That's not at all what I said. I'm saying the US is the only country which prefaces descriptions of people with info about their skin colour. It seems (to someone not from the US) a truly strange cultural behaviour.
I dunno if Europe is really recent, or just a bigger problem now. My experience of Berlin circa 2009 was that the natives were as racist towards Turkish immigrants as my hillbilly folk back in the states were towards Mexicans. There were also waves around that time about North African and Muslim immigrants in France.
[note - edited for clarity]