How Are Ethnicity and Race Different?

completely differently based on those looks. We come from different places, though we all as a species come from modern day Ethiopia, and the groups from which we have grown. Our families, our clans, our cultures, our nations all have traveled different paths. A wide world of factors have influenced our appearance and our ways of life during thousands of years of evolution and migration. Yet all of those amazingly diverse people's don't exist in a vacuum. Across all those millennia and all

those miles. We've come back together lots of times and in lots of ways, and we continue to do so. Putting us in distinct boxes with fixed labels is near impossible. Even the labels get jumbled. We spoke with Douglas Hartman, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and co author of the book Ethnicity and Race, Making Identities in a Changing World, along with sociologist Stephen Cornell. Hartman said, I think there's a ton of overlap between the terms

ethnicity and race. I really think it's difficult to disentangle them, and maybe even inappropriate, because all of these categories have elements of identity, self assertion, culture, and heritage, but they also have elements of labeling, of stigma, of differential treatment, of power, inequality. Still, maybe because of some innate need for order or something more sinister, we continue to define.

We identify people as this race or that ethnicity. We self identify too, and so it is that these labels become blurry and at times inseparable. The modern idea that there are independent races of man can be traced to the late sevents, when German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach attempted to scientifically classify humans, largely by how they looked and

where they called home. From an article on Bluemenbach in Discover magazine, Blumenbach's final taxonomy of sevente divided all humans into five groups defined both by geography and appearance in his order, the Caucasian variety for the light skinned people of Europe and adjacent parts of Asian Africa, the Mongolian variety for most other inhabitants of Asia, including China and Japan, the Ethiopian variety for the dark skinned people of Africa,

the American variety for most native populations of the New World, and the Melee variety for the Polynesians and Melanesians of the Pacific and for the Aborigines of Australia. Blumenbach not only used geography and skin color, but notably the size and shape of skulls to explore what he called the quote varieties of mankind. One of his measures, though, was unmistakably unscientific. He called Caucasian, named for the people of

the Caucus Mountains in eastern Europe, beautiful. Many Europeans, who already believed mistakenly that the first humans came from the Caucus, seized upon bloom Inbo's work as scientific proof that the light skinned race, the original race, was biologically and inherently

superior to others. They did so despite the fact that blumenbach EON's ahead of his time, held that all races and people's were equal, and stated that the quote many varieties of man are at present known to be one and the same species that thinking by Europeans that one race is superior to another has led historically to some of the worst of human behavior colonization, slavery, apartheid, and genocide. It's given rise to forced inequality in many different forms,

including political, social, and economic. And here's the kicker, the High and Mighty Europeans were dead wrong. Scientists now overwhelmingly agree that humans, biologically and genetically speaking, are all the same our DNA. The genetic makeup of all human beings who live today is ninety nine point nine percent alike. In fact, there's more genetic variance within any given race

than there is among the different races. Basically, what that means is because genetic differences in humans are so minimal, some scientists simply describe humans as belonging to just one race, the human race. Despite the scientific shootdown, the term race is still widely used today, and a person is still assigned a race according to physical characteristics skin color, the

shape of the nose or lips, or the type of hair. Now, instead of claiming some pseudo scientific basis, though race is considered a social construct, meaning it's something we as societies used to place people conveniently into groups. Here's how Hartman and co author Cornell define race in their book quote a human group defined by itself or others as distinct by virtue of perceived common physical characteristics that are held

to be inherent. Determining which characteristics constitute the race is a choice human beings make. Some of the reasons for the continuing use of race as an identifier may be acceptable. The US Census Bureau, for example, asks people to identify themselves by race, and currently gives them six choices, including some other race, which they can fill in. The bureau also allows respondents to say there of more than one race. The bureau uses that data for purposes such as funding

government programs aimed at specific groups. Other reasons, though, are definitely not acceptable. A racial discrimination is still real all over the globe. Though genetically race is not a valid concept, socially, it is very very real in some definitions. It goes well beyond physical characteristics too. Hartman said, there really are cultural differences between people who grew up in an African American community versus a white suburban community. It's not genetic,

but it's a real thing. There are different lane, which is, different patterns of behavior, different ways of thinking about the world. Cultural differences suggest the other word most often conflated with race, ethnicity, and that muddies the terminology waters even more. Cornell and Heartman defined ethnicity this way, quote a sense of common ancestry based on cultural attachments, past linguistic heritage, religious affiliations,

claimed kinship, or some physical traits. So the difference between race and ethnicity. Then, whereas race is mostly defined and determined by physical characteristics, ethnicity is considered to be more about a person's culture, language, family, and place of origin. Nationalities are thrown into the mix too. Examples of ethnicity

include being Indian, Jewish, or Asian regardless of race. So a woman born in Atlanta to parents from Japan might consider herself as racially Asian, but as ethnically Japanese American, Japanese American, or even something more specific based on exactly where in Japan her parents are from. Selected displays like clothing can play a part two. A Scottish American man wearing a plaid or tartan kilt or an Indian American woman wearing a sorry are examples of how people display

their ethnicity through dressing. But the important thing to remember here is that both race and ethnicity are socially defined, neither is biologically valid. Cornell and Hartmann say that people are more likely to self identify with multiple ethnicities than multiple races, though of course some consider themselves to be more than one race. It's important to note to other

points the sociologists make about race and ethnicity. Race, unlike ethnicity, is still mostly a term that is assigned by other groups, which often leads to one claiming superiority over the other, and racial identity is usually considered inherent. In other words, you're born as a certain race, and it's generally not something you can change just by saying so. Remember Rachel dolisal that said all of these are observations, not rules.

The rules, as we've said, are tad Murky. Hartman said, people have this kind of crazy idea about the purity of races. There's no way to really isolate a race, and today even more so with intermarriage, with globalization, those categories that we often think are so firm Americans are so convinced there's five main races. Because we've acted like there are in our senses and everything else, they get blurred and mixed up, and they don't make sense anymore.

If it's logic were after when discussing the terms of race and ethnicity, the last word probably ought to go to someone who's an expert at words, say a poet. This is from Maya Angelo's piece Human Family. I note the obvious differences between each sort and type, but we are more alike my friends, than we are unlike. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other topics,

visit our home planet how stuff Works dot com. And for podcasts from I heart Radio, visit that i heeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H