The 3 Critical Differences Between Race and Ethnicity
Many people think race and ethnicity are one and the same, but when we look at them closely, we find that they are in fact radically different ideas. There are three primary ways that race and ethnicity are different: embodiment, segregation and hierarchy.
1. Race is Disembodied; Ethnicity is Embodied
Embodiment is a fancy way of saying that your body matters. Your skin matters, your gender matters, where you live matters, who your parents are matters. None of those features are the most important things about you, but they are still relevant to who you are, and if we act like they are irrelevant, we’re headed for trouble.
Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the powerful case in his book Between The World and Me, that the idea of race has the purpose of protecting ‘white’ bodies and harming black bodies. This is the purpose of race, but achieving that purpose requires ‘disembodiment’, or the redefining and reduction of the body to an abstract concept like color.
Using the color white to describe people detaches identity from real skin and real geography. Snow, printer paper, and bleached underwear are white, but no real human being’s skin is actually white. Real skin is made by God with real melanin, the pigment that makes skin various degrees of brown.
Furthermore, real people come from real places, but the color white has nothing to do with real places. For instance, in the Bible we hear of people from Egypt, Tarsus, Galilee, and Syria. Contemporary ethnic identities like Irish-American, Haitian, or Puerto-Rican are in line with this historical way of understanding identity. But if we say that we are ‘white’, we are now identifying with an abstract, disembodied concept that has little or nothing to do real places. Race is different than ethnicity because racial identity is disembodied, while ethnic identity embraces embodiment.
2. Race Requires Segregation; Ethnicity Allows for Fluid Differences
If you’ve ever tried to paint a painting using the color white, you know how easily it loses its whiteness if another color touches it. A little color added to white will suddenly turn it gray, pink, tan, baby blue, ‘cream’ or some version of ‘off-white’. White cannot be white if other colors are added to it: its purity is lost unless other colors are kept segregated from it.
Purity is a central element of the history of white identity in America: Ben Franklin didn’t consider German immigrants in the 1700’s to be fully white; there was violent opposition to Irish immigrants assimilating in the 1800’s; Jews and southern Europeans were prevented from assimilating in the early 1900’s. The Racial Integrity Act in 1924 said it most clearly: “the term “white person” shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian” (emphasis mine).
The color white is absolutely different than black and other colors, so white identity imagines ‘white’ people to be absolutely different than others. It’s no wonder that segregated living is so common for ‘white’ people today.
Ethnicity does not deal in absolute differences: ethnic distinctions are real but fluid, and we can see this in ethnic descriptors like ‘Polish-American,’ ‘Chinese-Jamaican,’ ‘Mexipino’, and just about any other combination of the names of real places that you can think of.
3. Race is Inherently Hierarchical; Ethnicity is Not
When white identity was being formed, ‘white’ people thought of themselves as favored by God and civilized, which meant an imagined supremacy over others in strength, beauty, spirituality, intelligence, morals; a whole host of positive attributes. ‘White’ people thought of Africans and Indigenous peoples as having various versions of the opposite, negative traits, so from the beginning — and continuing through the present — racial identity was always about hierarchy, always about white over black.
Ethnicity, on the other hand, is not inherently hierarchical. Ethnic differences may mark out a conflict if one ethnic group wants to oppress another, as anyone familiar with the history of Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia can attest. But because ethnicity is little more than the name of a place of origin, it cannot be construed as inherently hierarchical.
Furthermore, it is incredibly hard to create a hierarchy of any list longer than a hundred, so with four-thousand-plus ethnic groups in the world — and some people think it may be as many as 24,000 — making any kind of thorough hierarchy of ethnic groups is impossible to do with intellectual honesty.
The lists of three to five races that most so-called anthropologists created in centuries past obscure the massive diversity of humanity. Hierarchies can be made from ethnic plurality, but only in isolated situations, while hierarchy and supremacy have always been inherent to the idea of race. Race and ethnicity are not the same because race is hierarchical in and of itself, while ethnicity is not.
Conclusion
There are dozens of implications for understanding race as distinct from ethnicity, but there is one in particular that must be pointed out: white identity is an evil idea. This must be pointed out because white people really don’t like talking about whiteness and because white people have had and continue to have narrative power over conversations about race in America.
But if white people can rightly understand white identity, they can be helpful in righting the wrongs of racial ideas. And this starts with recognizing that white identity is a supremacist, segregationist and disembodied identity.
