One of the top stories on CNN.com yesterday bore the headline “Gender or race: Black women voters face tough choices in S.C.â€Â

The story centered on the political gossip inside a salon owned by an African-American woman and whether the community of her workers and her customers, also largely black women, would support the “black candidateâ€Â or the “female candidate.â€Â

The story stirred up controversy amongst readers and, later in the evening, CNN posted an update, acknowledging a body of angry responses, including excerpts of e-mails from readers of various demographics. Many readers were offended at the assertion that the dominant mode of voting would be done in terms of racial or gender identification, rather than based on actual political content.

Frankly, we can̢۪t disagree with these readers. The headline alone belies the political stereotypes that inform the rest of the original article, assuming that black females in South Carolina will inevitably vote as Democrats, and that none are interested in seeing native son John Edwards as president.

This, on the holiday celebrating one of the greatest leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The assumption that landed CNN in hot water is the result of the same kind of punditry that, just weeks ago, virtually coronated Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee; that just months ago, proclaimed Rudy Giuliani as the Republican candidate; that year after year after year tells scores of high school seniors that white men are all Republican, black women are all Democrats and that Mexicans are somewhere in-between. They are all conclusions drawn from trends, that push pundits and speculators to talk about candidates “capturingâ€Â voting blocs like pieces in a game of chess, as if we’ve formed group identities that rigid, that unified, that homogeneous.

Simultaneously and, perhaps, ironically, we at The Collegian cannot escape blame when condemning that slightly ill-defined but comfortably culpable entity Western culture likes to call “the media.â€Â Even on this page, in our first issue of the semester, we’ve discussed the way Obama has, as per the pundits’ consensus, “capturedâ€Â the youth vote, and in the coming weeks, we plan to offer more stories and commentary surrounding the issues concerning California and our role in the political process on a national level.

As entrenched in the race for the presidency as we are now — we The Collegian, we the media and we the American public — it is sometimes hard to remind ourselves of the difference between trends and truths.

But it is something we must do. With “Gender or race,â€Â CNN overstepped the fine line between operating in the realm of political predispositions and journalistic racism.

Because we are not pawns, it is something we must do, lest we commit the same offenses, and in doing so, offer up a version of the American public that assimilates identities rather than forges them.

We should assume better of ourselves.