re: race in 300

I haven't seen this film either---
And I don't know if I plan to---
But it seems to me that the primary reason that we think in terms of race at all is to give structure to our ideas about the Other---and that as we move to define ourselves against new kinds of Others our notion of race shifts accordingly---and so in the context of the War on Terror it comes to seem natural to imagine Persians as black and as monstrous.