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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.