It’s one thing to describe an individual using physical characteristics; it’s another thing to separate people into groups based on those characteristics.
I think this political correctness crap has gone way too far. It is almost as offensive as racism.
I may well be some kinda creamy, pinky, putty colour, but I sure as hell couldn’t be bothered writing that on a form. I’m white. nice and simple. Some people are black, others brown or yellow, I’m white. I’m not Anglo-Australian, European, or anything else. I’m WHITE. What’s the big deal? Life is too short.
And if you want to call me “honky”, “Skip” (Aussie non-white slang for white people “Skip” - kangaroo), I couldn’t care less. It’s good to know how to laugh at yourself. My Chinese friends call me “Gwei Lo” (literally “ghost man”), my Thai friends call me “farang” (some obscure connection with the Thai term for a type of fruit), my Muslim friends call me “Kufr” (the ungrateful - non-Muslim) I call my very dark Indian friend “you black bastard”. So what? He gives it back as good as he gets, we remain friends, no problem.
Here in Australia, there was a push not to allow racial descriptions in police press statements of wanted people. Thank heavens common sense prevailed.
And no, I can’t dance. 
LoadedDog, I couldn’t agree with you more, but that attitude just won’t wash anywhere but in Australia.
We’re lucky to be living in a country where insulting our mates is a national pastime and everybody understands the concept, but if you’ve had any experiences like mine I’m sure you’ve noticed that it goes down like a lead ballon with foreigners who just don’t understand the concept.
Added to that of course even here it wouldn’t really be polite to stand up in public and describe a person you are looking for as ‘that black bastard’. It just might be construed as offensive.
We do have an interesting cultural mix, at least in Queensland, that makes the stupidity of trying to use terms like ‘African-American’ stand out. Here we have three fairly major groups of black people. The primarily Australoid Aborigines, the primarily Melanesian Torres Straight Islanders and the Melanesian/Polynesian Kanakas. Trying to describe someone that you don’t know, such as for a police report, by attributing a racial background to them is basically impossible, so terms like ‘black’ and ‘white’ have to be used over ‘Aboriginal’ or "African-Australian’. Can’t see what the problem with this is myself.
It’s mostly in South Africa, used to describe the descendents of Malay and Indian folk who migrated from the Dutch and British East Indian colonies and proceeded to hump with the natives and the imperialist aggressors.
Well I can’t resist adding this.
My family is basically Irish-German.
One of my brothers is married to a white South African, so his kids are white African-Americans.
My sister is married to a black guy from Guyana, so her kids are bi-racial South-American-Americans.
(And I’m not even going to get into the complexities of the rest of my family.)
I just hope that by the time they grow up all these labels are a lot less important than they are now.
In the south Arkansas town where I went to college, the jobs I worked employed about 90% blacks. Many days, I might have been the only white person in the place. All of the black people referred to themselves as black (and frequently, by generally offensive racial terms).
And most blacks who would choose to use those racial slurs were not offended when whites also used them, as long as it was in context (i.e. quoting a rap song or something someone said), or the person was so into the culture that it was just what they said (think John Travolta’s character in Pulp Fiction).
I try to leave race out of my descriptions when they aren’t important, as in “See that guy in the blue shirt?”, unless both a white guy and a black guy were both wearing blue shirts. I’m not going to spend all day trying to describe “that guy in the blue shirt who’s also wearing the tan slacks and the brown loafers” when I could just say “the black guy.” After all, deliberately ignoring it isn’t any different from giving it undue attention.
I agree with the person who mentioned that it’s silly to ignore race as a descriptor when trying to describe someone to someone else such as a police description. You’d be confused if I said, “Go in there and ask for that guy–I don’t remember his name–and he’ll help you out.” “What’s he look like?” “He’s about thirty, has black hair and brown eyes.” “Is he black or white?” “That shouldn’t matter.” And it won’t unless you see a black-haired, brown-eyed white man and a black-haired, brown-eyed black man of equal age.