Hope no one minds my two cents here. I think the issue with race and the burakumin is a little bit more complicated than the similarity between the English word "black" and "buraku" considering that burakumin have been _viewed_ as a race apart (the argument I make in my contribution to IBARW3) as early as the Meiji period, before English gained as much currency as this idea would assume.

In my research I encountered youth groups from these neighborhoods who have picked up buraku and made the buraku/black connection, but I think that's another unrelated issue to the history of their discrimination and it's not particularly pervasive from what I have observed. I could be wrong, since it's been a while.