"What are you?" Many of us are often posed with this awkward question when it comes to how we identify, and it's hard to know how to answer. Is the person asking you to explain your race, or your ethnicity—or maybe even both? And then, there's another question: What is the difference between race and ethnicity, anyway?
In society, race is often used to define someone by their skin color, as well as other physical, social, and biological attributes .
." 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. 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.
"We think we know someone's race when we see it, and it's really much more complicated and more powerful than that. "They change over time, they have power, and we claim them because they're about our lives. But they're also about our relationships with power... Some people want to exploit difference. And if you want to re-classify people, race is one way of having power over them."
Now, when using the word ethnicity, that term most often refers to the way in which one identifies learned aspects of themselves—i.e., nationality, language, and culture. For example, Italian is both a nationality and an ethnicity.
Of or relating to large groups of people classed according to common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or background.
Though it seems like they're two different concepts (as explained above), one can't exist without the other, as they have a large influence in how we deal with race in our country. Race and ethnicity are also often substituted for one another, due to how an individual chooses to identify and the historical impact on the perception of the two terms.
"You can't really define them separately because they are intimately related... Sometimes people mistakenly think that ethnicity is reserved only to whites or Europeans, but really it just means one's language or culture," she says. "This is why they're kind of interchangeable. There are two ways of understanding. You can think of one: the idea of race earlier in the world—and sometimes now—works like ethnicity in terms of one's cultural ideas. So we don't need ethnicity maybe so much or use it as much."
Great article