One of my favorite chapters in the AMA Manual of Style is about inclusive language, particularly the section about race/ethnicity (11.10.2). Race/ethnicity is a complicated topic because these categories have cultural and biological implications. In scientific research, it is important to specify race/ethnicity of study participants to understand the generalizability of the results. AMA Style instructs authors to indicate who classified the race/ethnicity of study participants (ie, the investigator or the participant).

Recently, I edited a research article with a table of participant characteristics that listed race/ethnicity as white, black/African American, Asian, and other. AMA Style notes that Asian and Asian American are not equivalent or interchangeable and that authors can be queried to clarify. All participants in this study were from the United States, so I asked the author about using Asian American instead of Asian. The author declined the edit, so Asian it stayed.

The editor in me shrugged it off. Editing is meant to serve authors and their research, and unless something is inaccurate, I have no problem reverting to the author’s original wording. After all, even the CDC website uses Asian and Asian American interchangeably.

The noneditor side of me, though—the child of immigrants who grew up in the United States and spent childhood summers in Hong Kong and Taiwan—was frustrated. I have been told I’m either not Asian enough or not American enough, and I try to explain that I’m both. I’m Asian American.

(As a sidebar, I also want to point out that black/African American presents its own problems. Many researchers do include non-Hispanic black, but where does that leave Afro-Latinx? This could be a whole other blog post.)

Of course, I understand that it may be exhausting to list out all the racial/ethnic groups in a table, especially considering page limits. I do appreciate when authors list more specific racial/ethnic groups, even if for many of them, n = 0. Any type of representation is a big step. However, I’ve also seen manuscripts in which the only race designations are white and nonwhite. The AMA Manual of Style notes that we should avoid using “non-” (eg, white and nonwhite participants) because it is a nonspecific “convenience” grouping. Instead, editors can query the author about using a specific race/ethnicity or using multiracial or people of color to address the heterogeneous ethnic background of many people. As an editor, a human, or even a potential study participant, I would self-report my race/ethnicity as Asian American or a person of color but never as nonwhite.—Iris Y. Lo