> If your race is something that you need to proudly announce (because you personally feel that it has cultural connotations in most/many cases), then race is always going to be an issue, because of assumptions of those cultural differences.

No it's not. Acknowledging the current situation is not an assumption and does not doom us to push every single aspect onto future generations.

Culture is real. The way to change part of culture is not to simply deny that that part exists.