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Race And Ethnicity Essay

478 Words2 Pages

Where did you grow up? What was the skin color of your classmates? Was skin color something you even thought about? Well, I grew up in a predominantly white community. Despite the few Americanized Mexicans, two black kids, and every once in a while an Asian foreign exchange student, the majority of my classmates where white. This means the only view we had of minority ethnic groups was from the news.
After high school I moved to New York City for college. It wasn’t until then that I realized the news rarely has good things to report about the minority. My friends thought it was strange that I joined a sorority that emphasizes different ethnicities and the fact that I had friends that weren’t white was just absurd. My family even comments on …show more content…

Ethnicity is an individual’s idea of cultural identity. It refers to cultural differences between and within societies. Ethnicity is often related to our own self-identification, each with its own cultural traditions. Culture is everything that a human being learns in order to survive in his or her natural and social environment. Whether you grow up in a small town with one race or a big city with many races. This includes clothing choices, holidays celebrated, culinary practices, language, religious and ideological views, social organization and other social practices. Culture is everything that one identifies with but this is not inherited. If ethnicity refers to learned behavior or non-genetic; what does race refer to? Race is difficult to define because it has multiple meanings. The media tends to use it interchangeably with ethnicity. We are all one species yet, there are obvious and not so obvious physical differences between us. The concept of race from a physical point of view refers to biological variation. This is the phenotypical difference in height, skin color, hair and eye color, facial shape and other characteristics that are inherited. However, it is nearly impossible to completely define varieties of human being based on physical characteristics. Nothing is 100% accurate when it comes to defining race. This means, race has no real anthropological

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