Ethnic Categories Paper

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The subject of race can be a touchy subject to many people. How people see themselves versus how a society views where a person fits into racial categories is a complex subject that has no clear lines. There is a tendency to categorize a group people together into an ethnic group, no matter the culture of the people, based off of physical traits. Ethnic categories and ethnic collectivity can seem at first to be very similar, but while categories put people in groups based off of physical traits while ethnic collectivity is more fluid as who people are as well as commonality. The use of ethnic categories is used to classify people and can be seen on many times of government documents, surveys, and other. The intentions of using ethnic categories were for enforcing civil rights legislations (Marger, 2014). The issue with ethnic categories is that it is a very rough way of counting the population ethnically. Ethnic categories are a fluid concept, the common categories that are seen on many documents, White, Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American/Alaskan Native, is limiting (Marger, 2014). …show more content…

Collective identities are fluid, meaning it can change over time depending on real or perceived attributes or experiences. African Americans are a prime example of ethnic collectivity. The African American ethnic collectivity is based off of their history of hard ship due to slavery, segregation, and civil rights issues as a common basis and is an important part of which African American’s see them as. Who or what a person is not a part of is also plays a part in shaping ethnic collectivity just as much as what does (Bull, A). Along with history, African American ethnic collectivity also includes food, language, ideology, exclusions, and in some cases religion (Bull,

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