Race and ethnicity  (Page 3/22)

For example, in the U.S., people of Chinese and Southern European heritage have been categorized as both black and white, dependent upon the time period.

Since earliest times, for hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have been moving across the face of the planet. From more than 75,000 years ago until the present, people have been meeting others different in physical appearance from themselves. Oftentimes these travelers have interbred with those whom they have encountered, creating a worldwide situation in which there are no pure races among human beings: we are all related, even if distantly, to one another, notwithstanding our superficial physical differences (phenotype)—the differences in phenotype are accounted for by 1 /10 ^th of 1% (.1%=.0001) of our genotype (DNA). Sadly, many socially defined racial characteristics have become significant symbols of character and Thomas’s Theorem which states that “things perceived to be real are real in their consequences” explains to us that race and the way we define it matters significantly in American society. When W.E.B. DuBois wrote about

this double consciousness this seeing one’s self through

the eyes of the other world

In about 2001, in a class discussion of race, one of my students who is from Venezuela told the class about her experience emigrating to the US. On her application there was a space for race: she wrote “human.” The immigration officials at the airport where she entered the US were not amused and changed her response to “white.”

Ethnicity

Ethnicity is a status based on cultural heritage and shared feelings of peoplehood, so that an ethnic group is a category of people that is set apart from others because of its distinctive social and cultural characteristics such as ancestry, language, religion, customs, and lifestyle. And although ethnicity is self-defined, it is more than possible for race and ethnic group membership to be combined in one person. Those who do the defining of race are referred to as the dominant group (the dominant group is always the ultimate in-group in a society).

In the US we consider Hispanic or Latino to be an ethnicity, but it is a problematic designation because the culture of Mexico is not the same as the culture of Venezuela and the culture of El Salvador is not the same as the culture of Argentina. In fact, even though most of Latin America shares a common language and a common history of conquest by the Spanish, their cultures are distinct as are their histories.

Racism and bigotry

Unfortunately, there has been a long and terrible history of racism in the United States—racism that is woven into the fabric of America. (Racism is the belief that one racial category is inherently inferior to another.) With that racism has come egregious levels of prejudice and discrimination which we learn as part of the socialization process. Bigotry includes racism but also includes hatred and discrimination against people based on sex, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, and socioeconomic status; thus bigotry is more all-encompassing than racism.