Scientists proposed banning the word race in favor of ethnic group
Evidence
Attempting to set the record straight, Huxley and Haddon (1935:220) argued that the groups which were commonly called races were genetically mixed, and that mixture was a matter of nationality, class, and social status; “the word race should be banished, and the descriptive and noncommittal term ethnic group should be substituted.” The relations between blacks, Native Americans, and whites in the US were ethnic relations because social and cultural factors occasioned their differences. This was a proposed correction of the first word in the expression. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 658
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Traces the origin of ‘ethnic group’ as a deliberate replacement for the discredited term ‘race.’
- XREF: Connects to the broader genealogy of race vs. ethnicity terminology, relevant to an essay on how scientific vocabulary gets politically engineered.
Related
- Early anti-racist scholars proposed replacing race with ethnic group as a descriptive category (similarity 0.92)
- After 1945 the label race gave way to ethnicity in scholarly usage (similarity 0.82)
- The term ethnicity was revived in WWII to replace the discredited word race (similarity 0.79)
- Definitions of race and ethnicity themselves require ongoing rethinking. (similarity 0.78)