In America, until very recent times, there were generally considered to be five basic race categories labeled as: American Indian, Asian, Black, Other (typically Latino), and White; and each of these categories, used examples of their respective countries of origin to help pigeonhole people into marking correctly their proper racial classification. It seems like every decade the census bureau adds and amends racial classifications, so that we now have Asians broken into more distinct categories such as Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese; as well as Latinos being separated into Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican and so forth. There are, however, areas on the census for race, which still don't seem to have an appropriate category for certain races, of which, a prominent example is Arab-Americans.
As it stands, Arab-Americans, to whose skin color can range from a very swarthy look to a blue-eye pale skin look, to which, traditionally, whether wrongly or right, Arab-Americans have been considered to be white, is being re-considered, especially since that racial classification seems to be out of step with reality. Yet, one of the racial definitions by the State of Iowa, for instance, states that you are white if you are: "…original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa," which signifies that Arab-Americans are white, it also signifies that Jesus by this definition was also white, which is probably the real reason behind this racial classification being this way, in the first place.
The whole thing about race seems rather problematic, especially in an era in which a larger and larger percentage of people classify themselves as being a mixture of races, or don't really self-identify with any one particular race. Another problem with racial classifications is that race, is primarily based on one's country or historic country of origin, but also typically takes into serious consideration the color of one's skin, as well as your basic facial characteristics. Additionally, the world is almost always in conflict, with nations conquering and being conquered, and consequently the inevitable intermingling of different races so that with the exception of peoples completed isolated from the outside world, it is a rather common occurrence, to have those different cultures and races collide and intermingle, so that the upshot is that a substantial portion of people aren't really 100% one race, anyway.
It just seems no matter how many racial categories are added, subtracted, modified, or re-arranged, that the whole process of tracking people on the basis of their race doesn't actually accomplished anything of real substance, and, to a large extent as long as America insists that in certain instances that people should be identified as a certain race, its concentration is misguided, as the real substance that America represents should be the substance of a man's character and not of his country of origin, or color of his skin, or his eyes, or his nose, or anything physical.
At some point, America must answer the question, are we all Americans and united under the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or are we all different races, different colors, different people, separated by origin, separated in principle, and unequal?