If you watch from 3:08 to 3:34 of last week’s 30 Rock episode, you will see characters Jack and Liz discuss Carmen Chao, a newscaster who is allegedly trying to steal the news position that Jack’s girlfriend currently holds. After Liz and Jack agree that they don’t know what ethnicity she is, Jack says, “Carmen’s very sneaky. And that’s not racist because I don’t know what she is.” Why do Liz and Jack need to know “what Carmen is” anyway? And if they had an answer, how would that be useful or change anything?
Obviously, this is a television sitcom and the purpose of this whole scenario is to make viewers laugh. (An important note to make is that what racism or being racist means has no standard, agreed upon definition.) On some level, the approach from the 30 Rock episode could be interpreted as a smart and funny idea because it is defining racism as only being possible when we categorize people. And that idea of racism is based on society’s own rigidness and individuals’ self-limitation. The writers’ idea was probably something like, Since Carmen has no known category, how could she be discriminated against based on race?
So in my opinion, this concept of race only being possible with a known “category” is not poking fun at any particular race, but at racism itself, or at oversimplified use of judgment. But the clip of Carmen acting “convincing” as many possible ethnic backgrounds could definitely be taken as very offensive to each race or nationality the show was stereotyping.
All that being said, I do think that people can be discriminated against based on race even if the person practicing racism might not know “which box to check.” In fact, it might make some people very uncomfortable to encounter someone whose race they can’t pinpoint. This has endless implications, especially because interracial marriage and family is much more common, so kids who are mixed could be treated strangely by others who don’t know “which kind of race” they are.
Because most people’s perception of race is based on observable traits, what are the implications of racism against anyone who doesn’t visibly fit into a pre-defined category?
Examining Racism 
This category-bending satire was also used in an episode of the Dave Chapelle show, when various racial and ethnic “teams” bid to have mulit-racial people associated with their group. The reality is that shades of blended color and ethnicity form the basis of “class systems” within racial and ethnic categories, self-imposed and imposed on the group by others.
Racial category is used to foster group idenitity and culture, it is used by leaders to pit various groups against one another as a way to maintain power, and it is exploited in many different ways. We have to avoid being trapped in the arrogance of presuming to know what any of these groups means.
Since I live in an area where there are a reasonable number of black African and Haitian immigrants, it is interesting to observe how all kinds of people react to someone who resembles a “familiar” African American, but who has an accent that puts him or her in another category. They generally don’t quite know how to treat people. But the answer is easy: Treat them with grace as individuals.