The US has a fairly recent and abhorrent collection of very undeniable racist policies including outright slavery, Jim Crow laws, and redlining. There are ongoing repercussions from just these issues, ignoring any other institutional racist laws/policies that may or may not still exist.

No doubt the US has more of a history with deep racial division than most other western democracies.

But is the race of someone voting really useful, or is it just a fairly good proxy for other demographics. And at what point does this use of race as a demographic in itself become a societal pressure for blacks, latinos, asians etc to fit into certain stereotypes?

Indeed, race is used as a proxy for class so commonly, that there was little reaction to Biden's quote "Poor Kids Are Just as Bright as White Kids"

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/politics/joe-biden-poo...

In my circles there was a lot of reaction, as it seemed to be a Freudian slip as to how racist the man is. It's seemed instead the media rather wanted to protect him for some post-trumpian political reason.

Trying to interpret a word transposition from a senile old man in any direction at all is just kind of sad, in my view.

But of course, some people are so coddled by modernity and their social media bubbles that they implicitly think racism is all about choice of vocabulary or other completely superficial things.

This is the paradox of racism. Is it racist to study races? Is it racist to ignore races and let racism sneak unchecked?

Well, it's interesting that this is such a ubiquitous thing in the US, and so uncommon elsewhere. It's not an uncommon view in sociology that this can be self-perpetuating, though I could go both ways on this myself.

This preoccupation with race as a demographic discriminant is pretty uncommon in Europe.

I would think more people on HN would understand the importance of data. Its pretty hard to change something that you aren't tracking.

Perhaps Europe would benefit from more data in this regard?

It just seems like a horrible practice to me because the fact that 1930s Germany tracked Jewish people and allowed them to kill so many.

If we could guarantee that another genocidal dictator won't come to power then I might be OK with it. Couple that tracking with the surveillance and one might be able to ensure few slip through the cracks.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. You want to change race, that's why you track it? Or you want to change how racial "groups" vote? The logic makes sense in some contexts, but not all, and not the one I was referring to anyway.

No, you want to change descrimination. You have to have metrics related to descrimination if you are going to develop policy to change it.