I'm curious... what term would you use instead of 'race' to describe people? It's not a bad word in itself... I think maybe you don't like it because racists have sullied it?

Variety within the human species needs SOME kind of descriptive language... it's not something that we can just pretend doesn't exist. It's not inherently 'racist' to recognize that we are of different ethnicities (is that your preferred term?)

Steven Colbert often employs the joke that he doesn't know he's white because he doesn't 'see race'. What he's mocking are the conservatives that pretend they are inclusive.

I think more than anything this illustrates how ordinary, un-'loaded' words definitions can be twisted into carrying meaning that IS loaded with negative connotations.

When James Brown sang 'I'm Black and I'm Proud', he was embracing the term 'black'. And I don't know about anyone else, but the deliberate changing of that to 'African American' seems to me more a milquetoast technical description than an affirmation.

Having racial pride... now that's a loaded subject. It can mean totally different things depending on what color you are... most infamously, 'white pride' is usually a code word for racism. Even 'pride', itself, can mean something positive or negative, completely outside the context of ethnicity.