how to answer ethnicity and race

I do too. Use of the words overlap and are very historical and often personal. I was searching for answers, but did I actually want to hear them? From that moment on, I've known myself as a half-black person. Anthropologists, physiologists, and other writers and thinkers in the late 18th and 19th century—including the likes of Thomas Jefferson—wrongly claimed that characteristics of a person’s race innately determined and justified their social superiority or inferiority to others. Compared to race, ethnicity is more recent, dating back to around 1765–75. And then the impossible happened. Nowhere is this tension more obvious than in the U.S. Census, which provides interesting (if somewhat behind-the-times) evidence for tracking the complexities of race and ethnicity. That we know the two are somehow different but related is clear from the lexical side of things again: The most common use of ethnicity in print, and one of the most common uses of race in print, is in the phrase “race and ethnicity.”. I'd gotten used to being the brown friend among white friends. That descriptor can be specific and supplemental to a person’s race, speaking to a person’s culture, ancestry, and sometimes language and religion. Still, as a brown girl in Oklahoma, there were times when I noticed I was the only nonwhite person at a roller-skating rink or food court. She was matter-of-fact, as if she were filling me in on something I wasn't aware of. I had taken the test last June, in a time we could call pre-Ferguson, pre-Eric Garner, two tragedies that drastically shifted the conversation around race in our country. As it happens, DNA that traces from multiple continents is labeled "unassigned." We may earn commission from the links on this page. The College is mandated to ask for ethnicity and race information in a two part question. Race and ethnicity have been used as not just descriptors of a person’s physical features or ancestral origin, but throughout history they have also been deployed, sometimes maliciously, as a means to other—if not outright hurt or oppress—someone perceived to be different. Many people have mixed cultural backgrounds and can share in more than one ethnicity. CONSCIOUS STYLE GUIDE is a registered trademark of Karen Yin. The test results sat in my inbox for months. But very generally speaking, the word race involves shared physical characteristics, especially skin color, and a shared ancestry or historical experience based on that, whereas ethnicity involves shared cultural or national identity, which may include language, nationality, religion, or other customs. I read further. Those whose race appeared to be white incorrectly believed the color of their skin and other aspects of their appearance meant they were more intelligent, moral, capable—more human, tragically—than those who were not white. But in that moment, I saw parts of myself in both of them—I could identify with each one and, for that matter, whomever I wanted. (Mark Twain, “Eve’s Diary,” The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories, 1906). Learn how your comment data is processed. “Hispanic” vs. “Latino”: When To Use Each Term, These Are Some Of The Best Words To Describe Scorpios. When the email arrived, I was with two of my best friends, Rightor and Elizabeth. Others felt that race and ethnicity were both movable feasts and relied more on how power structures categorize and operate against people. Hispanics can choose one or more race categories, including White, Black or African American, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander. This content is imported from {embed-name}. The Oxford English Dictionary has one citation, from 1772, for ethnicity, where it’s a translation of the Spanish etnicidad, but the word doesn’t appear again until the early twentieth century, in a book condemning the idea that common ethnic or cultural identity is deterministic of character or personality: To regard every individual of an ethnic group as having primarily the characteristic nature of that group, as if affiliation with it invested him with a particular kind of ethnicity which then determined his nature, is contrary to the doctrine that each individual structure is primary. So when considering what the different types of races are, the options are usually: white, Black of African American, Asian, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and Other Pacific Islander. As I crossed the street, a black man passed me on the left. The use of race as a classifier, however, has always been fundamentally flawed because sorting individuals based on their race is an arbitrary practice. https://www.livescience.com/33903-difference-race-ethnicity.html. The professor points to the history book How the Irish Became White because it shows that the concept of race "is something made." The day after I opened the email, I went through my morning, still feeling disappointed. Nigerians who recently moved to the U.S. might identify more with their specific group from within Nigeria—Igbo, Yoruba, or Fulani, for example—than their nationality. Here I was in this room, with a lot of other black people, and didn't look black to Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of our nation's foremost experts on race. I was scared to find out. I realized that while I'd been searching for the answer to what I was, I'd also been looking for affirmation of the black part of me. Conley, like other sociologists, argues that ethnicity is more fluid and crosses racial lines: Understanding the Difference Between Race and Ethnicity. In this cultural moment, the concepts of race and ethnicity have never been more important to grasp. The most common comment on the entry for race is essentially “Okay, but what is race, then?”, The reality is that the words race and ethnicity have a significant amount of overlap in terms of their general use. "I'm not sure," I'd say with a smile. These personal identifiers are the words you most often see when you're completing official paperwork and are asked to check the box of your respective race. Some mixed people feel they've lived a black experience in America. Suddenly, certainty didn't seem so exciting. © 2020 Condé Nast. As European colonialism and imperialism spread, white Europeans used race to sort humans by place of origin as well as skin color, creating the social hierarchy which served as the foundation of slavery. Or, to bring pop culture into it, Jason Momoa identifies his race as Native Hawaiian, but his ethnicity is Polynesian. Then I moved to New York City, a place where everyone on the subway looks like they're from somewhere else. If you're still confused, here's how Brody puts it to most easily understand: "Race is something we believe to be heritable, and ethnicity is something learned; however, this masks the history of how race has been used to create these concepts for political power.". The earliest use of ethnic in English—it’s worth noting while we’re on the topic of social divisions—was as a noun for a “heathen” or “pagan.” At that time, ethnic was also used colloquially to refer to those who originated from nations that weren’t Christian or Jewish. When looking at how society, scholars, and the government define the words, the university explains: "There is little agreement on core distinctions between race and ethnicity." I held up my phone, pointing to the message that would reveal my race, my identity, my everything.

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