What Is The Definition Of Race Vs Ethnicity

If you re still confused here s how brody puts it to most easily understand.

What is the definition of race vs ethnicity. Expand your cultural mind further by exploring cultural diffusion. Race is something we believe to be heritable and ethnicity is something learned. It all depends on one s ideology. An ethnicity is a social group that shares a common and distinctive culture religion or language.

However this masks the history of how race has been used to create these concepts for political power. Here are some of the key differences and similarities between the three concepts. Where does ethnicity come from. Understanding ethnicity and race.

Race and ethnicity are two concepts related to human ancestry. Like race the meaning and use of the word ethnicity has changed over the last few centuries. Ethnicity however refers to cultural factors including nationality regional culture ancestry and language. However if you remember that race is based on physical attributes while ethnicity is based on cultural attributes things can become more clear.

Race is defined as a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits the term ethnicities is more broadly defined as large groups of people classed according to common racial national tribal religious linguistic or cultural origin or background. Ethnicity can be displayed or hidden depending on individual preferences while racial identities are always on display to a greater or lesser degree. Race is usually seen as biological referring to the physical characteristics of a person while ethnicity is viewed as a social science construct that describes a person s cultural identity. Ethnicity and culture each contain the letter t so remembering this fact can help you decide when to use ethnicity to describe categories of humans.

Census bureau defines race as a person s self identification with one or more social groups the social groups include white black african american asian american indian and alaska. It also refers to a person s ethnic traits background allegiance or association. In some ideologies race ethnicity and nationality are all one and the same. Race refers to physical characteristics.

While race is ascribed to individuals on the basis of physical traits ethnicity is more frequently chosen by the individual. Wading through the murky waters of ethnicity and race and what constitutes each can get confusing. Ethnicity refers to cultural characteristics like language and religion and can include race as well. Other ideologies hold that nationality simply means your country of citizenship and that race and ethnicity have no significance.

The traditional definition of race and ethnicity is related to biological and sociological factors respectively.