1. Item: NATIVE RACES as both a primary head and subhead (p. 877; Sears, p. 418-19)

This is thorny on several counts, not least because of the disparity or discrepancy between the boundaries dileniated in the scope note and the actual employment of the head by catalogers. In practice, the subhead, particularly, becomes an ethnological or sociological catch-all, applied to works on the life, habits, and social conditions of "races" within a prescribed land or region, as well, perhaps, as to their relations with the "governing authorities." Objections to the phrase itself are manifold:

(a) "Races" is unquestionably an anachronism, no longer -- if ever -- sound anthropologically. Coming to the nitty-gritty, it is meant to encompass the "aboriginal" (i.e., originally-resident) people in a given area, whether they be a "nation," or organized tribally, by clan, etc. The overridingly important consideration here is that there may be many such "peoples" in, say, Angola, and they need not be -- and often are not -- much differentiated from one another biologically. If "race" retains any solid contemporary meaning it is biological or taxonomic, not ethnic nor cultural. In short, the LC term has been misapplied to what are not racial (i.e., necessarily biological), but rather ethnic or social groups. As an example, the Benga, Combe, Bubi, and Fang of Equatorial (formerly Spanish) Guinea - all distinct ethnically - don't differ much racially. Yet LC insists on terming these culturally-disparate people "races." They aren't.

(b) "Native" is the sort of word employed by a European or American, not an African or Asian. That it connotatively expresses a White supremacist or "bwana" attitude is perhaps nowhere better revealed than in a passage from Ezekiel Mphahlele's short story "Point of Identity." Karel, a good-natured "Coloured" mechanic who willingly lives among Black South Africans, but has just been threatened with downward reclassification, exclaims:
Look man... de word 'native' doesn't simply mean one's got black blood or African blood. It's a p'litical word, man. You's a native because you carry a pass, you can't go to watch-imball-er-Parliament. You can't vote, you live in dis location. One can be proud of being an African but not a native.

To cement the point, consider Mr. Fafunwa's remarks:

The word "native" is defined [by the Shorter Oxford English dictionary] as "One born in a place; left in a natural state, untouched by art, unadorned, simple; in modern usage, especially with connotation of non-European origin." In Western journals, magazines and textbooks for primary school children, authors out-do themselves in making the label stick. The word "native" in terms of current usage is synonymous with the African. If no harm is meant by the users of this word, then conscious effort must be made to avoid the use of it by writers and publishers...

(c) It is palpably ludicrous to assign - NATIVE RACES, as a cataloguer now must, to material treating with, as examples, Xhosa and Zulu people in mid-20th century South Africa who may well be identifiable as Xhosa and Zulu (i.e., the "aboriginal"/original inhabitants) but many of whom are no longer folk- or traditionally-organized - in other words, who are modern, urbanized, relatively mobile members of the society. The foolishness only compounds with the realization that these very "native races" will one day, most certainly, become the "governing authorities" themselves, that their presently inferior political station is merely transitory, temporary.

Remedy: (a) Abolish the adjectival "Native" in all its permutations; i.e., NATIVE CLERGY, NATIVE LABOR, NATIVE RACES.
(b) Denote material on "the relations between the governing authorities and the aboriginal inhabitants" by the new head, COLONIZED PEOPLES

Sanford Berman, Prejudices and Antipathies, 1971.