> From the outside (Europe) you have to ask yourself why the US even recognizes such a thing as race. I work for a public K-12. We're required to ask students

> From the outside (Europe) you have to ask yourself why the US even recognizes such a thing as race. I work for a public K-12. We're required to ask students to identify their ethnicity at enrollment. If a student refuses to identify a race, we're required to enter something. The direction we've gotten is, "look at the student and guess". That sounds ridiculous, until you remember that real people identify minorities 100% by looking at them and guessing. In a very real sense, you are the race you appear to be to a bigot when it comes to discrimination. However, we're also not allowed to question a reported ethnicity. That's because even if you look white, if you have black ancestors you're still likely to have worse outcomes simply because your ancestors endured racial discrimination. Now, the only reason we collect ethnicity is so that it can be used for reports to USED's Office of Civil Rights. It's used to document that the educational outcomes for students are as equal or equitable as possible. It's used to show that there is as little racial discrimination built into the structure of public education as possible. That is the sole purpose we use it for. We report it to state and federal agencies, and they use it for basically the same. They use it to identify where racial discrimination is taking place. The reason we do that is because racism and racial discrimination is alive and well. Bear in mind, too, that there are public school districts in essentially every state in the US under desegregation orders right now. It's not just a problem of individual racism, but structural and institutional racism as well. It extends the whole gamut from petty teasing in grade school to genocide. It appears to impact everything from academic achievement to job earnings to healthcare outcomes to life expectancy to risk of being a victim of a crime to likelihood of home ownership to incarceration rates. It is a deep and clearly systemic issue, and if you think it doesn't exist in your nation it's because you're not actually looking. If you weren't paying attention over the past several years the far right has a lot of followers, and it's not just in the United States. Britain's brexit and Europe's response to the Syrian refugee crisis are also examples of ongoing racial discrimination. This is a global problem with real, measurable, ongoing effects. Right now as we speak people are being killed simply because they belong to a different race or culture. Why does the US care about race? Because bigots do, and minority xenophobia is one of the foremost causes of violence, civil war, and state-sponsored violence against their own citizenry in the world today. It's the metric that the enemy uses. Why wouldn't you want to pay attention to it? Frankly, I think it's shocking that Europe ignores such a blatant and informative metric. You look like you've got your head in the sand.