Caucasian asians?

Imprecise usage as labels for human classification

The terms "Caucasoid," "Negroid," "Mongoloid," and similar ones with the "oid" suffix are also used in several fields as euphemisms for racialist terms that came to be seen as offensive about fifty years ago. Scientific support for the Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid terminology has fallen steadily over the past century. Where 78 percent of the articles in the 1931 Journal of Physical Anthropology employed these or similar synonymous terms reflecting a bio-race paradigm, only 36 percent did so in 1965, and just 28 percent did in 1996. In February, 2001, the editors of the medical journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine asked authors to no longer use "race" as explanatory variable nor to use obsolescent terms. Others prestigious peer-reviewed journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the American Journal of Public Health have done the same. Furthermore, the National Institutes of Health recently issued a program announcement for grant applications through February 1, 2006, specifically seeking researchers who can investigate and publicize among primary care physicians the detrimental effects on the nation's health of the practice of medical racial profiling using such terms The program announcement quoted the editors of one journal as saying that, "analysis by race and ethnicity has become an analytical knee-jerk reflex."

Two criticisms are often leveled at the usage of these terms in scientific venues. The first objection to Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid and similar terms is that they perpetuate the simplistic and demonstrably false notion that H. sapiens can genetically be divided into a specific set of 3-8 distinct groups, clusters, clines, races, breeds, varieties, or subspecies, which can then be objectively delineated. Humanity can be grouped or classified in many different ways, of course, either genetically (as, for instance, by blood type, lactose tolerance, skin tone, or the neutral markers of prehistoric migrations) or politically (as in EEOC regulations or the exhortations of Pan-Black Afrocentrists, for example). And whether any such classification scheme matches any particular individual's notion of "race" depends entirely upon the individual. As R.S. Cooper puts it, "Each time the technical facade of these racialist arguments is destroyed, the latest jargon and half-truths from the margins of science are used to rebuild them around the same core belief in Black inferiority. Because race is in part a genetic concept, the advent of molecular DNA technology has opened an important new chapter in this story. Unfortunately, the article... begins from mistaken premises and merely restates the racialist view using the terminology of molecular genetics."

The second objection is more pertinent to this discussion. It is that since such terms lack a current consensus denotation in science, their use makes papers diffult if not impossible to understand. A sampling of such criticisms in scholarly peer-reviewed professional papers include:

• "Race equality as a matter of governance has gained momentum in most Western countries and is reflected in race/ethnicity data collection in administrative systems and the attention accorded to terminology by census agencies. However, the vocabulary of health care--both in its literature and the language of officialdom--has proved resistant to the use of this lexicon of acceptable terms.... What makes such language racist is the historical legacy it carries--that is, its symbolic importance."
• "We find that commonly used ethnic labels are both insufficient and inaccurate representations of the inferred genetic clusters.... We note, however, that the complexity of human demographic history means that there is no obvious natural clustering scheme, nor an obvious appropriate degree of resolution."
• "Although quality research in this field is most welcome, concern is mounting over the confusing and often inappropriate labeling of populations under study."
• "Given the widespread and often inconsistent use of this terminology in both text and tables, resulting in confusion or ambiguity about the populations being described, it is important that this issue is addressed."
• "Medical definitions of race have lagged behind [in the elimination of the imprecise and innaccurate terms Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid]...."

Some critics go on to affirm that usage of these terms (Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid) has declined in recent years. According to a current undergraduate physical anthropology text, "...Europeans, Africans, and Asians (often referred to by the archaic terms 'Caucasoid,' 'Negroid', and Mongoloid,' which are almost never used in scientific research today)." According to M.A. Winkler "thankfully the former Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms such as Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australoid rarely appear in biomedical literature."

And yet, although many scholarly articles criticize usage of the terms, and apparently no one in scholarly venues defends their use, the terms continue to appear in the literature. Such usages generally fall into two groups: admixture mapping and "ethnic" medicine.