I'm writing a fantasy story that takes place mostly on another world. There they use the term race to refer to elves, humans, trolls, etc. The kingdom is isolated, and where the humans there were originally refugees, they are all Caucasian looking. Recently, some of the non-humans met a human of Asian descent and were trying to understand why she looked different. Someone who was familiar with our idea of races (i.e., Caucasian, Asian, African, etc.) was trying to explain it to them. I had originally used sub-race since most of the synonyms given in thesaurus don't seem to fit. But then I wondered if that made it seem like I was implying that different races might be sub-human (which was not my intent) Does it sound that way or is there a better term to use?

How about "ethnicities"?

Nice one, Wheaty! In the UK, I've heard other races refered to as 'Ethnics', though mostly in the derogatory sense.

In biology, a species (abbreviated sp., with the plural form species abbreviated spp.) is the basic unit of biological classification. Race refers to a person's physical characteristics, such as bone structure and skin, hair, or eye color. ... Your race is determined by how you look while your ethnicity is determined based on the social and cultural groups you belong to. Subrace, Noun, (plural subraces) (biology) A secondary or subsidiary race. (as in Cro-Magnons to Neanderthals).

Therefor: Humans are a species with many racial variants, often based on location the race originated and adapted to survive the local environment.

Caucasus is a mountain range and region in Russia. The first person to classify people used the people from that area as a model - Caucasian had "sharp" noses and a light skin then Mongolian had more flat noses... The actual classification stems from those times - you could probably find the history somewhere, I read it when I was editing a documentary some time ago.

In Africa, referring to Africa as a race is insulting. We're a mixture of very different people who live on this continent and not all are black. Consider that Egypt is in Africa and Egyptians are also Africans. The American habit of referring to themselves as African-American doesn't go over very well in my country - with anyone. I am African, nobody in my country would dispute that. I don't have dark skin.

In South Africa where we openly recognise and talk about race as our history made it a big issue which we're still struggling to solve - we openly and without prejudice refer to people as Black, White, Asian, Indian, Coloured. Asian would be people that come from China, Japan etc. Indian would be people who come from India, Pakistan, Syria Arabian countries. White would be ex-Europeans, black would be Africans and coloured is mixed race and Cape Malay. A South African would be able to tell the difference and we have a hard time explaining the concept of "coloured" to other people. But you could look up Trevor Noah who is a South African comedian working in USA - he makes a lot of jokes about this situation.

You could always make up your own word - for example call it Zing - we're a different Zing and then explain that.

Thanks for the replies. Definitely, things to think about. I think I'll be rewriting the explanation, but I'm not sure how yet.