trigs;325018 wrotein reference to your second point there milo, there are quite a lot of people who argue that there is no such thing as race. if you are actually interested i can try to find some links for you. i've taken a crap ton of cultural studies courses back in the day and there is a lot of literature on the subject of race and it's complete arbitrary nonsense.
I will stipulate . . . these days I tend to swap "race" and "ethnicity", and use them to mean the same thing. Bad Milo, I know, but there it is . . .
Still, I think that, when discussing cultural or ethnic divides, use of the term "race" does speed up the conversation, despite it's imprecision. We all know that homo sapiens are all one "race", broken into many evolutionary ethnicities, but that is just too much of a mouthful to speak, let alone type every time . . . hence "race".
