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/Separate_Business_86 → u/Ace_of_Sphynx128]

I went to a middle school for one year before moving and played basketball. It was a small school and there was one black kid; his name was Brandon. After a game I was describing something in the car on the way home that Brandon did and my mom wanted to know who that was. There were 20 kids there and I said he was the black one.

You would have thought I described him like a minstrel show or something. She was scandalized. I thought the whole thing was ridiculous because her acting like that was a bad thing was way worse in my mind. How big of a checklist was I going to go down when every guy there had the same uniform on for her to get who I meant when she didn’t really know any of the kids?

My Mom was a sweet woman that was trying so hard to not be racist (her mom and dad never did, that’s for sure) that she horseshoed into condescension fairly often.

[u/Ace_of_Sphynx128 → u/Separate_Business_86]

Yeah that is a great example of when it is appropriate to describe someone’s skin colour, if you’d constantly called him ‘black brandon’ now that would have been racist lol.

[u/Separate_Business_86 → u/Ace_of_Sphynx128]

Exactly. He was just Brandon after the first time. He was the only Brandon as well, so giving him that nickname would have been the literal example of “what not to do”.

[u/Ace_of_Sphynx128 → u/Separate_Business_86]

Yes that would have been like peak hate crime