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The U.S. has never found it easy to assign race, although it certainly has tried. A century ago, the people who did the counting -- demographers, sociologists, policy thinkers -- divided whites into three strata. They considered Nordic whites, from England, Scandinavia and Germany, the most ethnically desirable and elite, followed by the Alpine whites, from eastern and central Europe, and finally the Mediterraneans. Everyone else was identified as black, red, yellow or brown, which included South Asians.