these broad classifications?

For starters, discussions like the one today. By opening a line of communication and informing people that Hispanic should not be used as a general term for all Spanish-speaking people, we are spreading awareness.

Enlighten people. A person may be German, Scottish, Middle Eastern or Italian. Is it fair to just call him “White?” Should we throw out the terms Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Taiwanese in favor of the all-encompassing “Asian?”

One of the most important aspects of our identity as Americans is that our culture is made up of all different ethnicities and cultures that blend their traditions together to create an American heritage.

Generalizations offer nothing to the masses. They simply bring minimal information about one’s heritage to light.

Sadly this is not enough to gauge an appreciation of someone’s cultural lineage.

Black, White, Asian, Native American and Hispanic are inept descriptions of race.

In order to establish a proper respresentation of one’s race, there should be more options available on applications.

As a person you are proud of where you came from and deserve the right to fully respresent every nationality that is in your blood.

If we continue to pack ourselves into these general ethnic labels, we lose the finer pieces of what our culture consists of, different ethnicities of the world.