ethnicity

Meaning: Ethnicity describes membership in a group that shares cultural heritage: common ancestry, language, religion, customs, food, and often a national or regional origin. It rests on both self-identification and how others classify a person. Because it is learned through socialization, cultural practices can change across generations, as in assimilation, even when ethnic identity persists. Like race, it is a social construct, so the categories and their meanings vary across time and place.

On the MCAT: Passages describe immigrant communities, ethnic enclaves, assimilation versus multiculturalism (pluralism), or differences in income, education, or health among groups. Questions ask you to classify a variable as ethnicity, race, or nationality, to predict how cultural practices shift across generations of immigrants, or to link ethnicity to ideas such as prejudice, discrimination, and stratification.

Common confusion: Students treat ethnicity and race as the same thing, or treat ethnicity as biological. Race is tied to perceived physical traits such as skin color; ethnicity is tied to culture. One race can include many ethnicities, and one ethnicity can include people who are classed in different races. Ethnicity is also different from nationality, which is legal citizenship in a state. The fact that settles it: ethnicity is defined by shared culture, and sociology treats both ethnicity and race as socially constructed.