Well, yeah, I almost forgot that the individual originally under discussion here is NOT a United States citizen or resident, so American notions/definitions of racial identity are somewhat beside the point.

Only somewhat so, however: Great Britain certainly has its own part in the evolution of these ideas, as the instigator and principal operator of the slave trade that brought all those kidnapped Africans to the New World.

Certainly, before 1776, all those rich white planters who bought and managed African slaves in Virginia and the Carolinas were Englishmen who would only gradually assume a newly created national identity.

The English (and/or English-speaking) slaveowners of colonial America maintained and promoted a uniquely inhuman and impersonal version of race relations. The Spanish and French ruling classes also practiced slavery and other forms of exploitation elsewhere throughout the hemisphere, but (like the ancient Greeks and Romans and countless other slaveholding societies throughout history) they recognized the humanity of their enslaved workers to an extent that the English and English/Americans never did.

In Louisiana and the Caribbean, overprivileged white Frenchmen customarily kept African/Creole mistresses and maintained dual households, providing their mixed-race offspring with educational and other opportunities fairly similar to what they gave their "legitimate" children, the white babies borne by wives who had been assigned to these men via arranged marriages.

In the English-speaking American South, white landowners who impregnated black women did so to "breed" human livestock, often by force, and then consigned their own children to lifetimes of slavery. This is something I find almost impossible to understand, but it seems obvious that this custom could exist only because these men were convinced, by the unanimous opinion of the society in which they lived, that their African workers were something less than human.

It's a very nasty legacy to try and overcome.