Well, IMHO race is an illusion as our deck is so shuffled everybody has some diamonds, some spades, some clubs and some hearts in their hand. The American convention that one drop of African blood (i.e. 31 of 32 of your 4th generation ancestors came from Europe, one from Africa, you're still considered black) only serves to reinforce how absolutely foolish it is to continue this ridiculous convention.

What many people don't seem to realize is that "White" only goes back about 30 to 40 years, when the Klan couldn't get enough members restricting their recruiting pool to those of Anglo, Germanic and Scandanavian descent. In 1950, Irish, Poles, Italians, (even the French!) were all considered as less than desireable.

What are Jews? White or Middle Eastern?

Anyway, a couple of other points I'd like to make on comments I've seen so far:

What about an interracial person?
People aren't inter-racial (between races), they're multi-racial, and I would argue that if you look hard enough EVERYONE falls into this category. Relationships are inter-racial. {Semantics}

So what is Asian? Indian Subcontinent? Arabian Subcontinent? Far East Asia?
In American parlance, Asian is what you in the UK would refer to as Oriental. Korean, Japanese, Han and other Asiatic peoples in the USA get offended when you refer to them as Oriental (not sure why) and if you guess the wrong nationality, they REALLY get offended (that I can understand). So 'Asian' is a catch-all phrase for folks from China, Japan, Korea, Indochina, Indonesia or Malaysia. Interestingly, in the USA at least, it does not refer to people from the Indian subcontinent (whom we refer to as Indian, as a whole, regardless of their nationality). I'm sure the Sikhs and the Pakastanis seethe with resentment but they've yet to establish a viable alternative.

It is in my mind a worse subject than sexism because with sexism, no one has been enslaved or beaten or made a fool of.
You're joking right? Where do you think the expression 'rule of thumb' comes from? It was only in the mid to late 1970s in the USA that a man could be convicted of raping his wife. While I'll grant you that Africa, the Middle East and the Far East have a ways to go in terms of treating women better, let's not kid ourselves and pretend it's been any joy for North American or European women until this present generation....