You mean to say built on a premise that other people don't share, not "false pretenses". That would would imply i'm lying or being deceptive about something.
False for this use case. Not valid. Inapplicable.
Not that you're being deceptive.
I would argue only coloqually. Maybe I'm just completely out of touch, but I've only ever understand that use of 'race' to be an informal usage. I.e.: there are not multiple races that all belong under human - all humans are the same race, namely 'human'. That's why humans aren't categorized into species, because theyre all the same species.
So it was a political/strategic choice.
I personally don't care, I'm always going to say race just like I always say reflex save instead of dexterity save.
The colloquial usage is the problem. Yes, scientifically the idea of multiple “races” of human is complete bunk. But there is a long history of (pseudo-)scientific racism trying to use the notion of multiple distinct races of humans to justify racial hierarchies and imbalances of power. Many people still believe in this notion of race as a biologically significant category, and in much of the world, especially the US, it is still a socially significant category despite its lack of scientific validity.
The whole thing is a very touchy subject that fun imaginary elf games are probably better off distancing themselves from.
The word "race" used to be a lot more elastic than the way it's used today: it could be as big as "species" or as small as "ethnic group." The original D&D books used the word in this older sense. Frankly (and unfortunately), I don't think any of the replacement terms fills exactly the same niche.
To be honest, if we were living in a fantasy setting, we might well use the word "race" because it wouldn't have the same political connotations as it does today. (See my earlier post about how the meaning of the word used to be a lot more flexible than it has become in current usage.)
I don't know that I'd say it used to be more elastic. Rather that the meaning changed over time.
Race used to be more synonymous with the people of a country or region. The English considered themselves a distinctly different people than the Irish, and vice-versa.* They spoke (until pretty close to the modern era) of the English Race and Irish Race as distinct. Even though we now know that the distinctions between those two peoples are much more cultural than genetic or physical.
But then, during the colonial period starting a few hundred years ago, the word started to be used in a different way, more (pseudo)scientifically-based, delineating between ethnic types defined by physical characteristics like skin color or eye shape, more than by nations or cultures. It was used as part of a justification, on (spuriously) objective grounds, for the exploitation and dominance of some groups by other more powerful groups. To varying levels, but up to whole categories of people being treated as chattel, more like animals than human beings.
And unfortunately the world we live in is still grappling with the aftereffects of this categorization, and using it politically in ways that impact people's lives. There is documented statistical evidence of people being treated differently, under the law and in other social circumstances, despite legal reforms over the past half century or so. I was just reading a story about a black baseball player from a few decades ago being shocked when a white player willingly drank from a bottle he had been drinking from. Many communities in America have lost once-common public swimming pools, because people abandoned them once they were desegregated. Show Me a Hero is a recent critically-acclaimed HBO miniseries about a small city in New York grappling with the impact of redlining, and trying to block housing integration, in the 90s. While I was a teenager. In recent years we've seen a large-scale organized protest movement trying to push reform for police abuse of force, especially some apparent statistical disparities in what "races" suffer how much of it.
Given all this political and social baggage that the word still has, it makes sense to disassociate our fun elfgames from this context and the division and categorization of people in it by "race". Especially given how assigning different "races" mechanical differences kind of reifies the concept of how race used to be seen in the real world in terms of being an objective basis for disparate treatment.
*(And, relevant to the Pendragon campaign I've been playing, set in the late 5th century, back before there was a people who called themselves English, that place was occupied by a whole bunch of peoples who considered themselves different "races", including Cymric Celts, Cornish, Saxons, Angles, occasional Bretons, Franks, Scots, Danes, later Normans...)
