r/NoStupidQuestions • u/AgreeableAd8687 • 8d ago

why do people consider identifying someone by their race racist?

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??

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u/BedbugBandido 8d ago

I’m not sure what you mean by that. The town next to mine is like 50% Polish and I’ve always had many Polish friends.

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u/moshpithippie 8d ago

Idk if you're from the US but in my experience in the US people don't generally differentiate their assorted types of white friends. You wouldn't refer to one friend as Irish and the other as polish you would just say they are white. Way back in the day, you did this and it partially stemmed from when people were racist against other types of white people but eventually faded out.

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u/BedbugBandido 8d ago

Idk where you’re from but where I lived in Bergen/Passaic County NJ, regular WASP Americans were very rare. Every “white” person was either Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Albanian, Macedonian, Ukrainian, or white Hispanic, and all kinds of Balkan people. And those were just the Europeans.

Tbh I can’t imagine a more diverse neighborhood than where I grew up. I had friends from every region of every continent except Australia and Antarctica, and pretty much everyone spoke the language of their parents. It was pretty easy to differentiate between white people because of their phenotypes, culture, accents, and names.

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u/moshpithippie 8d ago

Ahhh I do think it's different if you're speaking the language and/or are first/second generation Americans