This is actually a good point; I had not considered that the equality that people are trying to achieve here is equality between races. And if that's what you're interested in, surely that's what you need to track.

I'm sorry for your friend; that situation sounds like a very odd mix of empowering (having the data — albeit after drilling) and deeply discriminatory and marginalising.

Over here we do actually have at least some of the race inequality problems, but we're putting much less emphasis on them. The approach has advantages but clearly also disadvantages. Thanks for the thought-food.