No, I am saying that skin tone would not be as important a feature.

For example, lining up those dead bodies by skin tone alone would have Central Africans mixed in with South Americans, Austronesians, and South Asians, Northern Europeans mixed in with East Asians and Inuit, Southern Europeans mixed in with Indians,Central Asians, Native Americans, and Arabs, etc etc.

But it's not limited to skin tone. Have you never been able to identify an albino African as African?

But you're moving away from the premise of the GP.

I don't see how.

That depends on the Alien's primary mode of sense. Which may not be sight. Sight is particularly strong for humans. But what if the Aliens primarily distinguish based on smell like many animal species with poor colour vision?

> Aliens may as well sort us by the colour of our pants as soon as the colour of our skin

This made me chuckle. But it is a good example. I bet there is a lot we can infer from people based on their common go-to colors for clothing.

I never realized how odd the concept of "blue jeans" were until I travelled outside the US.

Supposing there are Aliens FWIW I don’t know that they would perceive the same visible spectrum that we do, which might effect their ability to differentiate by color. And they might not even perceive colors at all perhaps focusing on patterns or perhaps use some sort acoustical sonar system of high pitched shrieks or an electrocapacitive perception captured by elongated dactyltennae hands with which they can sense the world around them.

The alien is hypothetical, a proxy point of view that's theoretically unbiased and has no awareness of human social context, history, etc.

Sure, but aren’t they just extending that to remove the “bias” of human-sensory-organs ? :P

"But I take higher ground. I hold that, in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by colour, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good," John c. Calhoun said.

"Nonsense," replied the thistleglorb. "You both have exactly the same capacitance."