The notions of ethnicity and race are often misinterpreted or erroneously used as synonyms, and though they are closely related, they still represent completely different ideas. Ethnicity stands for the cultural traits pertaining to people in a certain geographic area, which include their language, religion, and customs. In contrast to the idea of races that deals with people’s physical and genetic characteristics, ethnicity is related to an individual’s activities, the way of thinking, and their choices that cannot be defined solely by their place of birth. It represents the accumulated cultural experience of a person’s family and relatives, their lifestyles, and circumstances that could have influenced the adoption of certain practices that were passed through generations.
Both race and ethnicity are ways of categorizing people but on different levels – physical and cultural. Races describe an inherent mechanism of adaptation to the climate and living conditions, and thus they are not permanent but cannot be chosen by an individual, while ethnicity can be changed. For example, a person born of Chinese parents living in Canada cannot decide what they would look like and would probably consider themselves belonging to the Mongoloid race. As for their ethnicity, it would depend on the traditions of their family and their self-identification because if they do not engage in any particularly Chinese practices and customs, they would probably consider themselves to be Canadian. This is a common state of affairs for multinational countries, and it is important for all people to understand this difference and respect the customs and choices of people.
Race and ethnicity happen to overlap when peoples living in one region share both physical traits and religion or resembling customs. However, it does not imply that people of the same race think alike or that their biology defines their behavior and worldview. Behavior is learned and acquired from the outside, from interaction with other people, and, thus, peoples living in the vicinity and having genetic relations tend to cooperate and exchange their experience more. Ethnicity is fluid and allows for more freedom in self-identification than race because it is not a stable formed group but a collection of ideas developed throughout history. According to Eller, “in the final analysis, ethnicity is a style of social action, specifically and usually political and economic activity; an ethnic group may be an identity group, but it is also, in most cases, an interest group.” People can inherit them unconsciously through groups of people surrounding them or make a conscious choice in favor of different ethnicity that they feel close to.
Another peculiarity of ethnic groups is that they do not exist in isolation and can only be defined in relation to other groups through comparison and their social, political, and economic connections. Unlike some ideas of races, ethnicity does not suggest hierarchy as there are no measurable components in culture and traditions, and it is a very diverse concept. However, due to the frequent misuse of these terms and no distinct division between them, people tend to see the fact of belonging to an ethnic group as a basis for classification that allows creating hierarchies. It is a dangerous and harmful misconception as it restrains diversity in its own right and misleads people to explain social injustices by the fact of self-identification.