Minority (continued)

[Fred Shapiro]

On Sat, 26 May 2001 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

> AMERICAN MINORITY PEOPLES:
> A STUDY IN RACIAL AND CULTURAL CONFLICTS IN THE UNITED STATES
> by Donald Ramsey Young, 1898-
> Harper & Bros., NY
> 1932
>
> RESEARCH MEMORANDUM ON MINORITY PEOPLES IN THE DEPRESSION
> by Donald Ramsey Young, 1898-
> Social Science Research Council
> 1937
>
> OUR RACIAL AND NATIONAL MINORITIES:
> THEIR HISTORY, CONTRIBUTION, AND PRESENT PROBLEMS
> co-edited by Francis James Brown (1894-) and Joseph Slobey Roucek (1902-)
> (Brown contributed the essay "The meaning of minorities"--ed.)
> Prentice-Hall, NY
> 1937

These may be examples of OED sense 3.b. ("A small group of people
separated from the rest of the community by a difference in race,
religion, language, etc."); OED's first use of this sense is 1921.  It
seems to have been used in international law after World War I.  Here are
some earlier examples:

1898 _Mind_ VII. 252  It is also shown that religious minorities show a
lower suicide-rate than is normal to them in larger communities; this is
attributed mainly to the greater social integration of minorities.

1919 _Intl. Jrnl. Ethics_ XXIX. 347  Compulsory passing of legislation to
grant a proper freedom to racial minorities within a nation.

I did not give these examples to Mr. Safire because he was looking for
authoritative usage in U.S. law and for the specific sense of "nonwhite"
(also because he had a deadline and I didn't have time for exhaustive
research).

Fred Shapiro


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