Race, Ethnicity and colour

Race, ethnicity and colour are three different traits of mankind that are used to represent human diversity. Now, these three are often used interchangeably and are definitely distinguished from each other.

Race is used to represent biological and physical characteristics such as hair texture and skin colour. It includes discrimination based on characteristics associated with a particular race and cultural practices. There are numerous races around the world like Hispanic, Asian and African American. Simply put, the race is generally defined as a category of humankind having distinctive physical features.
Ethnicity: It is generally related to cultural expression and identification. Ethnicity recognizes the differences between people of different cultures and languages. It is a very broad category coming from the places of origin of certain individuals. To describe someone’s ethnicity, different factors such as national, tribal, racial, traditional, cultural religious and linguistic origins are taken into account. While someone is “brown” or “black”, their ethnicity can be Italian. Thus, it does not necessarily have to be dependent on your race.
Colour: Color and discrimination based on colour specifically refer to a person’s skin colour. But it is often confused by the race of the person which is not always true. The Colour of a person depends on their pigmentation, skin shade, and complexion. Now, skin colour can be a characteristic for defining race for someone but it is not necessarily the same. People from the same race may have different skin tones and can thus be discriminated against on this basis.

Now, after knowing the differences between race, ethnicity and colour, let’s discuss the discrimination that people have to face because of these three traits. Now, race was first introduced in the 18th century by anthropologists and philosophers when they used skin colour to form distinguished racial groups. Their discovery formed the grounds for separate racial types and brought the idea that one race was superior to the other which lead to massive power imbalance globally. These racial differences were based on the thought that people have biological differences coming from different races. But, modern scientists have proven that most of the races share the same genetic variations and there are more similarities than differences in all the racial groupings that we have created.

We may identify each other as “black”, “white”, brown” or “Asian”, “European” but these differences are created by human beings only, they do not have any scientific backing but they are used to socially differentiate and nowadays discriminate among all these races and ethnicities. People belonging to the same race but being of different colour shades are also discriminated against very often. When it comes to ethnicity, it is a broad subject, people can choose their ethnicity and identify themselves as their desired ethnicity depending upon their nationality, languages e.t.c. Ethnicity has been used in history to oppress different groups, it has been the basis of several genocides and mass killings. All this occurs when people believe that one race, one colour, or one ethnicity is superior to another one.

Race, Ethnicity and colour

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