I have a friend who is, among other things, a young black woman. We met about a year ago in a professional setting on Zoom (before Zoom was covid-fashionable). We remained friends after our four month project came to and end.
When we met, she was in the UK and I was asking her to join the project team (fortunately she agreed). What stuck me then was her composure and professionalism: but not her color. It really wasn't until we met in person about two months later that I registered that she was black.
If there was any categorizing on my part (and I'm sure there was) it was her background in terms of class. As I later found out her parents are both educated professionals, which in the UK makes her firmly middle class. And that, for many Brits, although perhaps mainly the middle class itself, is a more salient categorizing heuristic than race.
Not that it's better, but Brits have a tendency to divide people into the aristocracy (stereotypically rich, landed, lazy, and entitled - think of Downtown Abbey), the working class (stereotypically uneducated, unworldly and ignorant - those "downstairs" people) and the middle class (everyone else). In America by contrast, which is, supposedly, a classless society (although social mobility is in fact higher in Britain than in the US), race is the first framing many people rely on.
Neither is particularly good; but I would argue that prejudice based on class is more easily overcome than prejudice based on race. So if you have to choose, I'd settle for the lesser of the two evils.
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