RACE, ETHNICITY AND CLASS - AN ANALYSIS OF INTERRELATIONS

Race is a biological category, whereas racism is oppression based on t he belief that some races are inferior and others are superior. Ethnic ity has increasingly come to be viewed as a cultural identity and is s een positively, yet discrimination based on cultural differences persi sts. To correct this conceptual imbalance the pairs of terms - racism/ racity and ethnicism/ethnicity may be used to refer to the negative an d positive dimensions respectively of the two phenomena. The distincti on between race and ethnicity as well as ethnicity and nationality sho uld be insisted upon. Nationality emerges when territory and culture a re fused; ethnicity is a product of dissociation between them. Race an d ethnic groups are organic whilst classes are aggregative collectivit ies whose units are individuals. Theoretically members of all classes could be found in proportion to their sizes in different races and eth nic groups but in reality the distribution of classes varies drastical ly across them because of a combination of factors, which need to be i nvestigated and explained.