I think the skin color poll was perfectly fine, not racist in the bit. Pretend somebody posted a poll asking about skin color, and only white people saw the poll. And there were only white options. Now, the people with the different type of white color aren't offended. They don't say "HEY! DON'T SAY YOU'RE WHITER THAN ME YOU RACIST BIOTCH!" or anything like that.
Now, racism is treating people DIFFERENT than normal because of their skin color / race. Ex:
Code:
//Racist code
switch(skin_color)
{
case black:
//Do this certain code
default:
//This is for white people, and others, but not blacks
}
See, in the racist code there is different code for the black skin colors. It's treating them differently. Even if it's better code than the others get by default, it's still racist.
So, to eliminate the racism:
Code:
//Good code
switch(skin_color)
{
default:
//This is for white people, and others, as well as blacks
}
So, as you see here the good code treats them ALL the same.
So, in regards to the poll. The poster had no worry about posting about skin color, why would he? He isn't racist, he sees them all as good as the others, all as bad as the others. Had he been afraid to post the poll, that would be racist. See, by posting that poll it shows he ISN'T racist, because it makes them all the same! Get what I mean guys?
Do you ever treat people with your skin color like trash? You don't like them? Yeah, I'm sure most people have at some time or another. So, since we're NOT RACIST, we can do the same to other skin colors, and treat them just the same way.
We should be ok with posting polls about skin color, because it only shows that we treat all of the races the same! Being programmers, you guys should really understand what I'm trying to say.
So to cap it, you should treat other races / skin colors just the same as you would any other skin color. If you want to punch a black guy in the face, do it if you would punch a white guy in the face, or an indian in the face.
I still don't think I've put my thoughts into words as accurately as possible, but basically it is: Whether good things or bad things, treat all of the races the same. No benefits to any, no penalties to others. The real racist people are the ones who lashed out against the poll, because they were still seeing differences in JUST skin color. If they were not racist, and treated them the same, they wouldn't give a damn about it and woudn't even vote.
::FORGOT TO SAY::
So, when you first read the example at the top about the white poll (pretend), you probably agreed nobody would be offended. Now, if you add in colors like black and brown to the poll, nobody should be offended by this modified poll, because there is no difference to the poll with the new options! If you see a poll with only white options on an all-white message board being NOT RACIST, but a poll that has blacks and whites, blacks being at the bottom, on a multi-skin-colored message board, and see it as RACIST, then the latter of the two attitudes are the REAL RACIST ATTITUDES.