...and by discussing sex you become a sexist and by discussing religion you become a bigot or sectarian?

I don't think that the physical descriptors are culturally determined. All descriptors you have mentioned, Azizi, are facial/head features. That's where we look at in other persons for very good biological reasons and not at the length of the fingers, the colour of nails or whatever.

Colour and reflectivity is something we extract from what we look at even before we can determine what it is we look at. It is obvious for biological reasons that we should use skin colour if we choose to make a distinction at all.

Shape and surface texture/structure (hair) are the next things we extract intuitively from anything we look at. That's well founded in our biological basis.

My point is that if we at all make distinctions, the features you name and the position at the body where these features are are not chosen by chance or by any culturally based decision but are exactly the features we extract first from a view for biological reasons.

The point where I see a cultural influence (but no determination) are the boundaries of the concepts. Black and white (dark and light) are no culturally based concepts. But the amount of surface reflectivity from which on one says 'black' or 'white' have no biological basis and do vary between cultures.

I think that's what you mean with your experience in the US culture that I lack of course. What amount of curled hair in combination with what skin darkness and so on makes a person be perceived as white or black can vary. I even wouldn't be surprised if that would vary from one part of the USA to the next.

The dark skin and the black hair of an Italian makes him being perceived as 'not one of us' in Norway, but not yet in Germany because there's too much overlap with how 'we' ususally look. In a society with people of a darker skin I'd expect one should be 'objectively' considerably darker to be classified differently than in for instance a culture in the very North of Europe.

Wolfgang