Is it Always Bad to Categorize?

On Tuesday we talked a lot about how we as a society use categorizing in just about everything that we deal with. Pertaining to this class, we talked a ton about how we categorize people when referring to them. As we talked about the negative views on this subject I looked at it in a different way. I asked myself..does it always have to be a bad thing when you categorize a person by their race? I feel the most common case in which this happens is when you are describing a story that involves people that the audience may not be 100% familiar with. In these cases people are forced to describe the person they are talking about so that the people listening to the story know who it is about. This situation is where many people tend to describe a person by their race. Now is when I ask..is this always a bad thing? Just because I may say, "yes, my spanish friend" or "yeah my, black friend". Not every time a person uses this way to describe a person is categorizing them by what the story is about. I'm not using their race when I describe them to automatically mean that the story is depicting a stereotype. When we were talking about it in class on Tuesday I was getting the feeling that was what we were heading towards..always viewing this action as negative. And that is where I end this blog, is it always a negative thing to describe someone by their race? -Mary