Race and Ethnicity:

A race can be said to be a human population that has distict physical features from other humans, these physical features can include Colour of the skin, eyes and hair, the skin tone and facial characteristics, these physical features in turn sets that particular human population apart from the others. Whereas Ethnicity is all about the learned cultural behaviours, which includes Shared language, tradition and customs.

Race are the traits that cannot be changed or disguised and unlike Ethinicity race does not have customs or learned behaviour. In case of Ethnicity it can be altered as a person may move from one region to another and assimilate or give off his customs,language or belief.

This implies that race is nature whereas ethicity is nurture. Ethnicity covers a smaller subset of people than race, hence it can be said that people can be of the same race, with different ethnicity.

The human population of the world can be divided into many races and the races are further broken down by many ethicities.

Though the recorded categorization of human populations into distint races can be traced back to Ancient Egyptian book "Book of Gates". The first scientific attempts to categorize race have their origin in European imperialism and colonisation around the world. These classifications were based on Skin color, facial characteristics, hair color and cranial size.

Profiling of races is still a topic of hot debate among academics as there are no clear ideas on how race should be understood. Most biologist and sociologists believe that race is just an artificial distinction created by humans and has no basis in natural world and hence they have replaced the word race with the word ethnicity.

However this is debated by biomedical researchers who argue that ignoring race will be detrimental to the health of minority groups, as the disease risk factors differ substancially amont different races.

Though the bilogical differences are very small, these are very apparent and clear, perhaps the best way to understand race is to recognize that the socially constructed boundaries and biology overlap.

The debate and controversy over race and ethnicity is likely to continue, race and race realated issues such as racism, prejudice, bias and discrimination continue to impact the society as race and ethinicity remains a significant factor in social life.