My daughter thought for a moment and said nothing.

My wife asked again, explaining what she meant.

Still nothing.

Finally my daughter replied, in all honesty, "I don't know."

It was a refreshing moment, especially when we confirmed later in the week that the little friend is indeed black, so far as we can tell.

As President-elect Barack Obama has noted, it's not easy to define race and ethnicity anymore. Obama, with an African father, is hailed as the first black president. Yet his mother was a white woman from Kansas.

The American melting pot has become a blender. My daughter's school on Madison's East Side is a kaleidoscope of color. Fewer than a third of the students are white.

And from what I can tell, the kindergartners group one another without any racial or ethnic hang-ups.

They care most if their fellow students are fun to be around, if they're willing to share their cool stuff and sit by them during lunch.

If they have to quickly group their peers, they do so by gender and grade level. For example, I recently learned it's a big deal on the schoolyard that one of my daughter's friends is (gasp!) a first-grader.

But when it comes to race, the kids seem colorblind. And a lot of their parents are growing tired of having to identify their children's shade of skin on bureaucratic forms. This is especially true of the Latino and black parents who worry their children are being set up for low expectations.

They're starting to wonder why race has to be defined and used as a measure for gauging learning at all. Why can't their children simply be children who may or may not need help in a particular school subject?

The answer, of course, is that government is trying to to prevent discrimination. And yet by calling so much attention to skin color that's increasingly hard to define, government institutions may actually be perpetuating the problem they're striving to fix.

Obama's election suggests race matters less than a lot of us thought. That's not to say racism is gone. I can only imagine the elation that black people, abused by bigotry for generations, must feel after this historic election. I also can understand some worry that racism will not be rooted out with as much vigor now that a black man is in the White House.

Yet Obama is technically of mixed race. And increasingly, so are we all.

By "celebrating diversity," as the cliche goes, we are gradually eliminating it. More and more families in white Wisconsin have children and grandchildren of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds. Even in my own family of German and Irish ancestry, the number of brown children at reunions is growing.

It's quite easy to imagine my own grandchildren being of vague ethnicity. And the more younger generations mix and marry, the less skin color will matter. Virtually everyone is going to be varying degrees of the same ambiguous shade.

A lot of white people in Wisconsin, including myself, have tended to avoid discussions of race in the past because we worried we didn't have proper standing. What do we know? We've never experienced the brunt of discrimination. And we feared politically-correct Madison might pounce at the slightest offense.

But Obama's big win seems to have changed the rules. Everybody is talking about race.

I just hope all the discussion doesn't throw off or back our kids. After my daughter learned that her parents use race and ethnicity to help identify people, she worried she had failed somehow by not doing the same thing.

No, Zella, you haven't failed. You and your generation are the ones finally getting it right.

Milfred is editorial page editor for the State Journal; smilfred@madison.com or 608-252-6110.