College life is an opportunity for people to broaden their horizons. With a chance to meet new people and learn new things, students are supposed to be able to leave school as better, more well-rounded people.

When I came to MSU, I was excited to be a part of something so big. And coming from a town that is mostly white, I was even more thrilled to be submerged into a place with so many different cultures.

Despite my open-mindedness, I have met with various surprises and obstacles since my first day in East Lansing. Things such as affirmative action and racially segregated organizations on campus have made many of my interactions with students of color incredibly uncomfortable.

I hate to say it, but this isn’t right.

As a student, and a person, I feel isolated and shunned because of these MSU-sponsored groups and functions. Why does there need to be a group labeled by the color of a person’s skin?

If you do a search for clubs on the MSU Web site, racial labels head about half of them. Google.com supplies 720 pages for the key words “black clubs.” Black caucuses alone have 225 pages on Google, and that’s not counting those chapters outside of MSU.

Should there be a white caucus, too? Seriously, I thought this kind of division by race should have ended in the 1960s with the rest of publicized racism.

Organizations that are academically or politically based are creating underlying bias that could result in resentment when it chooses to use segregation to aid in its functioning. I am completely in favor of groups that use a common interests as their central purpose, because there still is room for individuality among members.

I am not saying people of the same ethnicity should not be able to identify with one another, but when many of them are excluding others and sitting alone at cafeteria tables or in study lounges, others around them are likely to get a negative vibe.

In all honesty, my roommate is the first black person I have ever spoken with.

I remember the first week of school, when members of the black caucus were knocking on our door. When I answered the door, they took one look at me and said, “Oh, you must be Carrie, is your roommate here?” I’d say, “No,” and they’d thrust a flier at me and tell me to alert my roommate of their visit.

In addition to that, we have received countless notes and flyers in our mailbox, and under our door about the “Black Welcome,” the various “black” groups and other activities seemingly for blacks only.

My roommate says she thinks the black groups are great, but they just aren’t for her. She is comfortable being black, but if she wasn’t, she would still be the same person.

The bottom line is that among any race no two people are alike. Why should one person have an advantage or disadvantage over another because of his or her ethnic background?

Affirmative action is an important national issue and found on MSU’s campus as well as other colleges and universities. This issue was brought up in my sociology class last week and got students out of chairs, yelling and declaring their righteousness.

Personally, I don’t understand how this supposed land of equality can tell anyone they can’t attend an institution simply because of the color of his or her skin. I am for integration of diverse cultures in the college environment, but I don’t think anyone should be part of a quota that must be met as a standard.

When I applied to MSU last fall, I was met with a delay in the process of my admission, but I was lucky enough to get in even with a high grade-point average. But a friend of mine with a higher GPA, who happened to be a white male, wasn’t admitted.

This leads me to wonder how affirmative-action standards judged me in my pursuit of a higher education. A quota seems to be the only thing that could explain my friend’s loss, and my near miss of the privilege of attending MSU.

Segregation is outlawed by our Constitution, and although the intent of affirmative action might be positive, in reality it creates unnecessary inequality. These inequalities can be fixed by the elimination of racially labeled groups and the restructuring of affirmative action.

I am not promoting racism, but this is my pitch for equality among college students.

Carrie Hoover is a State News intern. Reach her at hooverc4@msu.edu