Did the book address the topic of rapes by US soldiers? This was a big issue after liberation, and still is a major issue near US bases nowadays (in particular Okinawa).
Crimes by foreigners generally cause a lot of outrage, regardless how common they are. I saw stats a few years ago that had the crime rates of US troops in Japan lower than the native population. While the crime rates of immigrants was higher than natives. But one of these topics is politically correct and the other is not.
> If you were a French soldier, whose land had been invaded, whose wife or sister or mother had been taken into a German concentration camp and raped or killed, you might have found it difficult to control Your emotions.
> Lastly, a good many French women have been in terror of American troops, especially in Paris. Our SIP records testify to a deplorable amount of drunkenness, molesting of women and street fights -- by americans.
With rape specifically after war, years ago in completely different situation.
Also, US soldier were rude, assertive and agressive towards women, and this was caused by racism and too much ego (French woman image from back home and stories from WW1, and their own self-inflated image)
Do you regard French and Americans as different races?
Note how the remaining big race classifications recognized by the US Census are divided up mostly based around areas with which we still have some political tension or heavy political history: Asian, Middle-Eastern European, Latin American and African, and Native American and Native Alaskan, and Hawaiian.
You are implying a use of the term which is more influenced by biology and some vague, folksy notion of genetic/darwinian relation, often focused on skin color etc. I understand your distinction. but it is, almost by definition, more modern.
There is absolutely no scientific basis for the racial categories used today.
Apart from the fact that the genetic differences between all humans are tiny compared to different races in animals (which is I guess where the term comes from), there is also the fact that many ethnicities which are lumped under a common race differ more from each other than from many other "categories", e.g. Africa has more genetic diversity than all other continents combined. Therefore one "black" person might differ significantly more from another "black" than from a Caucasian or Asian person.
I mean the irony that there is the "racial" category of "African-American".
I think this is also not just semantics. The use of the term race associates much larger differences than there actually are, which makes it easier to justify discrimination/hate.
They can all align to (mostly) one group, like in India and China, or can be mostly aligned like in northern Europe, or a melting pot like the US.
It's the "connotations" (i.e. conflations) that are the reason that almost everything is labeled "racist".
As stated, they were not. Race and ethnicity (and also words like breed and stock) were much more synonymous 100 years ago. If you aren't keenly aware of semantic shifts like this, you will misunderstand older texts.
I'm also not sure if you're actually suggesting that China and India are (by any definition) racially and ethnically homogenous. If you are, I must encourage you to study those countries more.
The concept of race very much predates our understanding of genetics, which is a relatively modern science.
My wife is Chinese, and feels a racial kinship to Asian people from many countries: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, ... Refers to all as Asian.