Politically correct?

Today we were talking about political correctness in our sociolinguistics class. I have mixed thoughts about it:

First, the N-word. Do you know which one it is? I didn't think it was that obvious. At the end we were talking about coloured and African-American people. Which one is better? The first one sounds like white people have no colour. Well, at least I don't, but I would love to! :)

On the other hand people are of different colours. I don't want to support racism, let's clear that up, I'm strongly against that. But I don't see the point. Why wouldn't we embrace all these different races? What if you say your dog is a German shepherd, is that politically incorrect too? Should we just call all of them them "dogs"?

I love a quote from Two and a Half Men regarding that topic:

"Evelyn: Well, we can rule out ecstasy. I mean, that's a powerful aphrodisiac ... I've heard.
Jake: Nowadays you're supposed to say African-American disiac!"

The second thing we were talking about was the sexism. I know English has a lot of "-man" words. In our language we use different suffixes to fix that, English invented several "-woman" expressions and many neutral ones. But there was one that really bothered me: Obviously you can't even call a scarecrow a straw-man any more, nowadays it's called a straw-person!

Now, come on ... that's just stupid. :P We all know men are waaay scarier than women. ;)