US ethnic-studies practice subsumed ‘racial’ groups under ‘ethnic’ categories

Evidence

While the word “race” never completely disappeared from the field of ethnic studies, it became common practice to define “racial” as a part of “ethnic” phenomena. John Higharn’s collection Ethnic Leadership in America (1978), for example, includes entries on Afro-Americans and Native Americans. A journal devoted to “American ethnic literature,” MELUS: The Journal for the Society of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, similarly offered (and still offers) criticism of literature from many ethnic groups, white and nonwhite; and many anthologies of ethnic literature followed the pattern of interspersing writings by African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans with texts written by “white ethnics” (e. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 697

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Early anti-racist scholars proposed replacing race with ethnic group as a descriptive category — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 658