What's the difference between nationality, race, and ethnicity?

Uhm… Ok, let us first do the “Nationailty” thing… Nationality means that you are the citizen of a country. It has nothing to do with the color of your skin or your heritage or where your ancestors came from.

If you have a French passport, then your nationality is French. Regardless whether your parents came from Normandy, Algeria or Timbuktu.

The thing called “Race” is in your genes. In your blood. You cannot change your race. So if a child of one race is adopted by the family of another race, the child will still be the race of the natural parents. Race is completely independent of culture. Race will determine some of your facial features as well as the color of your skin and hair mostly. Race will also have an influence your susceptibility to certain diseases and the probability of you having this or that gene.

The thing calles “Ethnicity” is often used similar to “Race”. But “Ethnicity” comes with culture and language and background. If you are, as a baby, adopted into a family of different ethnicity than your natural parents are, you will be your natural parents race but not their ethnicity. You will instead be the ethnicity of your adoptive parents. You will speak their language, You will do their cultural celebrations, you will most probably be their religion and you will definitely be their culture.

Hope this makes it clear.

What we think of as “race” are small local adaptations. Given enough time isolated groups of humans could evolve into different sub-species but that hasn’t happened to homo sapiens and due to the way we are integrating it probably never will. There is one race of people, the human race. My dream is a day when the color of one’s skin is as trivial as their eye color; something for the most part ignored and rarely thought about. When Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton won the world championship racing fans noted he was the first British champion since Damon Hill and the youngest world champion in F1 history. Lewis Hamilton is also black and the first black driver to secure a F1 contract, the first black F1 driver, the first black driver to earn world champion points, the first black driver to earn a pole position, the first to win a Grand Prix and the first black F1 champion. In American sports his color would be his most defining category while in European racing it is rarely even mentioned.

Thanks, fillet. Yes, you are right. If you put it that way…. We are the “homo sapient” race, and the last real other human race that existed was the Neanderthal man. But the term “race” is commonly used the way I explained in my original post in the USA. Where I live, we don’t use it at all. Saying that a human belongs to a certain “Rasse” is considered Nazi here.

I have to disagree with both Astrid (Rotten) and Fillet. This is really a complicated question, and the only thing I can say briefly is that these categories do not have precise definitions because they do not exist independently of their definitions (as, say, a tree does). Race, nationality, and ethnicity are what societies understand them to be, which differs from one place to another, and also changes over time in any given place.

There is an old saying that “a language is a dialect with an army.” Similarly, one could say that a nationality is an ethnic group that has organized itself politically to attain national rights. But these are rough characterizations, not precise definitions.

A few examples to illustrate the complexity:

1. Jews in the USA are often considered an ethnic group, but in Israel, Jews are a nationality that includes many different Jewish ethnic groups, like Yemenite, Ethiopian, Polish, or German Jews.

2. In bi-national countries (like Canada, Belgium, Iraq, and the former Czechoslovakia), and in countries with bi-national societies (like Spain, Israel and Syria), and in multinational states (like Russia, China, the former Ottoman Empire, and the former Yugoslavia) nationality does not coincide with citizenship. That’s partly because there is a difference between the “ethnic nationalism” of those countries and a “civic nationalism” that embraces all ethnicities, as in the USA.

Race is even more complex, and I don’t have time before the festival of Sukkot begins - any minute! If anyone cares enough about it to ask me when I’m back on Sunday, I’ll try to address it then. {:^)

I have nothing to add, excpet it’s nice to see some thought out, considered responses to a question.

When I took anthropology in college I read that 150,000 years ago There were Homo Sapiens in Africa, Homo Erectus in Asia and Neanderthals in Europe but by 50,000 years ago Homo Erectus and Neanderthals were extinct and Homo Sapiens lived in all three places. Over the short period of 100,000 years two species of mankind died out and one spread and dominated. That so much happened over such a short evolutionary period of time always kinda’ blew my mind.

nationality and ethnicity are same but race denpends on ansestory