Race is the outward physical appearance of a person. In other words, race is how a person looks. Ethnicity is the cultural background of a person. In other words, everything else. If you had to choose only one of these things to define people by forever, which would it be?
Defining people by race is an outdated practice that I’m surprised we haven’t dropped yet. It evokes segregation. A hundred years ago, we called people whites and blacks, now we call them white people and black people. A poor excuse for a language reform and hardly a big enough change to convince anyone that we’re over the “Us vs. Them” mentality.
The root cause of bigotry is ignorance. Sexual orientation, race, religion, political leaning and other characteristics seem to be superfluous when exhibited by people that we love. You wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) stop loving someone just because of these things. And how do you learn to love someone? By getting to know them.
It’s easy for us to believe that there’s a white vs black struggle because we believe that those two groups actually exist. They do not. (I’ll explain)
I am white. Spaniards, The British, Australians, South Africans, and many other groups are white. But to group us together under the banner of being white and assume that we have anything more in common than skin tone would be a blunder. Now, it is possible that we do share a level of privilege not enjoyed by other groups, but a key step to undermining this cultural principle, which would be to the benefit of the whole human race, is to stop reducing people to their races.
Ethnicity is a more useful tool in categorizing people, and reflects who a person is or might be more handily than race ever could. Once we stop thinking of people as either being one of Us or one of Them, we can start thinking of everyone as a unified human race comprised of many beautiful and varied cultures, each with our own strengths and weaknesses, weaknesses that can be covered and made up for by cooperating in full with the rest of humanity.
To stop using race to define people is a step towards world peace.
There is nothing that all peoples of color have in common, so calling them Them is a great way to breed misunderstanding, ignorance, and fear. Educate yourself on the cultural backgrounds of people so that you can more accurately understand social issues, discuss world politics, and better appreciate all our places on the world stage.