Excellent comment, I really agree and have thought bout this a lot too.

I'm writing a world where race has been partially turned on its head. It is an alternate history, with a massive indigenous pseudo-communist superpower occupying almost the whole of the Americas; this country dominates the world along with the Harmonious Union of Buddhist States (China, parts of India, and some satellite states). Europe and the Middle East is a backwater, a land of theocratic princelings and vicious warlords squabbling over doctrine and resources. What's more, they are the same backwater; there is 'racial' little distinction between people from Saxonrike (Britain) and people Farsrike (Persia) because they are all 'people of the Book' (that is, monotheists) with similar technologies at their disposals.

In my world, Great Saxonrike is a racist totalitarian state in much the same way that our world's North Korea is racist. It preaches the superiority of Saxon stock in the same breath as talking about global unity. It sees Celts, which in my world are much less assimilated, as being more degenerate than any other Europeans/Mediterraneans. But its racism is futile and helpless.

In the meantime, former European colonies in the New World are under ruthless occupation by Hadanosony (Iroquois) soldiers. Their able-bodied populations are employed on 5-year obligatory work assignments throughout the Americas. They are treated as unassimilable aliens, good only for working in the worst conditions, and ultimately probably to be wiped out or bred out of existence. They are called 'dead' by their conquerors, both in reference to their pale, dead men's skin, and to the social fact that they are in some ways the living dead.

And so on.