I get it and agree mostly. I definitely think socioeconomic classes are more of a defining/dividing line than a heritage you happen to share with someone.
Only <1% of any humans DNA differs, but I think a better point is that everyone is atleast 50th cousins or something (Granted if you share a heritage its much closer)
But also if you told someone like my girlfriend that race isn't real she'd probably sock you. She's experienced it and its very real to her.
When we started dating I would actually try to talk about how I don't understand why she would side with someone solely because their skin was dark like hers and it would be a point of contention. She would literally associate with someone that objectively did something she thinks is reprehensible because of literally only that. She grew up very wealthy and never hurt anyone, guy on the news was someone in and out of prison who literally fired first on the guy that revived him with narcan--but they happen to have the same color of skin.
As a boy other Latinos would literally antagonize me for "acting white" because I would rather read during recess than play football/soccer--because being educated is associated with being white; we were the children of poor families with gangbangers as role models so we must obviously be destined for different things /s
I feel like a lot of racial issues are cultural and self-perpetuating. But my girlfriend in particular was the only black woman in a white conservative town, people would open doors for her friends and close it when it came to her, If I visit her hometown she doesn't want to be out for long, etc. So I get why it is very important to her.
The way I coped is through apathy, but then i realized that that was super depressing and it was very bad.
I then got enchanted by the idea of melancholy, I would just think about it to feel very sad because feeling sad was better than nothing at all.
It's a weird thing to say but it helps, you can't be truly sad unless you were happy before--there is beauty in that.
You don't need to do anything to distract yourself or plan to try and be busy enough that you don't have the time to think about it. Healing isn't when you find yourself forgetting.