Ethnicity and Race

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Question: What is the difference between ethnicity and race, and is class analysis still important for understanding social inequality globally? Provide examples about how gender, class and race inequalities reinforce each other and contradict each other. There are many factors which go into determining the path a person’s life can take; the most significant of those being the social class into which he or she is born. Every civilised society has a class society. Each of these societies has based its civilisation, its culture, its technology, on the oppression of the majority by a minority. Class is vitally important in understanding social inequalities suffered globally by the races which structures our world, but also it extends more specifically into the different ethnicities which create a race. There are many races which make up our world, however these races are broken up by many nationalistic ethnicities. While many confuse race and ethnicity as one in the same, an ethnic group can be a group of people sharing a common religion or national heritage or even a common cultural tradition. Race is not determined by belief or choice to belong to a group, but rather we are all born into our race. A race is a “local geographic or global human population distinguished as a more or less distinct group by genetically transmitted physical characteristics.” (dictionary.com) When evaluating races and the differences between them, the norm is to study the different races and how they are broken up into the social classes of a society. In the United States for instances, studies have been done that show ... The concept of "race" may be usefully compared to the concept of "caste." Caste includes ancestry and actual social stratification, and also includes ideas about real or imagined body type differences and socially
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