ETHNICITY NOT RACE: A PUBLIC HEALTH PERSPECTIVE

This article presents an argument, from a public health perspective, against the use of the term ‘race’ and for its replacement by the term ‘ethnicity’. Historically, the rise of the race concept in society was dependent on its undeserved status as an objective scientific and biological category and was associated with strategies of exclusion and political domination. Mainstream science played a key role in the rise of the race concept but has since largely abandoned it in face of evidence from population genetics. Similarly, the public health movement has historically been concerned with race/ethnicity as a determinant of unequal health status, but the race term has now all but disappeared from the Australian public health literature, where it has been replaced by the concept of ethnicity. Ethnicity is a complex social variable, with cultural and political dimensions, but no biological dimension. Adopting a public health perspective on ethnicity which recognises the fluid and contested nature of this socio‐political variable, whilst seeking to make explicit its relevance and definitional limits, allows us to dispense with the race concept altogether, since race has no additional explanatory or strategic value above that of ethnicity. The race term is still commonly used, however, in general conversation and in the media. The persistence of the race concept and of racism is difficult to explain but may be related historically to the politics of nationalism, and in modern times to the politics of difference and identity that characterise the modern multicultural nation‐state. Abandoning the terminology of race leaves racism without any logical basis, and may contribute to a process of social change, although it cannot be expected to eliminate the phenomenon of racism.