I agree that it’s awkward and it creates problems in some scenarios. I’m not sure it’s necessarily a bad thing, but it’s an understandable (over) correction for some pretty heinous behaviour.

I think it’s also equally pretty weird to just dismiss a facet of someone’s humanity.

At work? I think it’s preferable to limit our interactions to work related stuff.

Outside of work, I’m ambivalent. We associate physical features, names, and accents with cultures. But those don’t always line up to significant differences in someone’s personality.

In the last few decades we’ve noticed that we’ve been treating each other like shit. We’ve used race, skin colour, ethnicity, weight, etc to insult others and reduce their social standing.

We’re trying to fix that. As such, calling out those specific differences is frowned on, even if we aren’t using them negatively.

Is this inconvenient? Yes. It’s pretty easy to point out the only black/fat/disabled person in a work place. But we’re really trying to avoid any conversations that could turn into insults or attacks.

So we now have an unwritten social rule that we avoid using those identifiers when talking about individuals.

That Pepsi ad during BLM.