Knowing something about a person's beliefs about the root causes of racial inequality can tell us a lot about what should or shouldn't be done about racial inequality in our country. To start our discussion of Chapter two, we go over the meaning of the terms, race and ethnicity so that we come to a better understanding of the groups we're comparing in this course. As we've discussed already, a person's race and or ethnicity are very personal and have a lot to do with identity, our identity is who we think we are in recent ethnicity. Both play a part in defining us. But self identifying is one race or ethnicity or another isn't always a simple matter. It isn't straightforward, just look at the changes over time in the Census Bureau data starting in two thousand with the decennial census people, the United States were permitted to choose as many races listed as they wished. Imagine that. Let's take Tiger Woods, for example, who refers to himself as Caballe, an Asian Polynesian. He made that term up. It means he's half Asian, Chinese and Thai, one quarter African-American, one eighth Native American and one eighth Dutch. Wu, who you can see how that's complicated. So self identifying with your race or ethnicity is a complicated matter. To clarify what we're talking about, let's set forth a few formal definitions and explain some important terms, starting with race. When people use this term, they generally think of groups that are biologically distinguishable by physical, mental and genetic traits. But most social scientists don't think like this. Instead, they think of race as socially constructed. We discussed this briefly in Chapter one, but I'll say it again, saying that race is a social construction means that how groups get defined varies over time and space. Iceland provides many examples to demonstrate that race is a social construction. I'll let you read those on your own. Suffice it to say that social scientists today see race as representing social relations in a particular time and place. Racial distinctions are real and meaningful to the extent that people are treated differently and experience different kinds of life experiences and outcomes. If that's what we mean by race, what do we mean by ethnicity? Iceland tells us that ethnicity is tied to culture, examples of culture, our music, food, religion, language, clothing, art, sports, books and other written material holidays, to name just a few. Culture is the sum total of human creations. If humans played a hand in it, it's safe to say it's culture. Here is the formal definition from the book. Ethnicity refers to a group of people who are differentiated by culture rather than by perceived physical or genetic differences central to notions of race. With those two terms defined, you should know that these terms are often used interchangeably in public conversations today. In fact, Iceland ends his discussion of these two terms by saying. Given the ambiguity in the use of these concepts, even among social scientists, I often use the terms, race and ethnicity together or interchangeably. Understand the composition of the United States, please study figures one and two in the book, which show trends in racial and ethnic composition of the United States from 1970 all the way to 2050, where the proportions of populations are estimated. In this short film, I've introduced the terms, race and ethnicity and acknowledge that the terms are often used interchangeably, then I pointed you to figures one and two for good look the other racial and ethnic composition. In the next film, I'll discuss theories and more terms that we'll need to move forward in the course.