III. What Culture Is Not, continued

Most races are made up of many cultural and ethnic groups: Bantus and Zulus, for example, are cultural groups that belong to the Black race, and Hmong, Mien, and Zhuang are all cultural groups that belong to the Asian race. Clearly, these groups are culturally very different from each other because culture and ethnicity refer to the concepts inside people’s heads, not to their physical characteristics. Moreover, a cultural group may be made up of persons from several races as with Puerto Ricans who can be of African, American Indian, White, or mixed racial descent.

Because race is a socially defined construct used to categorize people by their physical characteristics, it is not surprising that different cultures have very different perspectives with respect to racial identifiers and to relations between people of different races. Physical variations, most often in appearance, acquire distinct meanings and are linked to class or caste in various ways, depending upon the specific culture. Someone classified as “black” in the U.S., for instance, might be considered “white” in Brazil and “colored” in South Africa.

These meanings structure social relations, oftentimes resulting in stratification and discrimination over time. Further, when a racial group is excluded or isolated from other groups within a culture, and the isolation continues over several generations, the group may develop a distinctive group identity that becomes a subculture within the larger culture. In this way, culture may become linked with race though the two are conceptually different.