What is the difference between race and ethnicity?

Answer 1

Ethnicity refers to selected cultural and sometimes physical characteristics used to classify people into groups or categories considered to be significantly different from others

A race is a biological subspecies click this icon to hear the preceding term pronounced, or variety of a species, consisting of a more or less distinct population with anatomical traits that distinguish it clearly from other races"

Answer 2

The members of various races are all within the same species (I believe that is what the previous poster meant). The differences with race is more than skin color. Races form as adaptations to particular environments. The tropical sun will result in Melanesians, Negros, Negritos, Negrillos, Bushmen, etc forming black skin but all are separate races. There can be different ethnicities in a particular race. For example there are Irish and German in the caucasion race.

Answer 3

race consists of a single species, for example, the human race or neadertal race as is so often confused and misinterpeted as ethnicity. Ethnicity is the physical characteristics of each culture including skin, eye, language, etc. it is what makes up a specific group of people.

Answer 4

Race consists of the physical differences. Ethnicity covers culture, beliefs and identity.

Answer 5

Ethnicity refers to a set of characteristics modal to a subset of people that is drawn both from physical obsevations and cultural observations. Race puts emphasis (often an overstated emphasis) on physical characteristics.

Answer 6

Race is the color of your skin and texture of hair and ethnicity is the clothes you have on. The clothes may indicate status or membership in groups. (or they may have copied the outfit from a fashion model, so this criterion for classification is not used in the U. S.)

Answer 7

race is the color of the skin, i think ethnicity is the beliefs and culture that go with it.

Answer 8

The term race serves to distinguish between populations or groups of people based on different sets of characteristics which can be determined either through scientific conventions or more commonly through social conventions. The most widely used human racial categories are based on visible traits (especially skin color, facial features and hair texture), genes, and self-identification. Conceptions of race, as well as specific racial groupings, vary by culture and over time, and are often controversial, for scientific reasons as well as because of their impact on social identity and identity politics. Most biological and social scientists regard the concept of race primarily as a social construct, while some maintain it has a genetic basis.

Since the 1940s, some evolutionary scientists have rejected the view of race according to which any number of finite lists of essential characteristics could be used to determine a like number of races. For example, the convention of categorizing the human population based on human skin colors has been used, but hair colors, eye colors, nose sizes, lip sizes, and heights have not. Many social scientists think common race definitions, or any race definitions pertaining to humans, lack taxonomic rigour and validity. They argue that race definitions are imprecise, arbitrary, derived from custom, have many exceptions, have many gradations, and that the numbers of races observed vary according to the culture examined. They further maintain that "race" as such is best understood as a social construct, and they prefer to conceptualize and analyze human genotypic and phenotypic variation in terms of populations and clines instead.

Other scientists however, have argued that this position is motivated more by political than scientific reasons{citequote}. Others also argue that categories of self-identified race/ethnicity or biogeographic ancestry are both valid and useful, that these categories correspond to clusters inferred from multilocus genetic data, and that this statistical correspondence, not necessarily a proven cause and effect, implies that genetic factors somehow contribute to unexplained phenotypic variation among groups.

An ethnic group or ethnicity is a population of humans whose members identify with each other, usually on the basis of a presumed common genealogy or ancestry (Smith, 1986). Recognition by others as a separate ethnic group, and a specific name for the group, also contribute to defining it. Ethnic groups are also usually united by certain common cultural, behavioural, linguistic and ritualistic or religious traits. In this sense, an ethnic group is also a cultural community. Processes that result in the emergence of such a community are summarized as ethnogenesis.

[edit] Ethnicity, nation, and race

Because of closely related definitions, an ethnic group can overlap or even coincide with a nation [citation needed], especially when national identity is defined primarily in terms of common origin. Members of nations also identify with each other, often presume a common ancestry, and are recognised by others as a distinct group with a specific name. Nations also have a common identity: always cultural, usually linguistic, and sometimes religious. An ethnic group which is also a nation can be the titular nation of a nation-state: however ethnic groups as such are not a state, and possess no territorial sovereignty.

Members of an ethnic group generally claim a strong cultural continuity over time, although some historians and anthropologists have documented that many of the cultural practices on which various ethnic groups are based are of recent invention (Friedlander 1975, Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, Sider 1993).

While ethnicity and race are related concepts (Abizadeh 2001), the concept of ethnicity is rooted in the idea of social groups, marked especially by shared nationality, tribal affiliation, genealogy, religious faith, language, or cultural and traditional origins, whereas race is rooted in the idea of a biological classification. In 1950, the UNESCO statement The Race Question, signed by internationally renowned scholars (including Ashley Montagu, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gunnar Myrdal, Julian Huxley, etc.), suggested to "drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of "ethnic groups."

Answer 9

Race is the color, ethnicity is the background.