| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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6. Names and Labels: Social, Racial, and Ethnic Terms
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| § 45. minority |
| Socially speaking, a minority is an ethnic, racial, religious, or other group having a distinctive presence within a larger society. Some people object to this term as negative or dismissive, and you should generally avoid it in contexts where a group’s status with regard to the majority population is irrelevant. Thus you would normally say a tour of the city’s ethnic (not minority) restaurants or a poem celebrating the diversity of cultures (not minorities) in America, where in both cases the emphasis is cultural as opposed to statistical or political. But in the appropriate context, as when discussing a group from a social or demographic point of view, minority is a useful term that you need not avoid as offensive. | 1 |
| A different problem arises when minority is used to refer to an individual rather than a group, as in the sentence As a minority, I am particularly sensitive to the need for fair hiring practices. Seventy-two percent of the Usage Panel finds this example unacceptable, possibly because it is felt that an individual cannot have the same relationship to society as a group. However, when the word is used in the plural without a numeral or a quantifier like many or some—as in The firm announced plans to hire more minorities and women—the panelists are more approving, with only 27 percent judging an example such as this one unacceptable. The discrepancy in these opinions can be explained by the fact that in this type of plural usage, the word is understood as referring to the members of a group taken collectively rather than as individuals. | 2 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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