Race and Health: Dilemmas of the South African health researcher

Abstract

We begin this chapter by discussing responses by members of our team to comments on articles submitted to major international journals focusing on health research. Recently, when one of our manuscripts was close to being accepted, the editors asked the author team to change its use of the term “coloured” to “mixed race”. Shortly after this, another journal asked us to change the term “coloured” to “people of diverse origin”. Some years ago, we were asked by a journal published in the USA to change our use of “coloured” by describing our (South African) research participants as “African American”! Lastly,