What is the difference between race
and ethnicity?
Dalton Conley |
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While race and ethnicity share an ideology of common ancestry,
they differ in several ways. First of all, race is primarily
unitary. You can only have one race, while you can claim
multiple ethnic affiliations. You can identify ethnically
as Irish and Polish, but you have to be essentially either
black or white. The fundamental difference is that race
is socially imposed and hierarchical. There is an inequality
built into the system. Furthermore, you have no control
over your race; it's how you're perceived by others. For
example, I have a friend who was born in Korea to Korean
parents, but as an infant, she was adopted by an Italian
family in Italy. Ethnically, she feels Italian: she eats
Italian food, she speaks Italian, she knows Italian history
and culture. She knows nothing about Korean history and
culture. But when she comes to the United States, she's
treated racially as Asian.
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John Cheng |
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I think most people associate race with biology and ethnicity
with culture. It's important to stress the culture and language
part of it. Ethnicity isn't just a question of affiliation;
it's also a question of choice. It's also a question of
group membership. And it's usually associated with a geographic
region. It's also often confused or conflated with nationality,
but that's not the same thing. Today people identify with
ethnicity positively because they see themselves as being
part of that group. People can't just simply say, "Well,
I want to become a member of that race." You either are
or are not a member of that race. Whereas, if you wanted
to look at ethnicity based on culture, you could learn a
language, you can learn customs - there are things that
you can learn so that you could belong to that group.
I think the most powerful argument about the differentiation
between race and ethnicity is that race becomes institutionalized
in a way that has profound social consequences on the members
of different groups.
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David Freund |
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I agree. The most important differences, at least in much
of U.S. history, lie in the ways that dominant powerful
institutions treat race versus ethnicity. So while one could
argue that both ethnicity and race are socially constructed,
their influence in terms of power and inequality is in the
way that racial identities have been constructed historically.
One could argue that they're both illusory and imagined.
But racial categories have had a much more concrete impact
on peoples' lives, because they've been used to discriminate
and to distribute resources unequally and set up different
standards for protection under law. Both public policy and
private institutional and communal actions have created
inequalities based on race. To be sure, groups defined as
"ethnically" different have been discriminated against in
the U.S. too, but not in ways that had nearly as dramatic
an impact. Indeed, those "ethnic" groups that suffered from
severe discrimination were usually labeled, at the time,
as "racial" groups as well. Consider the history of discrimination
against the Irish, Italians, and Jews, for example.
People commonly make these distinctions between race and
ethnicity as being biological, or cultural, or based on
national origins and things like that. But it's really important
to remember two things. First, both ethnic and racial identities
have changed a lot throughout history. And second, there's
very little evidence that people actually see great distinctions
between race and ethnicity culturally, politically, and
in daily life. In fact, there is a history of racial self-identification
in this country that is very similar to that of ethnic self-identification.
Italians, Jews, and Slavs were considered non-white in
popular political discourse of the late 19th and early 20th
century, and this discourse grew very influential in the
anti-immigration movement, leading eventually, in the 1920s,
to severe restrictions against entry of supposedly "non-white"
groups to this country. This popular pseudo-science made
it into the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and other
magazines, supporting immigration restrictions against the
"Alpine" and the "Mediterranean" races, described as the
long-skulled, slow, peasant stock people of Central Europe,
etc. Most of these immigrants were not running around in
the 19th and early 20th century proudly announcing that
they're Italian Americans or Slavic Americans because at
the time, it was often very dangerous and at least a disadvantage
to be identified that way. I think we call these groups
an ethnicity and not a race now, because those categories
have actually changed. This is due in large part to a series
of policy decisions that gave some groups certain advantages
in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, allowing them to be part of
an ever-expanding "white" race. The political context and
the power context changes. Ethnicity, like race, takes on
different meanings.
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Sumi Cho |
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In the law, I think there's a failure to seriously grasp
the significance of the impact of racial exclusion and white
supremacy in this society. There are many who don't believe
that racial divisions are much different from ethnicity-based
divisions; i.e., what African Americans have faced in this
country is little different from what Irish Americans or
Italian Americans have faced.
In the legal sphere, you get these court decisions that
endorse affirmative action programs that promote forward-looking
rationales, like diversity for a university, let's say,
but don't allow programs that promote backward-looking rationales,
such as remedying general societal discrimination, unless
you have a specific documented case of past discrimination.
So you end up with this ungrounded, untethered notion of
general diversity which has nothing to do with the real
impact of race in society. There's an asymmetry that's important
to keep in mind when we're talking about race versus ethnicity.
Yet politicians deliberately further this non-distinction
between race and ethnicity, especially conservative politicians
who want to downplay the significance of racial discrimination
in this country.
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