That is incorrect. “Hamitic” is a subgroup of the Caucasoid race. The taxon was reserved for populations inhabiting North and Northeast Africa that speak non-Semitic languages from the Hamito-Semitic/Afro-Asiatic family i.e. from the family’s Berber, Cushitic and Egyptian branches. This includes populations like the Berbers, Egyptians, Abyssinians, Somalis, Tuareg and Sahraoui. It doesn’t include Bantu/Nilotic Negroid populations like the Tutsi and Masai, though these groups do have some Hamitic admixture.
You may be correct about the precise definitions used for language classification, though I believe the term “Hamitic” has gone completely out of use.
However, what I was talking about were the racial categories outlined by anthropologists and explorers in the last half of the 19th and first part of the 20th and generally accepted up thru WWII.
Under these notions, the tall/slender tribes of East Africa with “Caucasoid” features were classified as Hamitic or as blends of Hamites and Negroes and were considered to be the true source of anything vaguely resembling civilization in the area. They were considered to be “white” in some sense and vastly superior racially to the lowly blacks/Negroes among whom they lived.
This broad use of the term Hamitic is why the term has gone out of use, I believe generally even in the restricted linguistic sense you describe. It is wildly non-PC.
Wiki has a decent article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamitic
Taxonomy of peoples and languages, like other taxonomy, has no definitive existence in the real world. They are categories we assign, often somewhat arbitrarily, because this categorization has meaning to us. The categories we put things into often tells us more about ourselves than it does about the items we classify.