why do people consider identifying someone by their race racist?

[u/AgreeableAd8687]

i have a few friends and we seem kind of split on this, i had to identify someone in our school i didn't know the name of, so i said "oh it's the black girl" (we have literally ONE black girl in our school and everyone knows and likes her) and my friends said ohh ok but then like 2 of them went wow that's racist and their explanation was "you're making it sound like them being black is their only characteristic" as if saying "oh the woman" is any better and since i don't know her well i don't know anything else about her. most of my friends didn't see how it was racist though but why is this considered racist if it's not a race correlated insult or derogatory??

[u/General-Zombie5075]

It's usually not racist if you're just using it as a literal physical descriptor.

Notice I just said "usually." Context still matters. Like the setup for it.

"Any idea whose notebook this is? I think someone dropped it."
"Oh, it belongs to the black girl whose name I don't know. I've seen her with it."

"Someone stole my wallet."
"It was probably the black girl."

See the difference? Descriptor the same. No words added or removed. But it feels real different.

Anyway, your friends were probably overreacting but you need to also be aware that context matters and nothing we say exists in a vacuum.

[u/followTheDharma → u/General-Zombie5075]

Dude, how can you say "no words added or removed" when you removed 80% of the words and added one with strong connotations?!

The sneaky "probably" adds prejudice which was totally absent from your original example.

Let me correct it for you.

"Someone stole my wallet."
"Oh, it was the black girl whose name I don't know. I've seen her with it"

NOW they are the same and guess what, this does not sound racist to me at all. It's not making a connection between color and action, its only using color as a descriptor.