| Chapter 1: | Reconsiderations of Race, Ethnicity, and Identity: Transnational Migrants in Post–World War II Global Society |
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ontologically real, as any person of any “minority” can attest. But what about non-skin-color-based races? Can races be detected using other biological features, such as molecular genetics? Though some believe so, there has yet to be any evidence to support it. Nonetheless, some people believe there are other non-skin-color-based genetic differences between the races. The typical example is the Nazi discrimination against the Jews.
What Are the Differences Between Race
and Ethnicity
According to Banton (1967), race is the public skin-color-based way of typing human beings. Ethnicity is the way minorities categorize themselves. To introduce some new terminology, in the late 1960s some social scientists proposed that we should look at the way both the analyst and the native view and label reality. Kenneth Pike (1967) introduced the terms emic to refer to native insiders' views and etic for outsider's views. The connection to Banton's definition are easy to see; Banton's definitions for ethnicity and race correspond to an emic versus an etic perspective (at least in so far as emic is considered an insider's view and etic as one imposed by those outside that group).
Many researchers besides Banton use ethnicity to mean an emic view and race to mean an etic view. Seen in this way, ethnicity carries a positive categorization and race a negative one. Pyong Gap Min (1999, 16) wrote, “Researchers have used interchangeably the terms ethnicity, ethnic identity, ethnic attachment, ethnic cohesion, ethnic solidarity, and ethnic mobilization…The term ethnic attachment seems best to capture this meaning…although many researchers use ethnic solidarity to indicate ethnic attachment as well.” Kim's description of ethnicity here is positive, but Kim is really referring not to how minorities categorize themselves, but instead to their strategy to create solidarity and power for social mobilization. Race (the phenotypical etic categorization) is applied to certain groups who then are socially victimized. In other words, using the category of race is a strategy of ranking people in order to foster