Race and Ethnicity

Race is a term that is used to describe the classification of various groups across the globe by their origin, skin color, and customs. It used to be that it was accepted that race was a “social construct” or something social scientists made up simply to classify human beings. By and large, that is still the accepted notion. Interestingly, in the first U.S. Census conducted in 1790, there were only three categories: Free white males and females, All other free persons, and Slaves. Thus, the only acknowledged racial category was White. These categories have changed substantially over the last 200+ years. In recent years, these changes have been chronicled in an interactive website by the Pew Research Center.  In contemporary America, the racial groups include Whites, Black/African American, Asian Americans, and Native Americans.

However, for some time now, there has been consensus that there are biological differences by race. For example, primarily Black people get the genetic disease Sickle Sell Anemia and largely Jewish people get Tay-Sachs disease. Also, some drugs seem to work better on Blacks than other groups.  In past years, it has been found that some blood pressure medicine is better suited for Blacks than Whites. The central question that geneticists and more recently sociologists or criminologists and other social scientists have encountered is this: Are there substantive differences that make each race so unique that we can call them "distinct" races?; and, for theorists, the prime question is whether we can attribute maladaptive or deviant behavior to evolutionary differences in the make up of the various races? We will study all sides of this often cantankerous debate in the next lesson.

Ethnicity is typically used to refer to groups that do not fit one of the traditional racial categories but they are distinguished by their unique culture and history. During the height of massive immigration to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was not uncommon to see the use of terms such as Polish-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, etc. There has been the evolution of the use of these terms, with most White-ethnics being subsumed under the category of White. In the past few decades, the entire group of persons  of descent from South America and the Caribbean have transitioned from being called Hispanic, Latino, to the gender-neutral term Latinx. In all cases, they are referred to as an ethnic group rather than a race. Why? Because somewhere along the line, it was noted that they can fall into the Black or White category, thus, they are not a distinct race. Hmmm...what do you think? While this is accepted in the scholarly community, some (including the author of the course!) have often wondered, can't this also apply to Blacks or Whites? As such, because Latinx are the largest minority in the United States, some believe they should be given "race status." In fact, there has been talk of categorizing Latinx as a race in the 2020 census. Thus, in line with this thinking, much of the discussion in this course treats them as a race. There is, however, a place for the term ethnicity. Both course texts note that there are ethnic groups subsumed within every major racial group. So, for example, someone I know is classified as a Black American - but he was born in England to Jamaican parents. Thus, his ethnic classification would be Jamaican. Or, what about the Latinx person who is of Cuban descent? Ethnicity is often not considered when we talk about race and crime. This is a serious problem since all ethnic groups subsumed within a particular racial category often don't face the same problems. Koreans, for example, might be facing different problems than Filipinos, etc. Consequently, the crime-related issues for each ethnic group might diverge as well.