Why have we as a society become so politically correct, that we cannot identify people by race?

In Beverly Daniel Tatum's "Why are all the black kids sitting together in the Cafeteria" And Other Conversations About Race, she tells a story about a father who, in picking up his young daughter from school, asked her to point out a new friend that she had been talking about. She described her, but did not mention that she was the only black child in her group of friends. The father was pleased, as he saw this as a sign of his daughter's colour blindness. Tatum saw it differently, and thought that is wasn't that the daughter didn't notice the colour of her skin, but merely that she was taught that it's not appropriate to identify people by skin colour.

I believe that our society tries much to hard to make "race" a bad word. True, our identities should not revolve around our race or place of origin, as that does not make a person, but when trying to describe a person to someone who doesn't know them, why is it "racist" to describe them as "the one who's Asian", when they are in fact the only Asian person in the room?

In areas where traditionally the dominant group has somehow treated the subdominant group badly, today we in society feel bad about using the classifiers of those areas as categorization. It's as if, in using the words "fat", "gay", or "black", you're somehow demeaning the person. These words are now like swear words in some contexts, not appropriate for public consumption.

What is wrong with using those words in a purely recognizable context? If I am with a group of friends in which I am the only Caucasian, I don't mind being called the "white girl", because I am. We need to move away from the idea that being black, or gay are somehow bad, and if we stop shying away from using the words, we will come that much closer to an equal society.