Race is a social construct—a system of classification based on perceived physical differences (especially skin color) that societies have invested with social meaning and used to distribute resources, rights, and opportunities unequally. Ethnicity refers to shared cultural heritage, ancestry, language, or religion and is also socially constructed and historically variable. Although race has no reliable biological basis, racism—prejudice and discrimination based on racial categorization—has profound and measurable consequences for life chances. Sociologists study both the construction of racial categories and the systemic inequalities those categories produce.
Trace the historical construction of racial categories (e.g., who counted as 'white' in the U.S. has changed over time). Distinguish individual-level prejudice from structural racism (policies, institutional practices that produce racial disparities regardless of intent). Examine data on racial gaps in wealth, health, incarceration, and education.
From your study of social stratification, you know that societies distribute resources, opportunities, and status unequally along multiple dimensions — class, gender, occupation — and that these inequalities are structured by social institutions, not simply by individual merit or effort. Race is one of the most powerful and consequential axes along which stratification operates, and understanding why requires grasping what it means to say that race is a social construct. This phrase is widely misunderstood. It does not mean race is not real, or that racial inequality is imagined, or that we should stop talking about race. It means that the categories themselves — the groupings, the hierarchies, the specific characteristics used to assign membership — are historical and social products, not discoveries of a natural order that pre-exists human classification.
The history of racial categories in the United States illustrates this clearly. Who counted as "white" has changed over time: Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants were not initially classified as white and faced systematic discrimination partly on racial grounds; over several decades, they were gradually incorporated into whiteness as their economic and social position changed. This is not what you'd expect if race were a biological fact — biological facts don't shift with economic conditions and political calculations. What actually changed was the social definition of the category, driven by specific historical processes of immigration, labor competition, and political coalition-building. The categories are made, and the making is always in the service of some social arrangement of power.
Ethnicity is distinct from race, though they are frequently conflated. Ethnicity refers to shared cultural identity — common ancestry, language, religion, customs, and historical memory. It is also socially constructed and historically variable, but it is defined by cultural heritage rather than by perceived physical characteristics. Irish Americans, Korean Americans, and Haitian Americans each have distinct ethnic identities; these may or may not map onto the racial categories that operate in U.S. society. The distinction matters analytically because race and ethnicity generate different social processes: race operates primarily through systems of classification imposed from outside (often by dominant groups on subordinated ones), while ethnicity is more often a matter of internal self-identification and community maintenance. In practice, the two frequently interact and overlap.
The gap between individual prejudice and structural racism is one of the most important conceptual distinctions in the sociology of race. Prejudice is an attitude — negative feelings, beliefs, or stereotypes directed at a racial group. Discrimination is behavior — treating people differently on the basis of racial classification. But many of the largest racial inequalities in contemporary societies — in wealth, health, incarceration, housing, education — are not primarily produced by the prejudiced intentions of individual actors. They result from policies and institutional practices that have racially disparate effects regardless of intent: residential segregation produced by historical mortgage-lending practices that are now illegal but whose wealth-gap effects persist; criminal sentencing policies that have differential racial impacts; school funding formulas tied to property values. Your basic statistics prerequisites are relevant here: data on racial gaps — in income distributions, health outcomes, incarceration rates — are the empirical evidence for structural inequality, and interpreting those gaps correctly requires understanding the difference between differences in measured outcomes and the causal processes that produced them.
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