> If gender is a state of mind, then why not race, or even species?
Race is absolutely a state of mind, more so than gender. All else being equal, a person who would identify as "POC" in the USA would simply be seen as "white" in many other Western countries.
> Race is absolutely a state of mind, more so than gender.
Yes ...
> All else being equal, a person who would identify as "POC" in the USA would simply be seen as "white" in many other Western countries.
I'm struggling to think of what you mean here? The 20th century saw the transition of various southern european ethnicities into being "white" where they might previously not have been. And also a brutal war in the ruins of Yugoslavia among ethnicities that outsiders would find hard to distinguish and label together as "white".
Race is a state of mind - both in oneself and in the eyes of other people.
An example would be how a broadly non-American audience commented to a video entitled "People Guess Who is White In a Group of Strangers" (though, to be fair, some Americans commenters were equally shocked) [0].
You are absolutely right about the huge variety of ethnic identities and conflicts in different cultures, and how they cannot be understood under the mores of a different culture. That is the spirit of my comment, offering a counterpoint to the implication that the idea of "race" is somehow objective.
Race is absolutely a state of mind, more so than gender. All else being equal, a person who would identify as "POC" in the USA would simply be seen as "white" in many other Western countries.