The ideology of race and its counterpart (racism) have been interpreted phenotypically throughout history. Race, defined by Dalton Conley in his sociologically grounded book You May Ask Yourself, as “a group of people who share a set of characteristics and are said to share a common bloodline.” (Conley 322). Ethnicity, defined by Conley, is one's ethnic quality or affiliation (Conley 355). Race is something externally imposed and involuntary, usually based on physical difference (phenotype) and hierarchical based on social constructs. Race is exclusive and primarily unitary: you can only have one race. Ethnicity, however, is based on practical differences, not voluntary phenotypic, self-defined/embraced by group members, non-hierarchical, fluid and multiple: one can have many ethnic affiliations. The fundamental difference between race and ethnicity is that race is hierarchical and socially imposed: you have no control over your race, it is imposed by others. You can identify many different ethnicities, but only one race. For example, you might identify ethnically as Russian or Irish, but in reality you can only identify racially as white or black. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Most associate ethnicity with culture and race with biology. Given the history of using biology for political purposes, it is very important to understand that race as we know it is not a biological concept. According to sociologist David Freund, “it could be argued that both ethnicity and race are socially constructed, their influence in terms of power and inequality is in how racial identities have been constructed historically. It could be argued that they are both illusory and imaginary. But racial categories have had a much more concrete impact on people's lives, because they have been used to discriminate and distribute resources unequally and establish different standards of legal protection." The main point of this excerpt is that the influence of race and ethnicity is global and have both been used to highlight inequality. An example of racial inequality occurs in the 1950s, when racial segregation was extremely widespread and thousands of people were killed due to the philosophy of white privilege. An example of ethnic inequality is Hitler's reign over Germany and his anti-Semitism towards Jews, where he questioned thousands of Jews in concentration camps and killed them, all because of their ethnicity: Jewish. There are many theories about inequalities and how they are related to race and ethnicity. According to a functionalist view, ethnic and racial inequalities must have served an important function to exist for so long. However, this concept has raised some questions. How can racial prejudice contribute positively to society? A functionalist might consider the “functions” and “dysfunctions” caused by racial inequality. The anthropologist Manning Nash (1964) focused his argument on how racism is functional for the dominant group, suggesting, for example, that racism morally justifies a racially unequal society. For example, the way slave owners justified slavery in the South: suggesting that blacks were fundamentally inferior to whites and preferred slavery over freedom. Works Cited Conley, D. (2017). You may wonder: An introduction to thinking like a sociologist (6th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.Freund, D. (2013). Race, ethnicity, and power in the United States. In R. Delgado and J. Stefancic (Eds.), Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2nd ed., pp. 97-117). NYU..