getting rid of the word “caucasian”

Racial labels and categories, like all terms and concepts, are human-made classifying devices that we learn, internalize, and then use to interpret the everyday world in which we live. But conventional American racial categories are rooted in colonialism, slavery, and an elaborate ideology developed to justify a system of racial inequality. Given racial categories’ sociohistorical rather than biological roots, the notion that “races” describe human biological variation has been officially rejected by the American Anthropological Association. As we critique outmoded systems of racial classification, we must also question the labels we use for “races.”