Inequality A Contemporary Approach to Race, Class, and Gender

To most people, race is essential – meaning it is necessary, basic, and defining. We generally talk about race as something based on physical characteristics, nationality, and religion. However, as we will learn in this chapter, racial categories are often arbitrary in nature and do not precisely describe groups of people, and these categories shift and change across time. Instead, sociologists often refer to ethnicity rather than race when discussing a nexus of behaviors shared by a particular group of people.