Defining Race and Ethinicity

The terms “race” and “ethnicity” are very different from each other. Race is a term that was created to label an individual based on their physical features. These physical features would be used to group certain individuals with similar features and use their “race” as a means for subjugating or enslaving them to give others power. An example of the use of the term race would be the United State’s own usage of African people as slaves for the plantations in the original thirteen colonies. These people of Africa were individuals who lived together as a communal society. They usually had a king. They shared their essentials needed to live. They lived in a society that punished with a learned technique. They had their politics and were artistically developed. These were a people of an established nation. It was with the use of racism that these people were captured. Racism allowed the captors to see the Africans as a subhuman, thus allowing years of enslavement, torture, and death to millions of African people.

Where racism is a tool of power, ethnicity is a tool of knowledge and tolerance. Ethnicity is the term used to know a person’s lineage. Ethnicity is a person’s essence, the factors that make this person an individual yet ties them to other individuals. Ethnicity is a person’s culture, religion, inheritance of natural gifts, and physical traits that create who they are. People have ways of how they live built on what their parents taught them or based on their environmental surroundings. People believe the way they do based on parental influence and that of their religion. People have traits and talents passed down to them from their ancestors. Physical features are inherited from their ancestral lineage. Knowing what makes up a person makes room for tolerance of why people behave or act the way that they do. One such example of knowing someone’s ethnicity is sharing a meal with someone who has a different ethnicity from another. The person is allowed the experience to know a different part of the world through food.

Knowing the difference between race and ethnicity allows a person to choose to experience life in either a positive or negative way. The United States is a country made up by many different cultures. Knowing the details of the many cultures will allow the people of the United States to avoid stereotyping and being racist, which in turn, allows our country to grow in strength.