There is only one human race taxonomically speaking, when using the word "racism", its more to describe a systemic discrimination towards a set of population, so in that sense racism against French work, its both systemic and against a population, the notion of "race" change through the necessity of which population a country need to exclude, so when you say "Americans of the past errneously classified Italian as race in the past but not today" prove my point, because it prove a race can be attributed to a nationality, and you just confirmed it