ABSTRACT
Race distinctions categorize people in terms of how others respond to them, socially constructed and with meaning changing over time and place. Usually they are a means of allocating status and privilege in a society; categories are arbitrary and not consistently related to underlying biological variables, but resulting social classifications are useful in understanding outcomes for groups of people. Ethnicity is a socially constructed way of sorting people into groups in terms of shared culture, heritage, language, and/or religion. Proudford and Nkomo (2006) refer to the English, Scots, and Welsh, living on the same island and sharing race but not ethnicity. The term “racioethnicity” has also been used to refer to groups identified by a combination of presumed biology and culture (Cox, 1990/2004).
