Consider what JD Vance’s children have in common with Barack Obama and Kamala Harris.

They share it with celebrities like Halle Berry, Mariah Carey, Meghan Markle, and the singer Drake, along with world-class athletes such as Tiger Woods and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the latter of whom made the women’s 400-meter hurdles look impossibly easy at the Paris Olympics.

For those slow on the uptake, the answer is that all those listed above defy America’s noxious obsession with racial categorization. All are biracial or multiracial, or whatever is the accepted word of the day.

Nearly 34 million American citizens fit this description. That represents 10% of the country, a number sure to spike in coming generations and render moot a lot of today’s compulsive silliness.

The reality to be celebrated is that ours is becoming increasingly a polyglot society. Just as Irish-Americans married German-Americans and Italian-Americans paired with Lithuanian-Americans a century back, the mix of backgrounds and ancestries is now widespread and irreversible.

In my case, nearly four decades ago, this son of German-Jewish refugees exchanged vows with someone who traces her lineage back to only a few ships after the Mayflower. The particulars are different, but at its core, our story is quite similar to that of J.D. Vance and Usha Chilukuri.

For most Americans, especially the young in the midst of finding partners and bearing the generation that comes next, race and ethnicity are far less dominant or even relevant than may have been the case many years past. The widespread sentiment among most of the cadre is some variation of, “What’s the big deal?”.

The same cannot be said for our political parties to go along with other significant institutions for which issues of race have become a consuming fixation.

We need to look back no further than the last week or two. Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee, somehow thought it advisable to travel to Chicago to engage in a combative session in front of the National Association of Black Journalists.

The very fact that there is a separate organization of Black journalists with sufficient clout to command Trump’s appearance is itself testimony to the dominant role of race in contemporary America.

For those who have not lost all capacity for revulsion, Trump’s half-hour there was cringeworthy in the extreme. Flailing to reestablish dominance amidst the Harris boomlet, Trump seemed determined to provoke, offend and conduct a masterclass in bad manners.

His outlandish comparisons of his own greatness to that of Abraham Lincoln went hand in hand with his repeated references to “the Black population” as if it was some distinct interest group of others. His taunts about Harris “turning Black”, as if he was preciously unaware of her mixed-race heritage, were a dog whistle directed to some underground caves.

To watch his performance was to recoil at the awkwardness to go along with the insult.

It is folly to assign a single motive or driving force to a political movement of such scope as MAGA. However, a significant factor has been the fear of demographic change and the withering of White primacy. Implicit in the call for a return to past days of greatness is the sense that hegemony on the part of a large White majority was part and parcel of such bygone glory.

Across the aisle, Democrats come at questions of race from a very different angle but with every bit the same degree of preoccupation.

To tune into the Democratic convention a week from now will be to observe a party still infatuated with all manner of goals, one step short of quotas, for representation by race along with a handful of other categories.

To call Harris a “DEI hire,” as has become commonplace in many GOP quarters, is to negate her substantial record of political success in California before becoming vice president. However, as with any critique, there are germs of truth contained within it.

Coming off a brief, underwhelming presidential candidacy in 2020 that never even made it to Iowa or New Hampshire, Harris’s selection by Joe Biden to be his running mate had everything to do with considerations of race and gender. He all but promised as much to the kingmaker Jim Clyburn, Biden’s savior in the 2020 primaries.

In his two most important appointments – Kamala Harris to be his vice president and political heir; and Ketanji Brown Jackson as his lone addition to the Supreme Court – Biden diminished both by telegraphing that group identity would be the central factor.

For one party, particularly its nominee, it is as if the early 1950s, before Brown v. Board – much less the major civil rights advances of the following decade, was America’s shining hour. For their opposites, it is as if America remains stuck somewhere between 1619 and Jim Crow with racism and persecution as universal today as during far earlier periods.

Every individual is the product of multiple inputs, identity certainly being one of them. Heck, both J.D. Vance and Tim Walz were picked largely for their identity – one as a son of Appalachia and the other as a midwestern everyman.

But with the healing of time and the tangible, measurable progress and reconciliation it has brought, we do ourselves a grave disservice by putting racial identity ever front and center at the expense of individual character and agency.

Memo to Republicans playing footsie with those who countenance an antiquated, discredited, immoral notion of White supremacy and to Democrats who worship at the counter altar of all-consuming group categorization: Each and every one of us is so much more than the color of our skin or the details of our heritage.

It is a long list of prominent sorts, alive or deceased, who look a lot like the America to come and don’t conform to easy categorization by race. You will find such names as James Earl Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Geraldo Rivera, Whitney Houston, Carol Channing, Muhammed Ali and Will Rogers. Former Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell fits the bill.

As to those who changed America, Rosa Parks was a mix of Native American, African-American and Scotch Irish origin. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. combined African and Irish ancestry.

With utterly predictable regularity, some supposedly wise person will step forward to urge America to undertake “an honest conversation about race.” From this vantage point, that discussion has been ongoing day after day, year after year.

Just perhaps, might it be time to focus on something else?

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for ColoradoPolitics and the Gazette newspapers. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann