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First, a necessary disclaimer: I'm white. That is not an overexposed photograph on my Helium profile. (Well, all right, maybe it is, but not that much.) As such I don't exactly feel qualified to have a real opinion about an organization expressly put together to assist people of color. It's their organization, not mine; they can run it as they like. And they don't need me to make that pronouncement, either. I'm making it more for the white people reading, frankly.

With that out of the way, although I'm probably a little better informed about racism than your average white American who isn't a member of any pro- or anti-racism group, I haven't been keeping up with news about the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Therefore, I'm not sure what is meant about a "name change" as suggested in the title of this debate. I have a few ideas, though, so I'll address each in turn.

The first possibility is that the NAACP is finding itself mired in yet another argument about what we should all call people of color. Some of my readers will be familiar with the way discussion about people of African descent has evolved in this country since the 1950s. I doubt this is the issue at the center of the name-change debate, however, because it went out of vogue to refer to African-Americans as "colored" sometime in the 1970s or 1980s. If they had a problem with the NAACP's name, they would have changed it then.

There's also the point that people of African descent are not the only "colored people" in the United States, and that it has become somewhat accepted, at least on the Internet, to refer to people who are not white as "people of color." This is to completely remove the notion that being white is some kind of "normal" standard from which people who are not white deviate, as was implied in the term "non-white." In that context, what the acronym NAACP stands for is completely appropriate; "colored people" is just a short form of "people of color."

The second possibility is that people outside of the NAACP think it has strayed far from its original purpose due to corruption within the organization. If an organization's internal corruption is bad enough to justify a name change, I could think of a few choice new names for the Republican Party. Let's get serious here.

(Yes, yes, the Democrats are corrupt too. I know. Let's not descend into childish whining about how your side's not bad because mine's bad too, please, especially as I consider myself a Green who

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