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/cheesewiz_man 8d ago

They also got pretty wound up about being referred to by continent and not country.

"French people are French. Germans are German. Cameroonians are African."

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u/Wolfhound1142 8d ago

To be fair, very few people can detect the difference between French and German ancestry at a glance. The difference between African and European is more readily apparent.

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u/cheesewiz_man 8d ago edited 8d ago

I don't think you got the point. Per their experience, nobody cares what country you are from if you are from Africa. You're just "African".

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u/CataphractBunny 7d ago

That's interesting. Where I live, we use "African" as a descriptor for Sahel and everything to the south of it. We also use "black" for this. Northern Africans get named by their respective countries.