[pluma]

To be fair the American racial categories seem pretty inane to my non-American eyes to begin with.

I understand that there is a lot of cultural baggage to the various categories but I can't count how many times I've been genuinely surprised by Americans identifying as black or Latina/o. The most striking ones I think were Halle Berry and Obama -- it took me a while to process that their recognition was genuinely noteworthy in the US because of their ethnicity. You could have told me Obama were Moroccan or Halle Berry were Indian and I wouldn't have been any more surprised.

For context: I'm German, grew up in the 90s in a city with ~1M residents and am literally colorblind (partially green blind). I'm not sure what part of that makes me unable to properly racially categorize people but I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.

[rdtsc]

I grew up in Europe and then moved to US. In US, at least in some context (college admissions for example), there is a thing called affirmative action. It seems in order to right a a wrong from the past, or to promote diversity they would sometimes have quotas on how many students from each background to pick. So depending just on race, one could have an easier or much harder way getting accepted. Therefore people would play that card in order to game the system.

[pluma]

I understand that the legislation/culture around race is in part used to correct historical racism (and the present day consequences of it) but I do wonder whether this obsession with racially categorizing oneself is a necessary evil or just evil.