Ethnic/Racial Terminology as a Form of Representation: A Critical Review of the Lexicon of Collective and Specific Terms in Use in Britain

Abstract

All ethnic/racial terminology may be seen as a form of representation, whereby meanings are generated by a range of social categorizers in settings of popular culture, political discourse, and statistical governmentality. This paper investigates these representations through a critical review of the lexicon of collective and specific ethnic/racial terms in use in Britain. Relevant studies and documents were identified through structured searches on databases of peer-reviewed literature and the websites of government census agencies. The full-text corpus of the UK Parliament was used to delineate the genealogies or etymologies of this terminology. The derivation of specific ethnic/racial terms through census processes tends to conform with the theoretical model of mutual entailment of social categories and group identities. This relationship breaks down in the case of the broad and somewhat abstract categories of race/ethnicity originating in the modern bureaucratic processes of government and advocacy by anti-racist organizations, opening up a space for representations that are characterized by their exteriority. Commonly used acronyms are little understood in the wider society, are confusing, and of limited acceptability to those they describe, while other collective terms are offensive and ethnocentric. Accurate description is recommended to delineate ethnic minority populations in terms of their constituent groups.