What's the difference between a race, an ethnicity, and a culture?
They are all ways to define and categorize humans. Race, this usually refers to instantly seen visual characteristics; Skin color, hair color/texture. This is usually divided into few main races, African, Caucasian (European) Asian plus New World and Arctic aboriginals.
Ethnicity - Is identification through religion/language and other cultural clues.
Culture - Language, religion, music, art, dance, food... that can be identified to a region or a group of people in a region.
Every ethnicity has a culture, not every culture has an ethnicity, maybe. All of this is just so we can put humans in neat little boxes to make them easier to talk about as groups. Or, conversely, it is so humans can put themselves in boxes so they don't feel so all alone.
Think of culture as a more general mix of customs and beliefs that link people with one another, sometimes over great geographic distance. Especially in a media-heavy world, the ability of culture to spread has been magnified and isn't tied to either specific regions (not even nation-states) or ethnic groups. Take something like "African American culture" - there's multiple ethnicities that such a concept could encompass, rather than just, for example, people descended from African slaves in North America.
Ethnicity, on the other hand, is a more focused idea. It connects people with specific shared heritages - which can include geographic, cultural, religious, etc. It's also a far more identifiable population compared to "culture" - in other words, culture tends to be more amorphous and fuzzy but "ethnicity" carries institutional weight within societies, governments, the media, etc. as a way to group people into discernible categories. The persistence of ethnic identity is fueled by how it can carry certain privileges or liabilities in many societies. In Malayasia, for example, higher education opportunities are maintained for the native, ethnic Malay population but not for the large ethnic Chinese population.
In the U.S., we tend to underplay ethnicity in favor of race.
The foremost difference between race, ethnicity and culture is that race inherently associates biological difference (in this case, how we look) with cultural difference. Think: "biology is destiny," in other words, what kind of physical characteristics you're born with goes a long way to determining your beliefs, attitudes and behavior. Biologically speaking, race is a complete fabrication. Physical appearance has no direct, biological bearing on our behavior. However, race - as most Americans can attest to (Barack, holla) - is very much a social reality simply because we choose to treat it as "real" even if it's not actually real in any scientific sense.
In any case, the reason why the U.S. tends to overplay race over ethnicity is just given the history of the country - not just with slavery and indigenous peoples - but also with subsequent waves of immigration that brought in different ethnic groups to America who were then filtered into the racial sorting box - Irish and Italians lose their ethnicity in favor of being racialized White; dark-skin makes one automatically Black; Asians and Latinos become trickier to slot in but we try to do it anyway, etc. etc.
To get back to the thread's inspiration, the irony I was pointing out is that even though this ridiculous Arizona bill wants to target "race-based" student organizations, with the overt intention to crush MEChA, under the U.S. Census, "Latino" or "Hispanic" are not racial categories - they're the only major group in America that has its own "ethnicity" category, separate from race.
In other words, if you're, for example, a light-skinned Cuban American, you have the option on the census to check off "White" and "Cuban" while a dark-skinned Dominican American could check off "Black" and "Dominican". That's why you often hear this phrase in the media "non-Hispanic Whites." It's basically an acknowledgement that the census doesn't consider "Hispanic" to be its own racial category even though, for most Americans, if you were to ask them, "name the 5 major racial groups in America," they'd most certainly include Hispanic/Latino as one of them.
In any case, that's why I think the wording of that Arizona bill is so poor - in order to have a prayer of enforcement, someone would first have to make the case that a group like MEChA (or any other Latino student group) was "race-based" when, in fact, you'd need to change the language to read "ethnic-based" but that would open an insane can of worms...for example, that would make, say, an Italian American student organization illegal for public funding.
I'll just reiterate - this bill has no Frickin' constitutional chance of ever being legalized (not with the current courts at least) and given the presidential political climate, I could see some heavyweight GOP folks quietly telling Arizona lawmakers to shut the fuck up until after November.
Comments
They are all ways to define and categorize humans.
Race, this usually refers to instantly seen visual characteristics; Skin color, hair color/texture. This is usually divided into few main races, African, Caucasian (European) Asian plus New World and Arctic aboriginals.
Ethnicity - Is identification through religion/language and other cultural clues.
Culture - Language, religion, music, art, dance, food... that can be identified to a region or a group of people in a region.
Every ethnicity has a culture, not every culture has an ethnicity, maybe. All of this is just so we can put humans in neat little boxes to make them easier to talk about as groups. Or, conversely, it is so humans can put themselves in boxes so they don't feel so all alone.
Think of culture as a more general mix of customs and beliefs that link people with one another, sometimes over great geographic distance. Especially in a media-heavy world, the ability of culture to spread has been magnified and isn't tied to either specific regions (not even nation-states) or ethnic groups. Take something like "African American culture" - there's multiple ethnicities that such a concept could encompass, rather than just, for example, people descended from African slaves in North America.
Ethnicity, on the other hand, is a more focused idea. It connects people with specific shared heritages - which can include geographic, cultural, religious, etc. It's also a far more identifiable population compared to "culture" - in other words, culture tends to be more amorphous and fuzzy but "ethnicity" carries institutional weight within societies, governments, the media, etc. as a way to group people into discernible categories. The persistence of ethnic identity is fueled by how it can carry certain privileges or liabilities in many societies. In Malayasia, for example, higher education opportunities are maintained for the native, ethnic Malay population but not for the large ethnic Chinese population.
In the U.S., we tend to underplay ethnicity in favor of race.
The foremost difference between race, ethnicity and culture is that race inherently associates biological difference (in this case, how we look) with cultural difference. Think: "biology is destiny," in other words, what kind of physical characteristics you're born with goes a long way to determining your beliefs, attitudes and behavior. Biologically speaking, race is a complete fabrication. Physical appearance has no direct, biological bearing on our behavior. However, race - as most Americans can attest to (Barack, holla) - is very much a social reality simply because we choose to treat it as "real" even if it's not actually real in any scientific sense.
In any case, the reason why the U.S. tends to overplay race over ethnicity is just given the history of the country - not just with slavery and indigenous peoples - but also with subsequent waves of immigration that brought in different ethnic groups to America who were then filtered into the racial sorting box - Irish and Italians lose their ethnicity in favor of being racialized White; dark-skin makes one automatically Black; Asians and Latinos become trickier to slot in but we try to do it anyway, etc. etc.
To get back to the thread's inspiration, the irony I was pointing out is that even though this ridiculous Arizona bill wants to target "race-based" student organizations, with the overt intention to crush MEChA, under the U.S. Census, "Latino" or "Hispanic" are not racial categories - they're the only major group in America that has its own "ethnicity" category, separate from race.
In other words, if you're, for example, a light-skinned Cuban American, you have the option on the census to check off "White" and "Cuban" while a dark-skinned Dominican American could check off "Black" and "Dominican". That's why you often hear this phrase in the media "non-Hispanic Whites." It's basically an acknowledgement that the census doesn't consider "Hispanic" to be its own racial category even though, for most Americans, if you were to ask them, "name the 5 major racial groups in America," they'd most certainly include Hispanic/Latino as one of them.
In any case, that's why I think the wording of that Arizona bill is so poor - in order to have a prayer of enforcement, someone would first have to make the case that a group like MEChA (or any other Latino student group) was "race-based" when, in fact, you'd need to change the language to read "ethnic-based" but that would open an insane can of worms...for example, that would make, say, an Italian American student organization illegal for public funding.
I'll just reiterate - this bill has no Frickin' constitutional chance of ever being legalized (not with the current courts at least) and given the presidential political climate, I could see some heavyweight GOP folks quietly telling Arizona lawmakers to shut the fuck up until after November.