"Lots of people miss this point, thinking that any mention of race is inherently racist."

Any mention of race is inherently racist, because it upholds essentializing categories of difference that are by definition exclusive. Racial identity presume the superior understanding (not to mention mystic kinship and a set of ethical obligation to live up to that identity compelled by something like natural law) of those with whom one happens to identify, implying further that this belonging has actual biological, rather than merely cultural (and thus largely imagined) roots. Race is a function of racism, not the other way around. The chief and most lasting tool of the suppression of African Americans is the very concept of blackness. Increasingly fewer whites anymore give that concept anymore credence than they do their own (empty) categorization as whites, but it's alive and well among those on whom it was formerly imposed. You don't beat the game by winning it.