Come Oh Ye Rational Thinkers...and explain race theory to me

[robvalue]

Race theory?

Pace yourself to begin with, keep that last burst of energy for the final sprint.

[Mister Agenda]

I just got banned from another board for being racist, in that I asserted that another poster calling me 'white' as in the culture was racist and offensive. I got dinged, saying "calling you white when you are white isn't racist, look it up". I did. Merriam Webster says, racialism: a theory that race determines human traits and capacities; also : racism. First definition, one is a synonym for the other...bam, banned for life.

'You are white' is not racist. 'You are white, therefore you have white privilege' is not racist. 'You are white, therefore you are an oppressor of minorities' IS racist. Essentially, racism is ascribing attributes to a person because of the race they belong to, to which their race is irrelevant. Merely acknowledging what race you (apparently) belong to is not racist. A race is a regional variation of a species. In humans, you can often determine what continent a person's ancestors were from at fifty paces. But also in humans, there is no evidence that race alone affects character.

This isn't about cross sniping. I utterly fail to see my sin, except that I think race theory is illogical and self-defeating and prefer, for myself only, the status of conscientious objector - my race is human and that's as far as it goes.

What right do you have to expect other people to adopt the same label use that you do? And you seem to have conflated 'race theory' with the fact that humans have minor physical variations as a result of evolution that are useful in describing a person's appearance.

I don't force my views on other people - if you want to be Black and rally for Black Power, good. If you prefer Chican@, I can do that. I manage trans-pronouns with native grace (deal with it, Ms Thing). I have erudite opinions on Gay Cinema and French Impressionism. Groovy. But I insist that be two way.

What right do you have to insist that other people agree with you that they're being racist? If I mow your lawn without being asked, does that oblige you to mow mine? Or do some other favor for me? You don't necessarily deserve to be treated the exact same way you are treating someone else. What you are askig for is not necessarily on the same axis as what you're giving. If I call you human instead of white, what does that entitle me to demand from you in return?

I don't make an issue of it, but 'race theory' is a twisted, evil, sick-to-the-core mindvirus/memeplex and I do not care to have it applied to me.

You didn't have it applied to you. Someone called you 'white'. If you're not white, correct them. If you are white, you're getting worked up over a fact. And if you consider 'white' an insult...that's kind of racist, man.

If you look at me and call me 'white' I will respond with something highly provocative and there we go.

You sound like you're being an asshole about it to me. It's not nice to push people's button, but some people have too many buttons.

My analysis of racialism and race theory as it exists in my culture:

The system of racial classification, which most people see as some kind of natural law, seems to be a sociopolitical construct designed to chart how alien a given person is to the cultural standard, using a mixed metric of skin color, native language and ethnic origin, while consistently refusing to define those units.

If that were true, I would not be able to tell the majority of your ancestors are from Europe at a glance.

For instance, while 'black' and 'white' are considered natural classes, nowhere is there to be found a display showing the various existing human skin colorations and the correct term for each.

They are shorthand for being of subSaharan African extraction (hereafter referred to as African extraction for convenience) and European extraction, respectively. They are not just about skin shade. There are dark skinned people who are technically 'white'. If we lived in India, we would use different shorthand.

In fact, the language itself lacks terms for those shades, despite have tens of thousands of other color terms.

Show a photo of a skin shade that you think no one here can name, please.

It seems that when a 'black' person has a skin tone lighter than many 'white' people, the term 'black' shifts to mean an ethnicity.

No, it still really means the person is of African descent. If they are biracial they are entitled to self-identify as black or white or biracial. And if most of their family is mostly of African descent and they are mostly of European descent, I say they still have a right to identify as 'black' if they want to, and vice versa (though the latter is rare).

In other cases, persons with any skin tone may be assigned to the 'Hispanic' or 'Latino' race based on their native language.

'Hispanic' and 'Latino' aren't races, they are ethnicities.

This leaves persons from countries in 'Latin America' who speak English, Portuguese or other languages in racial limbo - or perhaps not, as the category was clearly added to exclude persons from the Americas outside of the USA and Canada from being 'white'.

Are you on the autism spectrum? I don't mean offense, it would help me to know that in responding to you. You seem to take some things very literally. Plenty of Hispanic people are white. Some are Native Americans. Many are a mix. Fortunately for them being in 'racial limbo', their race is independent of what language they speak or what country they were born in. It depends on what region their ancestors were from. The only real 'racial limbo' that is relevant is that there has been so much intermixing of European and Native American and African that they are indeed 'racially ambigious'.

In some situations, the word 'Caucasian' is used, but rather than referring to natives of the Caucus Mountains, it appears to be a synonym for 'white' based on a theory discredited a century ago. Likewise, 'Mongoloid' is a nice term that can mean 'of East Asian extraction' or 'congenitally retarted'. The terms 'Black', 'African-American' and 'Negro' superficially refer to persons who are ethnically sub-Saharan African, while 'white' likewise pretends to mean 'of European extraction'.

Have you heard of the etymological fallacy?

However, when a White and a Black produce offspring, all are Black, rather than Gray or Half-Black as one might expect.

Actually, the result is usually a blend of skin tones exactly as you might expect, because skin color is a blended trait. Brown eyes are a dominant trait but brown skin is not. Interpeting the offspring's appearance as 'black' instead of 'biracial' is a cultural artifact. A racist one, actually.

This can be repeated ad infinitum with the same results: if you take the F1 Black offspring, crossed with a new White, you still get only Black, despite the actual skin tones of the children, which by now are well within the range present in Southern Europe.

Ah, you understand. You must be making some sort of stupid point, then.

This pattern applies only to Black - the F1 of a WhitexAsian cross are 'half asian' or 'mixed'. The only possible analysis of this is that 'White' means 'pure' and 'Black' means 'polluted'.

It's not whites enforcing the 'one drop' rule anymore. Another possible analysis of this is 'black pride'. The people you're talking about almost universally value their black heritage more than they value identifying as white, but even they usually start identifying as white when everyone assumes that's what they are based on their appearance anyway, as a sheer matter of practicality. It's not the 1960s anymore.

The system of hyphenated names to refer to ethnicity seems to be an alternative, but upon inspection shows glaring inconsistency. A 'Japanese-American' is a person with a Japanese cultural heritage who is either born in or a resident of America, but 'African-American' isn't reducible, but a fixed term to refer to persons with cosmopolitan American cultural roots and dark skin, and significantly does not refer to a person with African cultural heritage in the USA. Or maybe it means both. Logically, an Afrikaner or Egyptian immigrant to the USA is also an African-American? Notable for its absence is the term European-American, which should be the proper term for 'white' but isn't used at all. This could go on for hours.

Is there a label for people who insist that everyone use the same terminology they do? Not everyone wants to be as fucking precise as you.

---

I object to having that crap applied to me, especially by people who take it as natural law. Likewise, I don't appreciate being classified as an infidel my Muslims. It's technically correct, but it's irrational crap and I find it offensive on that basis. I don't like being seen as an archetype based on my Zodiac. So? Don't look at me and call me 'white'. Don't read my genome and call me 'black'. And please note that my status as an Asian is only honorary. I want to be classed, racially, as Human.

When I look at you, I think 'touchy', 'oversensitive', 'privileged', and 'over-entitled'.

Human is your species, not your race. 'Human race' is an inaccurate experession, aren't you obsessed with semantic precision, or is that only for other people?

---

Human races *don't* exist, at least in the categories we recognize.

What's this 'we' stuff. Speak for yourself.

Hindi's are Indo-Europeans.

No kidding. Since 'Hindi' isn't a race, and skin tone isn't the only measure of race, why wouldn't they be?

The Japanese don't seem to be related to anyone, nor or the Basque.

Everyone is related. The Japanese don't like to admit that their ancestry is probably mostly Korean mixed with Ainu because the Japanese tend to be pretty racist about that. It's not really such a mystery. I don't know much about the Basque, but even if they don't 'seem' to be related to anyone, they are.

In the real world, you most often find very fuzzy borders.

Again, no kidding.

There is more genetic diversity in one African village than all of medieval England - a sequence will tell you that two people from the same African village are more different than any two people in England. It's CULTURALLY DEFINED and exists for the purpose of discrimination.

It's nice that you read, but if it were really culturally defined, we would not be able to tell a naked person of predominantly subSaharan ancestry from a naked person of predominantly English ancestry by their differing physical qualities. Africans are more diverse because they're the oldest race.

Do you think on Japanese forms the Nihonjin check Asian? In India, your religion is registered with the government and you have to fill out forms to change it - it's their version of race.

It's your version of making everything fit into your worldview that race 'doesn't mean anything'.

It's crap and I don't subscribe to it. My race is human - you can labelled yourself however you like, it's good with me.

Gosh, how white of you to let me label myself however I like.

[LastPoet]

The dudes just went for a tan and forgot to set the timer! There is also the story of 2 guys pissing off D. Louie brigde, in Porto, the "white" dude complained about how dirty the water looked, the "black" dude about how cold it was. I get a laugh out of any black dude, never knew why

[Dystopia]

The dudes just went for a tan and forgot to set the timer! There is also the story of 2 guys pissing off D. Louie brigde, in Porto, the "white" dude complained about how dirty the water looked, the "black" dude about how cold it was. I get a laugh out of any black dude, never knew why

[I hope you're not from Porto]

[tantric]

"if you want to be Black"

This is where I stopped reading

You shouldn't. Consider the CSI Miami episode Double Jeopardy:

Horatio confronts Stephen with the new evidence, but Stephen knows he can't be tried twice for the same crime, and angrily tells Horatio that Melissa was no angel. Bothered by the comment, Horatio sends Ryan to look at Stephen's laptop, which the lab still has from the trial, and discovers a bunch of Nazi propaganda. Stephen was a racist, and had no idea when he married Melissa that his new wife was half-black.

He marries a woman and later finds out she's black. No, he's not blind. His wife is in no visible way black - but she had a black ancestor, so she's black. WTF?

I have 2% subSaharan African DNA. I can choose to be black, apparently.

[tantric]

:et me preface this by noting that my original post was a rant. I was pissed. I don't expect other people to work with my ideas of racism.

'You are white' is not racist. 'You are white, therefore you have white privilege' is not racist. 'You are white, therefore you are an oppressor of minorities' IS racist. Essentially, racism is ascribing attributes to a person because of the race they belong to, to which their race is irrelevant. Merely acknowledging what race you (apparently) belong to is not racist. A race is a regional variation of a species. In humans, you can often determine what continent a person's ancestors were from at fifty paces. But also in humans, there is no evidence that race alone affects character.

The problem is that you are utterly wrong. You are using the vernacular of racists. This is Wikipedia, but all dictionaries concur:

Racialism is the belief that the human species is naturally divided into distinct biological categories called 'races.' According to the Oxford English Dictionary, racialism is synonymous with racism.[1]

And no, you can't, well, it's highly unlikely. You can't tell a Siberian from a Kwakiutl, a Khoisan from a Negrito, a Vietnamese from a Cherokee. The variations in the real world are along a spectrum with no fine lines.

What right do you have to expect other people to adopt the same label use that you do? And you seem to have conflated 'race theory' with the fact that humans have minor physical variations as a result of evolution that are useful in describing a person's appearance.

I want to be able to use 'human' as my definition. That's all. I'm the conscientious objector. The terms are not particularly useful in describing appearances. The first thing to do is to look at this: skin tones. Now we need some words. I don't see white anywhere there, or black. I'd say 1-9 are Bloodless to Sallow, I've never seen anybody healthly like that. 10-18, Cream, Fawn, Beige, Almond? 19-27 Tan, Bronze, Cafe au Lait, Buff...you get the picture

What right do you have to insist that other people agree with you that they're being racist? If I mow your lawn without being asked, does that oblige you to mow mine? Or do some other favor for me? You don't necessarily deserve to be treated the exact same way you are treating someone else. What you are askig for is not necessarily on the same axis as what you're giving. If I call you human instead of white, what does that entitle me to demand from you in return?

Huh? They don't agree. I don't expect them to. That was one instance about a technical point. Well, you can demand that I refrain from insisting that Scientific Atheism is a religion and the belief in no god is still just a belief and a form of theology....just for instance.

You didn't have it applied to you. Someone called you 'white'. If you're not white, correct them. If you are white, you're getting worked up over a fact. And if you consider 'white' an insult...that's kind of racist, man.

So when a person looks at my opinions about the Rwanda genocide, having never met or seen me, and decides I'm white? In that context, it means supporter of the Capitalist Imperialist EuroAmerican Christian Patriarchy ™ and yeah, that's annoying. I did correct him, and in fact gave him a summary of my people's history. It didn't fit race theory, so he ignored it. Race theory is a cultural convention, and I don't belong to the culture that uses it. My people have their own theory - we're the Realpeople and y'all are the ColoredPeople (because of how you describe yourselves). For most of human history, race theory amounted to "our tribe is The People, everyone else is a cannibal". Yeah, I can imagine what you think of that, but it's irrelevant. Anyway, its exactly the same way I feel about American race theory.

You sound like you're being an asshole about it to me. It's not nice to push people's button, but some people have too many buttons.

Okay, let's have some context. I'm writing a setting for RPG's based on Bantu Africa. I've included a few Pygmy cultures on the borders. Since the point of the setting is to see how cultures might develop in best possible setting, I gave some of the pygmies a leg up. The guy who's arguing with me insists that the geSera pygmies in Rwanda live in egalitarian harmony with their Bantu neighbors and that I'm imagining their persecution so that I can feel noble by reimagining them as not nearly extinct. The problem is the 1/3 of the total population of the geSera were murdered in the genocide, which this guy flatly denies happening. You can Wiki it, but all the pygmies have suffered enormous persecution. So, based on this, he decides I'm part of the White Power Structure.

That's offensive on so many levels I don't know where to start. I went with 'racist' because I swore never to use Nazi analogies in an internet debate.

Are you on the autism spectrum? I don't mean offense, it would help me to know that in responding to you. You seem to take some things very literally. Plenty of Hispanic people are white. Some are Native Americans. Many are a mix. Fortunately for them being in 'racial limbo', their race is independent of what language they speak or what country they were born in. It depends on what region their ancestors were from. The only real 'racial limbo' that is relevant is that there has been so much intermixing of European and Native American and African that they are indeed 'racially ambigious'.

Close. I have low latent inhibition.
and a 160 IQ. I have no filters. I can't just classify something and tune it out. For instance, if I'm in a room with books, I'll read the spine of each and every one. That applies to people. I can't look at a person, say 'black' and stop. I look at grooming, posture, clothing, facial expression, etc, etc. Human beings are like a fire hose of information. I don't see the world like other people. Shorthand classifications are useless - the best I can do is try to evaluate what 'race' a person identifies with. But of course, other people look at me and see the shorthand. I can't expect them to see like I do, and wouldn't want them to, so I just offer another shorthand - 'human'.

When I look at you, I think 'touchy', 'oversensitive', 'privileged', and 'over-entitled'.

Human is your species, not your race. 'Human race' is an inaccurate experession, aren't you obsessed with semantic precision, or is that only for other people?

I was responding to a specific incident that really pissed me off. I don't normally care. I was very privileged and entitled during the two years I spent in a maximum security prison. Yeah, I know LOTS about race relations. I sat down at a table with an MS13, who had '13' tattooed across his forehead in Mayan numerals and showed him my Jaguar tat. Ojale. Since I could only have religious books, I got a bilingual copy of the Koran and got the Nation of Islam guy next door to teach me. I think that gangster rap is a disease, a sick scam where 'rappers' sell the idea that violence and crime are part of artistic integrity and prison is the road to being a star. I played DnD in prison with a protoAryan and a Nuwabian and a babyraper turned hyperchristian. And all of them are people to me. I don't think I could have done those things if I stopped at race. This is not some ivory tower theory - it's life experience.

And WTF? My species is Homo sapiens. My race is human - the other options being Martian, Vulcan and Alien Transvestite Robot? Want to know how deepset this is for me? Here's a nifty little anecdote.

I like rational, efficient systems. I live in the USA and use metric. The name 'USA' bugs me, but so what. I call all over the counter medicines by their chemical names. I reject Abrahamic religious concepts - I tried my damnedest (humor) to edit out of my language, but its useless. I say "the data are" when talking science and "the data is" when using computer jargon. I spent several months learning Lojban. When I was in HS I invented a script for phonetic English so I could record people's dialects accurately. Even though I grew up in the deep South with VERY southern parents, I've never had a Southern accent. I had a three way with ChiChi LaRue. I taught myself organic chemistry and set up an MDMA lab so I could give it away, fighting the War on Some Drugs. That's me. Human, Reincarnated pygmy, one of the Rainbow people.

[emilynghiem]

I just got banned from another board for being racist, in that I asserted that another poster calling me 'white' as in the culture was racist and offensive. I got dinged, saying "calling you white when you are white isn't racist, look it up". I did. Merriam Webster says, racialism: a theory that race determines human traits and capacities; also : racism. First definition, one is a synonym for the other...bam, banned for life.

This isn't about cross sniping. I utterly fail to see my sin, except that I think race theory is illogical and self-defeating and prefer, for myself only, the status of conscientious objector - my race is human and that's as far as it goes.

I don't force my views on other people - if you want to be Black and rally for Black Power, good. If you prefer Chican@, I can do that. I manage trans-pronouns with native grace (deal with it, Ms Thing). I have erudite opinions on Gay Cinema and French Impressionism. Groovy. But I insist that be two way. I don't make an issue of it, but 'race theory' is a twisted, evil, sick-to-the-core mindvirus/memeplex and I do not care to have it applied to me. If you look at me and call me 'white' I will respond with something highly provocative and there we go.

My analysis of racialism and race theory as it exists in my culture:

The system of racial classification, which most people see as some kind of natural law, seems to be a sociopolitical construct designed to chart how alien a given person is to the cultural standard, using a mixed metric of skin color, native language and ethnic origin, while consistently refusing to define those units. For instance, while 'black' and 'white' are considered natural classes, nowhere is there to be found a display showing the various existing human skin colorations and the correct term for each.In fact, the language itself lacks terms for those shades, despite have tens of thousands of other color terms. It seems that when a 'black' person has a skin tone lighter than many 'white' people, the term 'black' shifts to mean an ethnicity. In other cases, persons with any skin tone may be assigned to the 'Hispanic' or 'Latino' race based on their native language. This leaves persons from countries in 'Latin America' who speak English, Portuguese or other languages in racial limbo - or perhaps not, as the category was clearly added to exclude persons from the Americas outside of the USA and Canada from being 'white'. In some situations, the word 'Caucasian' is used, but rather than referring to natives of the Caucus Mountains, it appears to be a synonym for 'white' based on a theory discredited a century ago. Likewise, 'Mongoloid' is a nice term that can mean 'of East Asian extraction' or 'congenitally retarted'. The terms 'Black', 'African-American' and 'Negro' superficially refer to persons who are ethnically sub-Saharan African, while 'white' likewise pretends to mean 'of European extraction'. However, when a White and a Black produce offspring, all are Black, rather than Gray or Half-Black as one might expect. This can be repeated ad infinitum with the same results: if you take the F1 Black offspring, crossed with a new White, you still get only Black, despite the actual skin tones of the children, which by now are well within the range present in Southern Europe. This pattern applies only to Black - the F1 of a WhitexAsian cross are 'half asian' or 'mixed'. The only possible analysis of this is that 'White' means 'pure' and 'Black' means 'polluted'. The system of hyphenated names to refer to ethnicity seems to be an alternative, but upon inspection shows glaring inconsistency. A 'Japanese-American' is a person with a Japanese cultural heritage who is either born in or a resident of America, but 'African-American' isn't reducible, but a fixed term to refer to persons with cosmopolitan American cultural roots and dark skin, and significantly does not refer to a person with African cultural heritage in the USA. Or maybe it means both. Logically, an Afrikaner or Egyptian immigrant to the USA is also an African-American? Notable for its absence is the term European-American, which should be the proper term for 'white' but isn't used at all. This could go on for hours.

First I agree with you what is being debated are CULTURAL issues and differences in thinking and biases from that; so for you, by your cultural values, the person who made that comment really did so in the spirit of making a racially loaded remark.
if other people didn't see it that way, that is their cultural bias. and regardless if it was or was not intended as racial, if it came across that way to you, then it had that effect.

as for race, it has been shown that people's ethnic proximity makes a difference in medical issues, where genetics matters. the example I cite most often is HLA compatibility for bone marrow transplants. caucasian donors and patients have 9/10 chance of finding a match; but the minorities only have 1/10 chance of finding one. Race matters so much, it even depends on matching patients by nationality, like Nigerians to other Nigerians, and Vietnamese to other Vietnamese. the bone marrow registry set up 4 nonprofit groups to target recruitment for 4 key races identified as Asian/Pacific Islander, African, Latino/Hispanic, and Native American. so they even recognize that lives depend on matching people by these specific pools.

with black/white class division in America, the issue of slavery introduced factors into the actual bloodlines: first the factor of spiritual wounds carried from one generation to the next that require extensive work to heal and let go of resentment and anger that can express itself as either hatred or even phobic level fear of racism by others. you can say it is carried in the spirit, and race correlates as another factor passed
down from one generation to the next; race isn't necessarily the cause but a correlating factor in order to identify socially so the issues can be addressed.

second the factor of no family experience or history with owning and managing property and businesses, so that there can be a near phobic engrained fear of owning property under a daunting system that appears dominated by white culture and class. i've run into fear of property and fear of laws and govt etc because it is associated with white systems and white man dominance over the poor who are victims to it.

whatever you call that rental mentality and fear of being able to gain equal control as the white wealthy classes, i've seen this even worse in some black families and communities taught to resist and distrust this whole system as a way of oppression.

this should be just a physical difference in opportunity that can be remedied by education and experience, but it has been engrained in people because of the painful history of slavery and the deprivation of rights to own property and learn how to manage and govern as other property owners can. so it is deeper than just socioeconomic and some of it is passed down from families without this background, because the family history was destroyed by genocide and needs time to recover.

[Neo-Scholastic]

'You are white' is not racist. 'You are white, therefore you have white privilege' is not racist. 'You are white, therefore you are an oppressor of minorities' IS racist.

I knew someone would bring up 'white privilege' eventually Seems to be a new buzz word. I cannot put my finger on why I find it so problematic. Perhaps because it makes it possible to attribute any personal success or failure solely to sociopolitical factors. It seems to encourage envy and downplay grit, as in "You didn't build that."

[paulpablo]

There are gene lines, yes, and the East Asian Blush is true, but they don't track with 'races' at all. And, generally, they are mixed and mixed again, so that it'd be impossible to make neat categories.

What do you mean when you say gene lines don't track with races?

I'm just confused because I don't know what you mean by track with, and I don't know how you can find that something doesn't track with something you believe is non existent anyway.

I always thought race basically was genetic lines, different breeds of people. Obviously pretty much every different breed of human is cross bred because there's very few groups of people who are isolated totally from other groups of humans, there are no neat dividing lines but there are groups of people with different characteristics.

---

Julial wrote

Race is a leftover cultural concept from the age of expansion of the English/French/Spanish/Dutch/Portugese used to rationalize the subjugation of pretty much everyone they met outside Europe. Other folks, like the Japanese, had similar xenophobic concepts, but were less effective in implementing their empires.

I disagree with this just because it seems like an over simplified too specific to be historically accurate to say that the concept of race if leftover from one specific era by one group of people for one specific purpose.

Ancient civilizations all over the world before many of the countries you mentioned even existed had concepts of race, egyptians and greeks for example.

[tantric]

There are gene lines, yes, and the East Asian Blush is true, but they don't track with 'races' at all. And, generally, they are mixed and mixed again, so that it'd be impossible to make neat categories.

What do you mean when you say gene lines don't track with races?

I'm just confused because I don't know what you mean by track with, and I don't know how you can find that something doesn't track with something you believe is non existent anyway.

I always thought race basically was genetic lines, different breeds of people. Obviously pretty much every different breed of human is cross bred because there's very few groups of people who are isolated totally from other groups of humans, there are no neat dividing lines but there are groups of people with different characteristics.

---

Julial wrote

Race is a leftover cultural concept from the age of expansion of the English/French/Spanish/Dutch/Portugese used to rationalize the subjugation of pretty much everyone they met outside Europe. Other folks, like the Japanese, had similar xenophobic concepts, but were less effective in implementing their empires.

I disagree with this just because it seems like an over simplified too specific to be historically accurate to say that the concept of race if leftover from one specific era by one group of people for one specific purpose.

Ancient civilizations all over the world before many of the countries you mentioned even existed had concepts of race, egyptians and greeks for example.

The genetic maps of human groupings are wildly complicated. This is the easiest one to follow I've found, based on Y-DNA. It's also grossly simplified, particularly in the Americas. When you track mitochrondrial DNA, you get something else.

I actually had a plan for fixing the system - making new terms. I barely started before I noticed the extreme similarity to NewSpeak. If I'd finished it I'd be a namerigens weseurotype englang cosmamericult. Born in North America, of the western European YDNA group, english speaking, cosmopolitan american culture. Still, that tells you something.

Every country does have a concept of race, and all of them are different. Racism in alive and well in Zimbabwe, and it's not about the Rhodesians. It's conflict between the Shona and Ndebele.

Masiye, is one example. Masiye is today in his mid-thirties. His
late father was a Moyo, but his mother is a Khumalo. According to
the principle of patrilineality, he inherited his father's isibongo. He has
married an Nguni wife, however, and both he and his mother are very
proud of his wife's aristocratic status:

"My mum is extremely excited about it. She is very hard-core Nguni, and I
am sure she might have feared that I had married one of these lesser groups.
It is actually always in her speech. What kind of person are you talkkig
about? She actually says: Wumuntumuntu? 'Is it a real person?' [literally: 'Is
it a person person?']."

These three men all first presented themselves with pride as Ndebele;
however when tracing their ancestors' first names and izibongo back
in time, they revealed that they were of Shona origin. They first
over-communicated Ndebele ethnic identity and under-communicated
Shona origin, but when it became apparent that that they could not
pass as 'pure' Ndebele any longer they started to talk about their
Shona origin.

But to Americans, that's not racism cause both groups are 'black'.