black and white... ain't as easy as a cookie...

i attended a lecture last night about how we identify ourselves in canadian society... ok, ok, i admit that my motivation for attending this first and foremost was to fill the criteria for a radio journalism assignment, but nonetheless, it ended up proving to be rather interesting...
one of the main points the speaker brought up was the connotation surrounding the question "where are you from?"... call me ignorant, but it never crossed my mind that this was anything out of the ordinary to ask... apparently my pale skin has clouded my idea of this and in many ways it is considered to be quite offensive to many people of colour... (oh man, i'm already paranoid that any of this blog entry might border on political incorrectness...)
by asking someone "where are you from?" it creates the assumption that we are identifying people as being different... they are not white, they are black or yellow or brown... therefore they must not be from canada... they have an accent, therefore they must not be from canada... or, more importantly to this argument, they must not be canadian...
it was proposed that this in fact is how we operate as canadians; we question the differences and though we persistantly claim to be multicultural, that term is slowly starting to lose its flavour... or is it though? i think that by asking someone where they are from we are actually posing the question of what their background is... why is there skin a gorgeous light brown tone? why does their voice have a differently beautiful way of pronouncing vocabulary? we are embracing the multi cultures that in fact exist... you do the math: multi + cultures = multicultural???
paint me as an idealist, but i think that there is something so profoundly individual about explaining why someone is of different colour and embracing their differences as a part of what makes canada so unique... we are canadian because of our residential locale, but at the same time there are other cultures that make up our skin colour, hair colour, eye colour or even the invisible things like personality, religion and/or morals and ideals... i'll admit that i step lightly on the subject because i am not of a visable minority and i cannot fathom how it might be to live in canada and deal with prejudice... but, at the same time (and here comes the idealist in me once more) i hope that by exploring where someone came from or what their background is, i am not intruding on how different they are, but rather attempting to get to know them and how wonderful the differences between us are...
if we can morph together in a michael jackson video, then anything is possible... right?