| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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6. Names and Labels: Social, Racial, and Ethnic Terms
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| § 57. race |
| In its anthropological sense, a race is a group of humans distinguished from other similar groups by genetically inherited characteristics. Though the perception of distinctive physical differences between peoples is undoubtedly as old as the history of human migration, the search for a scientific basis for race is a more recent undertaking. The earliest efforts of physical anthropologists involved elaborate descriptions of such characteristics as skin color, hair color and texture, body proportions, and skull measurements. Modern studies tend to ignore these superficial features in favor of more precisely measurable criteria, especially the analysis of blood types and of metabolic processes. | 1 |
| The attempt to classify humans into discrete racial groups is greatly complicated by the fact that human populations have been migrating and intermingling for hundreds of centuries. There are no pure races in any meaningful sense, only large geographical groupings whose genetic histories can never be fully known. The traditional names for these groupings—Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid (or Caucasian), and in some systems Australoid—are now controversial in both technical and nontechnical contexts and are likely to give offense no matter how they are used. Caucasian does retain a certain currency in American English, but it is used almost exclusively—and erroneously—to mean “white” or “European” rather than “belonging to the Caucasoid racial group,” a group that includes a variety of peoples generally considered to be nonwhite. This ambiguity, along with the growing aversion among many people to the racial terminology of earlier anthropologists, suggests that Caucasian may soon go the way of the -oid words and disappear even from local police blotters. | 2 |
| Of course, the existence of racial differences between peoples remains an obvious, if scientifically indefinite, fact with important social implications. But the terminology of race has shifted in recent years from anthropological classifications toward a more flexible language of geography, culture, and color. | 3 |
| More at
Australoid,
Caucasian,
Mongoloid, and
Negroid. | 4 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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