Indeed, I as well. I even have a world map in the factbook that will eventually list all the various nations on the Amerikverse Earth...turns out it's a LOT easier to make them all consolidated into power blocs than actually figure out individual countries (what if Africa was just one nation, why not), but I'mma try anyways.
As far as races and species goes, I actually find that dividing a species into different 'races' in terms of physical appearance, even if it doesn't make them any more different from each other, actually kinda can help sometimes in fleshing them out. After all, it is somewhat presumptuous to assume that just because they're an entirely different species, there won't be infighting amongst themselves and even what we would consider racism based on their own inbuilt genetic diversity.
Or, in a broader sense, humans fight and seperate themselves into different groups based on a variety of reasons, some of them physical. It'd certainly be possible for other species to seperate themselves into different groups based on physical differences from other members of their species, especially if they developed along the same kind of pack mentality humanity did.