Race And Ethnicity Essay

The picture of the foot of Tse on the head of Archer, in the ballet an expression of tenderness and love, was considered by the black community as extremely offensive. To avoid more conflicts, the management of the Royal Swedish Ballet decided to remove the poster from their windows (Haidl, 2015).

Another reason for the sensitive connotation of the concept is due to people’s narrow idea of diversity, emphasizing only on differences between ethnicity and race.

The word ethnicity derives from the Greek word ‘ethnos’ (people, tribe, multitude, crowd or nation). In chapter eight of ‘Discours et Multiculturalité’, ethnicity is defined as: “Shared national origins, a national group from which one’s parents or ancestors have come and with which one feels kinship or identification…Ethnic identity is achieved after birth and exists beyond kinship” (Calabrese, 2016:21).

membership of a group, either from personal choice or as an external imposition, but which nonetheless implies the existence of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, and therefore the concept of ‘other’. 2. The search for a common identity on the part of the group members. 3. The perception on the part of other groups of more or less coherent stereotypes ascribed to the ethnic group in question” (Bolaffi et al., 2003: 94).

Calabrese (2016, chapter 8:21) also indicates that according to anthropology, ethnicity refers to:

“A biologically self-perpetuating population, that shares fundamental cultural values and has a field of communication and interaction (a shared public space). Ethnicity is a membership that identifies himself and is identified by others”

Fenton states that the simplest way to define ethnicity is by saying that “ethnicity is about descent and culture” (2003: 3).

In the frame of this essay the description of ethnic in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary gives a better idea of what is understood by