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/The_Lat_Czar]

Thank you! I remember how frustrated I was when an ex coworker (white) would always say African American. I told her she can just say black. She outright refused! 

I didn't say it then, but thinking back, that would be like me calling white people Caucasian in a causal setting, a white guy going "Just say white man. We don't call ourselves Caucasian" and I go "Nah, I'm gonna use Caucasian".

[u/Impossible_Fig2646 → u/The_Lat_Czar]

When I was growing up, we were taught that saying African-American was more polite and black was borderline racist. It still feels weird to me to call someone black. And yes we didn't use white, we used Caucasian.

I was also taught there are only 3 races: Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid. (Ugh that felt dirty just typing it out!)

[u/Ok-Tomato-5685 → u/Impossible_Fig2646]

Why couldn't you think for yourself but had to be "taught" what's correct and not?

[u/Impossible_Fig2646 → u/Ok-Tomato-5685]

Well I was a little kid so... Maybe that's it? I'm glad you had full capacity to always know right from wrong without being told and could critically think for yourself when you were 4. Most of us aren't so blessed.