<i>throws up hands</i> Well, you&#x27;re the one who brought up race, so I&#x27;m not sure what you expected.<p>I think the problem is that you experience US culture via the media, and you experience Canadian culture in real life AND via the media. I don&#x27;t feel that everything is about race in the US, but obviously it&#x27;s a pretty damn big deal in the media right now because of globally-known events that have happened really recently. Would you have said the same even 5 years ago?<p>In a bar in France one time, a group of drunk Canadian women started chatting me up, and the more drunk of the group kept going on and on about how terribly obsessed with celebrities all of us Americans were. She went on and on for 20 minutes about how it&#x27;s all we care about and all we talk about. Leaving aside the irony of the situation, she refused to listen when I said I simply don&#x27;t care, it&#x27;s not a part of my life, and it&#x27;s not a part of the lives of anyone I know.<p>But that&#x27;s what you get when your biggest impression of a place is from its media. That&#x27;s not to say that it doesn&#x27;t reflect something real, just that it&#x27;s not the whole picture.