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1.4: The Takeaway

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    324813
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    Race and ethnicity are seemingly two different sides of the same coin. The former, race, is largely the label associated with the look of a given individual, while the latter, ethnicity is the expressive cultural material that can be traced back to perspectives or assumptions about race. Thus, race may be understood as appearance and ethnicity as behavior.

    As social constructions, both race and ethnicity are not natural, but instead created in the service of informing our social realities, while noting that just because something is not natural, does not mean it is inconsequential. We will see in the chapters that follow just how consequential race and ethnicity have been in the American context.

    Finally, race and ethnicity are not fixed categories. One can certainly be a part of one racial or one ethnic category, yet it is also quite common for an individual to have a multi-racial and/or a multi-ethnic makeup.


    This page titled 1.4: The Takeaway is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Salvador Jiménez Murguía.

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