For people, use adjectives over nouns

When we use a noun to describe someone, we implicitly are giving that qualification permanence. This runs the risk of being diminishing to a person, but at the worst it runs the risk of solidifying simplistic and harmful views of others.

When you use an adjective instead of a noun, you are subconsciously reminding yourself that this is not the only adjective that this person is defined by.

I cannot think of many examples where using an adjective over a noun causes issues of semantic clarity.

In fact, we can see as we think about examples that the nouns are the ones first used to hurt people. Using an adjective

Examples

“A Black person” vs “a Black”. Obviously bad, because we have heard the noun form used as derogatory.

“A Jewish person” vs “a Jew”. Similar to above.

“A stupid person” vs “an idiot” (or the like). Many still place moral value using perceived intelligence, and the noun form communicates a harsher moral judgment.

“A disabled person” vs “a handicap”. Similarly self-explanatory.

“An American person” vs “an American”. The noun here doesn’t have a negative connotation for most, but simplifying people to nationality, religion, ethnicity, race etc all run similar risks. Compare with “a muslim”.

“A bigoted person” vs “A bigot”. Even “deserved” attributions should not simplify a person.

Even better…

Switching to use the adjective quickly leads to thinking of more generous formulations

When possible or important for clarity, don’t be afraid to use the full phrase that describes the truth like Ta-Nehisi Coates does with his phrase “Those who call themselves White”. Another example of increasing the precision of our map.

Or for “a bigoted person”, it might be more accurate to say “a person who has acted with hate” (or what have you).

Some might call this pedantic, but I think this sort of precision provides value to our understanding of each other, and in turn helps us better manage each other as well. It’s not a bad thing to use short phrases necessarily, but we should be wary that when we shorten we run the risk of communicating less nuance and letting that less nuanced perspective seep into our thinking.

Related

In other words, for people, we actually don’t prefer Simple.

This is an example of Soften the concept.

Another reason to prefer adjectives: Naming a phenomenon should imply some inference, and we don’t want to imply negative inferences (i.e. stereotypes).