British academic standardization drove the debate over the term ‘race relations’

Evidence

There are differences between US and British universities in the structuring of the undergraduate curriculum in sociology. In the United States a teacher may have considerable freedom to choose the title of a course of lectures. In Britain there is a stronger expectation that the subject shall be taught in a standard fashion, and therefore more concern about how a course shall be fitted into the curriculum. This helps explain why there has been a more animated debate in Britain about the appropriateness of the expression race relations as a general name for a field of study. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 670

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on national differences in how disciplines are institutionalized, e.g. US vs European sociology.