August 29, 2026 • 9 mins
The concepts of ethnicity and race are both human inventions with no basis in science, but these concepts have huge impacts on us and our world. Learn the difference between ethnicity and race in this classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/race-vs-ethnicity.htm
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hey, BrainStuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here with a classic episode from
The Vault. In this one, we get into the sticky
definitions of and differences between race and ethnicity. A note
here that both are different from nationality, which is an
indication of the country where a person is a legal citizen. Hey, BrainStuff.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Lauren Vogelbaum here. The concepts of race and ethnicity are
so intertwined that it's sometimes hard to tell one from
the other. Even unwound, the ideas are not as well-defined
as many people would present them to be. The reason
for that is simple. Yes, humans are a diverse lot.
We can look distinctively different. We're seen sometimes completely differently
(00:48):
based on those looks. We come from different places, though
we all as a species come from modern-day Ethiopia, and
the groups from which we have grown, our families, our clans,
our cultures, our nations, all have traveled different paths. A
wide world of factors have influenced our appearance and our
ways of life during thousands of years of evolution and migration. Yet,
all of those amazingly diverse peoples don't exist in a vacuum.
(01:12):
Across all those millennia and all those miles, we've come
back together, lots of times and in lots of ways,
and we continue to do so. Putting us in distinct
boxes with fixed labels is near impossible. Even the labels
get jumbled. We spoke with Douglas Hartman, a professor of
sociology at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the
book Ethnicity and Race, Making Identities in a Changing World,
(01:35):
along with sociologist Stephen Cornell. Hartman said, I think there's
a ton of overlap between the terms ethnicity and race.
I really think it's difficult to disentangle them and maybe
even inappropriate because all of these categories have elements of identity, self-assertion, culture,
and heritage, but they also have elements of labeling, of stigma,
of differential treatment, of power inequality. Still, maybe because of
(02:00):
some innate need for order, or something more sinister, we
continue to define. We identify people as this race or
that ethnicity. We self-identify, too. And so it is that
these labels become blurry and, at times, inseparable. The modern
idea that there are independent races of man can be
traced to the late 1700s, when German anthropologist Johann Friedrich
(02:23):
Blumenbach attempted to scientifically classify humans, largely by how they
looked and where they called home. From a 1994 article
on Blumenbach in Discover magazine, Blumenbach's final taxonomy of 1795
divided all humans into five groups, defined both by geography
and appearance— In his order, the Caucasian variety for the
(02:43):
light-skinned people of Europe and adjacent parts of Asia and Africa,
the Mongolian variety for most other inhabitants of Asia, including
China and Japan, the Ethiopian variety for the dark-skinned people
of Africa, the American variety for most native populations of
the New World, and the Malay variety for the Polynesians
and Melanesians of the Pacific and for the Aborigines of Australia.
(03:07):
Blumenbach not only used geography and skin color, but notably
the size and shape of skulls to explore what he
called the, quote, varieties of mankind. One of his measures, though,
was unmistakably unscientific. He called Caucasians, named for the people
of the Caucasus Mountains in Eastern Europe, beautiful. Many Europeans,
who already believed mistakenly that the first humans came from
(03:30):
the Caucasus, seized upon Blumenbach's work as scientific proof that
the light-skinned race, the original race, was biologically and inherently
superior to others. They did so despite the fact that Blumenbach,
eons ahead of his time, held that all races and
peoples were equal and stated that the, quote, many varieties
of man are at present known to be one and
the same species. That thinking by Europeans that one race
(03:55):
is superior to another has led, historically, to some of
the worst of human behavior, colonization, slavery, apartheid, and genocide.
It's given rise to forced inequality in many different forms,
including political, social, and economic. And here's the kicker. The
high and mighty Europeans were dead wrong. Scientists now overwhelmingly
(04:16):
agree that humans, biologically and genetically speaking, are all the same.
Our DNA, the genetic makeup of all human beings who
live today, is 99.9% alike. In fact, there's more genetic
variance within any given race than there is among the
different races. Basically, what that means is because genetic differences
(04:37):
in humans are so minimal, some scientists simply describe humans
as belonging to just one race, the human race. Despite
the scientific shootdown, the term race is still widely used today,
and a person is still assigned a race according to
physical characteristics, skin color, the shape of the nose or lips,
or the type of hair. Now, instead of claiming some
(04:58):
pseudoscientific basis, though, race is considered a social construct, meaning
it's something we as societies use to place people conveniently
into groups. Here's how Hartman and co-author Cornell define race
in their book. Some of the reasons for the continuing
use of race as an identifier may be acceptable.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
The U.S.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Census Bureau, for example, asks people to identify themselves by
race and currently gives them six choices, including some other
race which they can fill in. The Bureau also allows
(05:43):
respondents to say they're of more than one race. The
Bureau uses that data for purposes such as funding government
programs aimed at specific groups. Other reasons, though, are definitely
not acceptable. Racial discrimination is still real all over the globe.
Though genetically race is not a valid concept, socially it
is very, very real. In some definitions, it goes well
(06:07):
beyond physical characteristics, too. Hartman said... There really are cultural
differences between people who grew up in an African-American community
versus a white suburban community. It's not genetic, but it's
a real thing. There are different languages, different patterns of behavior,
different ways of thinking about the world. Cultural differences suggest
the other word most often conflated with race, ethnicity, and
(06:31):
that muddies the terminology waters even more. Cornell and Hartman
define ethnicity this way, quote, a sense of common ancestry
based on cultural attachments, past linguistic heritage, religious affiliations, claimed kinship,
or some physical traits. So the difference between race and
ethnicity then? Whereas race is mostly defined and determined by
(06:53):
physical characteristics, ethnicity is considered to be more about a
person's culture, language, family, and place of origin. Nationalities are
thrown into the mix too. Examples of ethnicity include being Indian, Jewish,
or Asian, regardless of race. So a woman born in
Atlanta to parents from Japan might consider herself as racially Asian,
(07:13):
but as ethnically Japanese, American, Japanese-American, or even something more
specific based on exactly where in Japan her parents are from.
Selected displays like clothing can play a part too. A
Scottish-American man wearing a plaid or tartan kilt or an
Indian-American woman wearing a sari are examples of how people
display their ethnicity through dressing. But the important thing to
(07:35):
remember here is that both race and ethnicity are socially defined.
Neither is biologically valid. Cornell and Hartman say that people
are more likely to self-identify with multiple ethnicities than multiple races,
though of course some consider themselves to be more than
one race. It's important to note two other points the
sociologists make about race and ethnicity. Race, unlike ethnicity, is
(07:58):
still mostly a term that is assigned by other groups,
which often leads to one claiming superiority over the other.
And racial identity is usually considered inherent. In other words,
you're born as a certain race, and it's generally not
something you can change just by saying so. Remember Rachel Dolezal?
That said, all of these are observations, not rules. The rules,
(08:19):
as we've said, are a tad murky. Hartman said... People
have this kind of crazy idea about the purity of races.
There's no way to really isolate a race. And today,
even more so with intermarriage, with globalization, those categories that
we often think are so firm. Americans are so convinced
there's five main races because we've acted like there are
in our senses and everything else. They get blurred and
(08:42):
mixed up and they don't make sense anymore. If it's
logic we're after when discussing the terms of race and ethnicity,
the last word probably ought to go to someone who's
an expert at words, say a poet. This is from
Maya Angelou's piece, Human Family. I note the obvious differences
between each sort and type, but we are more alike,
(09:02):
my friends, than we are unalike.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Today's episode is based on the article Ethnicity vs. Race vs. Nationality,
an explainer, on HowStuffWorks.com, written by John Donovan. BrainStuff is
a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with HowStuffWorks.com and
is produced by Tyler Klang. four more shows from iHeart Podcasts.
Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hey, BrainStuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here with a classic episode from
The Vault. In this one, we get into the sticky
definitions of and differences between race and ethnicity. A note
here that both are different from nationality, which is an
indication of the country where a person is a legal citizen. Hey, BrainStuff.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Lauren Vogelbaum here. The concepts of race and ethnicity are
so intertwined that it's sometimes hard to tell one from
the other. Even unwound, the ideas are not as well-defined
as many people would present them to be. The reason
for that is simple. Yes, humans are a diverse lot.
We can look distinctively different. We're seen sometimes completely differently
(00:48):
based on those looks. We come from different places, though
we all as a species come from modern-day Ethiopia, and
the groups from which we have grown, our families, our clans,
our cultures, our nations, all have traveled different paths. A
wide world of factors have influenced our appearance and our
ways of life during thousands of years of evolution and migration. Yet,
all of those amazingly diverse peoples don't exist in a vacuum.
(01:12):
Across all those millennia and all those miles, we've come
back together, lots of times and in lots of ways,
and we continue to do so. Putting us in distinct
boxes with fixed labels is near impossible. Even the labels
get jumbled. We spoke with Douglas Hartman, a professor of
sociology at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the
book Ethnicity and Race, Making Identities in a Changing World,
(01:35):
along with sociologist Stephen Cornell. Hartman said, I think there's
a ton of overlap between the terms ethnicity and race.
I really think it's difficult to disentangle them and maybe
even inappropriate because all of these categories have elements of identity, self-assertion, culture,
and heritage, but they also have elements of labeling, of stigma,
of differential treatment, of power inequality. Still, maybe because of
(02:00):
some innate need for order, or something more sinister, we
continue to define. We identify people as this race or
that ethnicity. We self-identify, too. And so it is that
these labels become blurry and, at times, inseparable. The modern
idea that there are independent races of man can be
traced to the late 1700s, when German anthropologist Johann Friedrich
(02:23):
Blumenbach attempted to scientifically classify humans, largely by how they
looked and where they called home. From a 1994 article
on Blumenbach in Discover magazine, Blumenbach's final taxonomy of 1795
divided all humans into five groups, defined both by geography
and appearance— In his order, the Caucasian variety for the
(02:43):
light-skinned people of Europe and adjacent parts of Asia and Africa,
the Mongolian variety for most other inhabitants of Asia, including
China and Japan, the Ethiopian variety for the dark-skinned people
of Africa, the American variety for most native populations of
the New World, and the Malay variety for the Polynesians
and Melanesians of the Pacific and for the Aborigines of Australia.
(03:07):
Blumenbach not only used geography and skin color, but notably
the size and shape of skulls to explore what he
called the, quote, varieties of mankind. One of his measures, though,
was unmistakably unscientific. He called Caucasians, named for the people
of the Caucasus Mountains in Eastern Europe, beautiful. Many Europeans,
who already believed mistakenly that the first humans came from
(03:30):
the Caucasus, seized upon Blumenbach's work as scientific proof that
the light-skinned race, the original race, was biologically and inherently
superior to others. They did so despite the fact that Blumenbach,
eons ahead of his time, held that all races and
peoples were equal and stated that the, quote, many varieties
of man are at present known to be one and
the same species. That thinking by Europeans that one race
(03:55):
is superior to another has led, historically, to some of
the worst of human behavior, colonization, slavery, apartheid, and genocide.
It's given rise to forced inequality in many different forms,
including political, social, and economic. And here's the kicker. The
high and mighty Europeans were dead wrong. Scientists now overwhelmingly
(04:16):
agree that humans, biologically and genetically speaking, are all the same.
Our DNA, the genetic makeup of all human beings who
live today, is 99.9% alike. In fact, there's more genetic
variance within any given race than there is among the
different races. Basically, what that means is because genetic differences
(04:37):
in humans are so minimal, some scientists simply describe humans
as belonging to just one race, the human race. Despite
the scientific shootdown, the term race is still widely used today,
and a person is still assigned a race according to
physical characteristics, skin color, the shape of the nose or lips,
or the type of hair. Now, instead of claiming some
(04:58):
pseudoscientific basis, though, race is considered a social construct, meaning
it's something we as societies use to place people conveniently
into groups. Here's how Hartman and co-author Cornell define race
in their book. Some of the reasons for the continuing
use of race as an identifier may be acceptable.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
The U.S.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Census Bureau, for example, asks people to identify themselves by
race and currently gives them six choices, including some other
race which they can fill in. The Bureau also allows
(05:43):
respondents to say they're of more than one race. The
Bureau uses that data for purposes such as funding government
programs aimed at specific groups. Other reasons, though, are definitely
not acceptable. Racial discrimination is still real all over the globe.
Though genetically race is not a valid concept, socially it
is very, very real. In some definitions, it goes well
(06:07):
beyond physical characteristics, too. Hartman said... There really are cultural
differences between people who grew up in an African-American community
versus a white suburban community. It's not genetic, but it's
a real thing. There are different languages, different patterns of behavior,
different ways of thinking about the world. Cultural differences suggest
the other word most often conflated with race, ethnicity, and
(06:31):
that muddies the terminology waters even more. Cornell and Hartman
define ethnicity this way, quote, a sense of common ancestry
based on cultural attachments, past linguistic heritage, religious affiliations, claimed kinship,
or some physical traits. So the difference between race and
ethnicity then? Whereas race is mostly defined and determined by
(06:53):
physical characteristics, ethnicity is considered to be more about a
person's culture, language, family, and place of origin. Nationalities are
thrown into the mix too. Examples of ethnicity include being Indian, Jewish,
or Asian, regardless of race. So a woman born in
Atlanta to parents from Japan might consider herself as racially Asian,
(07:13):
but as ethnically Japanese, American, Japanese-American, or even something more
specific based on exactly where in Japan her parents are from.
Selected displays like clothing can play a part too. A
Scottish-American man wearing a plaid or tartan kilt or an
Indian-American woman wearing a sari are examples of how people
display their ethnicity through dressing. But the important thing to
(07:35):
remember here is that both race and ethnicity are socially defined.
Neither is biologically valid. Cornell and Hartman say that people
are more likely to self-identify with multiple ethnicities than multiple races,
though of course some consider themselves to be more than
one race. It's important to note two other points the
sociologists make about race and ethnicity. Race, unlike ethnicity, is
(07:58):
still mostly a term that is assigned by other groups,
which often leads to one claiming superiority over the other.
And racial identity is usually considered inherent. In other words,
you're born as a certain race, and it's generally not
something you can change just by saying so. Remember Rachel Dolezal?
That said, all of these are observations, not rules. The rules,
(08:19):
as we've said, are a tad murky. Hartman said... People
have this kind of crazy idea about the purity of races.
There's no way to really isolate a race. And today,
even more so with intermarriage, with globalization, those categories that
we often think are so firm. Americans are so convinced
there's five main races because we've acted like there are
in our senses and everything else. They get blurred and
(08:42):
mixed up and they don't make sense anymore. If it's
logic we're after when discussing the terms of race and ethnicity,
the last word probably ought to go to someone who's
an expert at words, say a poet. This is from
Maya Angelou's piece, Human Family. I note the obvious differences
between each sort and type, but we are more alike,
(09:02):
my friends, than we are unalike.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Today's episode is based on the article Ethnicity vs. Race vs. Nationality,
an explainer, on HowStuffWorks.com, written by John Donovan. BrainStuff is
a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with HowStuffWorks.com and
is produced by Tyler Klang. four more shows from iHeart Podcasts.
Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
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