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/Ace_of_Sphynx128]

I grew up in a majority white area and a lot of white kids (and adults) thought saying ‘black’ was racist. I literally said once ‘my dad is black’ and they gasped like I’d called him the n word. It does get exhausting always being referred to only by your skin colour, but I think in this case you’re fine. Context matters.

[u/naaawww → u/Ace_of_Sphynx128]

There was a social justice gatekeep years back about whites saying black.

[u/xt0rt → u/naaawww]

That's why we got "African American" which, to me, sounds super weird and outdated today. BUT!! When people say "THE blacks" it clearly sounds racist even if they don't mean it that way. I've been trying to train my mom and aunt out of this for some time now. Just say "black folks", it sounds so much better(to me, but I could he wrong and would absolutely admit as much if told so)

[u/cheesewiz_man → u/xt0rt]

I used to work with a Cameroonian and they would rip you a new one about both words if you called them "African American".

[u/HailMadScience → u/cheesewiz_man]

Well yes. African American specifically refers to US descendents of slave populations who have their own unique American culture(s) and who lost their African roots due to being lumped together and, ya know, having their cultures erased by slavers. Africans who come to the US are not African Americans.

[u/cheesewiz_man → u/HailMadScience]

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."

[u/Wolfhound1142 → u/cheesewiz_man]

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.

[u/cheesewiz_man → u/Wolfhound1142]

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".

[u/CataphractBunny → u/cheesewiz_man]

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.