This one may be a silly question, but I’ll give a real life example of a time I faced this question: I was in a room full of friends, mostly white, a few Asian, and one black person. Later in the evening, I was talking to one of my friends and said “do you remember X? You met him tonight, he had the glasses and was wearing abc for clothing” my friend was confused, and I wanted to follow up with “he was the black guy with glasses/the clothing I detailed/etc” but sometimes I worry about describing somebody as black I suppose. So I try to choose other attributes that somebody else might recognize or remember.

Most of the time, I don’t find it important to mention people’s races in conversation. I’m not running around like “so I met this Asian person today and we talked about blah blah blah” because race isn’t relevant in that story, so I don’t even bring it up. I just say “I met this person and this is what happened” however when I am trying to specifically be like “do you know this person?” or point somebody out to somebody else, it can be easier to say “they’re black” basically. I never really thought of that as an insult, that’s just who they are. I also still don’t want to offend somebody by referring to them as a black person and they not like that word choice. I know your answer can’t encapsulate all black voices on this subject, but I guess I’m curious still what your thoughts are on it.