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Social Sci LibreTexts

9: Ethnicity

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Geography plays a significant role in the creation, maintenance, and erosion of ethnic identity. A person’s ethnic identity can be very complex because it is determined by many cross-cutting factors, including language, appearance, national heritage, and religion. Although all identities are social constructions, identity influences many cultural practices, including politics, religion, and economic behaviors.

“What are you?” You need some sort of an answer to this question about your ethnic identity because you will be asked about it frequently. Employers, schools, banks, and the US Census are among the many institutions interested in placing you into a category based on your ethnicity and/or race. You may be asked the same question by new acquaintances or old friends. Despite the potential complexity of the answer to that question, our limited vocabulary and our political structures often prohibit people from answering that question in anything other than the most simplistic terms. The world seems to want you to check only one box. Some people find it easy to check a single box or provide a one-word answer to questions about ethnicity. Others find checking a single box or providing a simple answer difficult. Moving from one region of the world to another can make answering identity questions even more confusing because “what you are” can change when a person moves to a new location. This happens because the categories that governments and culture groups use for ethnicity are socially constructed. In other words, we made them up. Because these categories are socially constructed, they’re also subject to change through time and across space. Who you are - depends on where you are. Geography matters. A lot.

Flowchart showing process for deciding whether to add emergency preparedness information to a project. It includes multiple decision points, such as location and risk factors, leading to a final decision.
Figure 9-1 Many government documents ask people to report their identity, but provide the few categories thereby actively helping create or maintain identity categories into which people generally place themselves, even if they don’t fit well.

The idea of ethnicity has ancient roots. Slavery, once nearly a universal human practice, and perhaps as old agriculture itself, may well be the original impetus behind the creation of ethnic categories. Some of the criteria we use today in the US to determine ethnic identity were introduced by Europeans hundreds of years ago to make slavery more efficient and to increase the profitability of agriculture.

Today, because the ethnic composition of our country is far different than it was in the 1800s, Americans use multiple strategies and frameworks to maintain categories of ethnic identity. The three main frameworks are race, language, and national ancestry. Americans regularly confuse race, ethnicity, and/or national origin, mistakenly treating these concepts as one. The paragraph below describes how these ideas and concepts work together.


This page titled 9: Ethnicity is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Steven M. Graves via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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