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The United States has a racially and ethnically diverse population. [1] At the federal level, race and ethnicity have been categorized separately. The most recent United States census recognized five racial categories (White, Black, Native American/Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander), as well as people who belong to two or more of the racial categories.
Researchers have investigated the relationship between race and genetics as part of efforts to understand how biology may or may not contribute to human racial categorization. Today, the consensus among scientists is that race is a social construct, and that using it as a proxy for genetic differences among populations is misleading. [1] [2]
Measuring Race and Ethnicity Across the Decades: 1790-2010 United States Censuses. The exact terminology of racial groups changes over time. In the United States census, the US Census Bureau and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) define a set of self-identified categories of race and ethnicity chosen by residents, with which they most closely identify.
The number of ethnicity/nationality options available on Soviet censuses was enormous—the Soviet Union offered 194 different choices for ethnicity/nationality in its 1926 census. [74] There were 97 options in 1939, 126 options in 1959, 122 options in 1970, 123 options in 1979, and 128 options for the Soviet Union in 1989. [ 74 ]
Nationality is sometimes used simply as an alternative word for ethnicity or national origin, just as some people assume that citizenship and nationality are identical. [38] In some countries, the cognate word for nationality in local language may be understood as a synonym of ethnicity or as an identifier of cultural and family-based self ...
Another way to look at differences between populations is to measure genetic differences rather than physical differences between groups. The mid-20th-century anthropologist William C. Boyd defined race as: "A population which differs significantly from other populations in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses.
Due to its ambiguity, terms such as race, genetic population, ethnicity, geographic population, and ancestry are used interchangeably in everyday discourse involving race. Some researchers critique this interchangeability noting that the conceptual differences between race and ethnicity are not widely agreed upon. [25]
Around 1900 and before, the primordialist understanding of ethnicity predominated: cultural differences between peoples were seen as being the result of inherited traits and tendencies. [73] With Weber's introduction of the idea of ethnicity as a social construct, race and ethnicity became more divided from each other.