Is racism a holdover from German pseudo-science? People try to make a race out of everything, confusing DNA with ethnicity. The two could hardly be more different. Hardware is one thing, software another. But then software makes sure hardware counts for a lot, in terms of how the sorting algorithms work. "What race is he?"
It still sounds out of line to reply "I don't keep track of races" as people think that's a claim to color blindness, as if one were literally unable to pick up the RGB value of someone's skin tone. Well, put in those terms, maybe I am color blind, as I'm not "perfect pitch" going from an observed tone, to the actual catalog combo.
"He's what people call Black" is better, and for sure he has dark skin. But then so do people considered "not Black" by some. The use of the word "colored" never really went away, but became People of Color.
Anyway, the short answer is no. German pseudo-science was bolstered by the eugenics movement, which was strong in North America, to the point of making laws. Insofar as "racial purity" might be a thing, the eugenicists and the KKK had a leadership position.
As an elitist, I might say the bottom half of the Bell Curve believes in races, but that wouldn't be an IQ curve. A lot of people who do well on standardized IQ tests nevertheless believe in races. One's ethnic conditioning is "orthogonal" to one's IQ, is how someone with a high IQ might put it, using an ethnic (as in niche) way of talking.
Some ethnicities obsess about race more than others. To obsess about race doesn't mean admitting to being racist. Few people I know would go with the definition: a racist is someone who believes in races. That sounds as wrong as: a nationalist is someone who believes in nations. "Of course we believe in races and nations. That doesn't make us racist or nationalist." That would be the mainstream view.
