I was thinking along the lines of the practice of using distinguising features to describe a person (excitable middle age woman with a tangle of red hair
). Which, I think is fine if you are trying to pull up a mental picture of a person. My Mother (bless her racist soul) used to always include people's races in her description of them but ONLY if the person was "non-white". (She was often wrong , as in calling my Castilllian Spanish SIL Mexican).
I went to Disneyland with my Gay friend Brad and my Mexican friend Pedro........that's not really necessary.