During the Iowa State Conference on Race and Ethnicity (ISCORE), one virtual session was “Ethnicity and Race, What’s the Difference?”

Zizheng Yang, a senior in mathematics, led the session.

During the session, Yang explained the different definitions of race and classes of racism throughout the presentation.

“I want people to see that there are differences between ethnicity and race; I want people to be educated on the huge difference between the two definitions,” Yang said.

Ethnicity and race are often confused despite their subtle differences.

By definition, ethnicity is the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition.

Race is defined as a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits.

Race includes phenotypic characteristics such as skin color, where ethnicity includes cultural factors such as language, traditions, religion and nationality.

Other definitions of race mentioned without social construction were a combination of blurred physiological background, geology-based phenotype similarity, mendelian inheritance, descent inheritance and genetic differentiation.

Yang went on to explain how there are different classifications of racism besides the general racism that we see today.

Here are some of the different classes of racism discussed:

Antipathy racism – making an unconscious negative evaluation of a race or ethnicity

Cultural racism – belief from the heart that your national culture is superior to other races

Anti-nationalism – belief that other races are inherently better than oneself

“Despite ethnicity and race, racism is alive and well in this world and people need to know the different ways of racism,” Yang said.

The breakout session had a goal to help participants understand and see the differences between ethnicity and race as well as understand that racism comes in many different forms.

More than 95 people attended the session. There were several comments about how well done the research was and how well the presenter shared his research.