Race and Ethnicity
Race and Ethnicity
Race vs. Ethnicity
• The terms race and ethnicity are often used interchangeably…however, they refer to different things.
Race
• Race has historically been a way of grouping people by their physical characteristics.
Human Variation
Origins of Race in the West
• Thinking about race originates largely in Europe during the 17th and 18th Century.
Archaic Racial Terms
• Caucasoid (Europeans/Middle Eastern/South Asians)
• Mongoloid (Central/East Asian and American Indian)
• Negroid (Indigenous Africans)• Aboriginal (Indigenous Australians)
Race and Racism
• There was never a time when the idea of race, as formulated in 17th and 18th Century Europe, wasn’t racist.
Challenges to Race as Biology
• No trait or gene is found in only one racial group.
• The amount of genetic difference between various “racial groups” is very small…and people may find that the person they are most genetically similar to looks very different from them.
Race: a folk taxonomy
• Race is a folk taxonomy, a system of classification based, not on science, but cultural ideas.
Race: Cross-Culturally
• Racialization: the assignment of racial labels to individuals and groups differs across cultures.
• The same person may be racialized differently in different parts of the world.
Ethnicity
• Ethnicity refers to shared social, cultural and linguistic characteristics as well as a collective sense of identity.
• A given ethnic group may or may not share a common set of physical features.
Nationality
• Nationality refers to one’s citizenship (or membership) within a particular country/nation-state.
• Within a given nation-state there can be numerous distinct ethnic groups who may or may not identify with the nation-state.
Race/Ethnicity/Nationality
• All of these terms are shifting and there is considerable variation in self-identification.
Ethnicity vs. Race
• Race: shared physical characteristics• Ethnicity: shared cultural characteristics• Nationality: alignment with a particular
nation-state.
Racism
• Individual vs. Structural
Structural Racism
• Structural or Institutional Racism refers to legal, institutional or cultural practices that encourage or advantage certain “racial” groups over others.