these conversations are always incredibly frustrating.

On one extreme are people who believe that white people are inherently better than black people because of some genetic inheritance. This is obvious nonsense.

On the other extreme are the people like the one you are arguing with who claim that race does not exist because all humans are biologically identical. This is also nonsense as any black person in the US will tell you.

What you seem to be arguing is that ethnicity, and the genetic effects of ethnicity, are real. They are. Race as biological construct, with consequent societal effects is also not real. White people are not inherently more intelligent that Black people.

The other person is technically right, but is one of those people who seem to believe that biological differences do not matter in society, one of those "i don't see colour" types. Race as a social construct is very much real.

Is this thread just one big semantic misunderstanding, then? I think of ethnicity and race as casual synonyms, and when they are distinguished, I think of ethnicity as cultural ("Hispanic") and race as biological (genetically Spanish), both of which are very fuzzy. But it sounds like you're using the term "ethnicity" biologically, the way I would use the term "race", which I'm not used to.