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Unit 8: Race and Ethnicity

United States Notes
In the United States of America, the term “ethnic” carries a different meaning from how it is
commonly used in some other countries due to the historical and ongoing significance of racial
distinctions that categorize together what might otherwise have been viewed as ethnic groups.
For example, various ethnic, “national,” or linguistic groups from Africa, Asia and the Pacific
Islands, Latin America and Indigenous America have long been aggregated as racial minority
groups (currently designated as African American, Asian, Latino and Native American or American
Indian, respectively). While a sense of ethnic identity may coexist with racial identity (Chinese
Americans among Asian or Irish American among European or White, for example), the long
history of the United States as a settler, conqueror and slave society, and the formal and informal
inscription of racialzed groupings into law and social stratification schemes has bestowed upon
race a fundamental social identification role in the United States.
“Ethnicity theory” in the US refers to a school of thinking on race that arose in response first to
biological views of race, which underwrote some of the most extreme forms of racial social
stratification, exclusion and subordination. However, in the 1960s ethnicity theory was put to
service in debates among academics and policy makers regarding how to grapple with the demands
and resistant (sometimes “race nationalist”) political identities resulting from the great civil rights
mobilizations and transformation. Ethnicity theory came to be synonymous with a liberal and
neoconservative rejection or diminution of race as a fundamental feature of US social order,
politics and culture.
Ethnicity usually refers to collectives of related groups, having more to do with morphology,
specifically skin color, rather than political boundaries. The word “nationality” is more commonly
used for this purpose (e.g. Italian, Mexican, French, Russian, Japanese, etc are nationalities). Most
prominently in the U.S., Latin American descended populations are grouped in a “Hispanic” or
“Latino” ethnicity. The many previously designated Oriental ethnic groups are now classified as
the Asian racial group for the census.
The terms “Black” and “African American,” while different, are both used as ethnic categories in
the US. In the late 1980s, the term “African American” was posited as the most appropriate and
politically correct race designation. While it was intended as a shift away from the racial inequities
of America’s past often associated with the historical views of the “Black race”, it largely became
a simple replacement for the terms Black, Colored, Negro and the like, referring to any individual
of dark skin color regardless of geographical descent. The term Caucasian generally describes
people whose ancestry can be traced to Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. This includes
European-colonized countries in the Americas, Australasia and South Africa among others. All
the aforementioned are categorized as part of the “White” racial group, as per US Census
categorization. This category has been split into two groups : Hispanics and non-Hispanics (e.g.
White non-Hispanic and White Hispanic.)
Difference between Ethnicity and Race
Ethnicity Race

An ethnic group or ethnicity is a The term race refers to the concept of
population of human beings dividing people into populations or
Definition whose members identify with groups on the basis of various sets of
each other, on the basis of a real or physical characteristics which result from
a presumed common genealogy or genetic ancestry.
ancestry.

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