Race

Yesterday I spent quite some time exploring my virtual world and realized that in terms of race, Second Life lacks variety. The individuals that I have encountered appear to be Caucasian, with the exception of two people. It was interesting to see the options when initially selecting an avatar. There were several Caucasian men and women to choose from, but only one avatar of African American heritage. Although you can customize and change features on your character, exclusion is definitely at work, in my opinion. There are so many steps that you have to go through when you modify your appearance, that it becomes frustrating in some ways. My guess would be that most users stick with the generic avatars while simply altering clothing.
Honestly, it was a little discouraging, and somewhat of a hassle to make my avatar resemble my real life appearance. When I signed up for Second Life, I selected the African American woman, but I may have had a glitch in my computer system because once I began exploring the world I was Caucasian. I scrambled to change my physical features because I felt as though I was being deceitful. I mentioned in a previous post that I gained quite a few friends within the first 20 minutes or so. I can't help but to wonder if my race had anything to do with how friendly people were to me. In addition, I thought about the possibility of the other users representing a race not true to their own in this virtual world.
Would you ever consider being a completely different race in a virtual world? If so, what race would it be and why? Do you think your behavior as that particular race would be affected by stereotypical ideologies?