distinguish identities people claim for themselves from categories others assign to them, explain the difference between race and ethnicity as scholars use the terms, and show from census history that official categories change over time.
Instruction
Everyone carries more than one identity: a name, a language or several, a neighborhood, a faith or none, a family story, a school, a team. Some of these we choose and some we inherit. Ethnic studies begins with a simple but powerful distinction between the identities people claim for themselves and the categories assigned to them by others — neighbors, employers, courts and governments. The two often do not match, and the gap between them is where much of the history in this course happens.
Ethnicity and race. Scholars usually use ethnicity for a shared sense of belonging built on things like ancestry, language, customs, religion or homeland — something a group recognizes in itself. They use race for categories that sort people mainly by perceived physical appearance and ancestry, categories that have usually been created and enforced by those with the power to make rules. Modern genetics finds far more variation within any so-called racial group than between groups, and no set of racial boxes matches clear biological boundaries. That is why scholars describe race as a social and historical idea: it is real in its effects, because laws and customs were built on it, but its categories were made by people and have changed over time.
Worked example: the census. The national census is the best evidence that official categories change. In 1930 the census counted “Mexican” as a race; after objections from Mexican American organizations and the Mexican government, the category was removed in 1940. Since 1980 every census form has asked a separate question about Hispanic origin, which is treated as an ethnicity, not a race — so a Hispanic person may be of any race. In 2024 the federal Office of Management and Budget revised its standards to combine the race and ethnicity questions and to add a Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) category, after years in which people with roots in that region were officially counted as white. None of these changes happened because human beings changed. They happened because people argued about how they should be counted, and governments decided.
Why the categories matter. Categories decide who is counted, how voting districts are drawn, which communities qualify for programs, and how discrimination is measured. A category that erases a community can make its needs invisible; a category imposed on people can also misdescribe them. Ask of any category: who made it, for what purpose, and who was left out?
Your own identity is yours. In this course you are never required to share personal or family information. When a task invites you to use your own story, you may instead study a public figure’s or a documented community’s history, and both routes earn the same credit.
Terms change too. People describe themselves differently: Mexican American, Chicana or Chicano, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Latine, Hispanic; American Indian, Native American, Indigenous, or the name of a specific nation. The Model Curriculum writes “Chicana/o/x” and “Latina/o/x” to include several of these. A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that only about 3 percent of U.S. Hispanic adults used the term Latinx for themselves. The best practice is to use the name a person or community uses for itself, and to recognize that members of the same group may disagree.
The communities that built this place
Every California school stands in a place with its own layered history: the Native nation or nations whose homeland it is, and the communities who arrived, worked, organized and stayed. That history is held by the people who lived it, not by a course vendor.
The census example above is one lens on your area, not the whole story. Build the rest yourself: take one of the three routes below. Each one runs from any address in California, costs nothing, and needs nobody’s permission. If a community later contributes its own account of this place, hold that account above anything you assembled from records — the people who lived a history are its best source.
Your route — choose one. All three earn full credit.
- Route A — Who lives here now, and who lived here before (U.S. Census Bureau) — Open data.census.gov and search your city, town or ZIP code. Pull table DP05, ACS Demographic and Housing Estimates, from the most recent 5-year American Community Survey, and record the population, the share of residents in each race and ethnicity category, and the share born outside the United States. Pull table S1601, Language Spoken at Home, for the same place. Then search the same place in the 2000 decennial census and compare. Write 150 words on what changed, what held steady, and which of this lesson’s concepts — migration, exclusion, displacement, community cultural wealth — the numbers can show and which they cannot.
- Route B — The local press, decade by decade (free newspaper archives) — Search the California Digital Newspaper Collection (cdnc.ucr.edu, run by UC Riverside; California papers from 1846 on, free) and Chronicling America at the Library of Congress (loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america). Search your town’s name together with the name of a community, a congregation, a lodge, a mutual aid society, a union hall or a business district, and limit the search to one decade. Log five articles with date, paper and headline. For each, note who is speaking and who is being spoken about — nineteenth- and early twentieth-century papers often describe a community in language that community would never have used for itself, and that gap is evidence too.
- Route C — What was built, and what the record marks (Calisphere and the National Register) — Browse Calisphere (calisphere.org, from the California Digital Library) by county or by contributing institution, and collect five photographs, letters, maps or documents about your area. Then search the National Register of Historic Places database (npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP) by your county and open one nomination form: these are federal public-domain documents, often twenty pages of researched local history, and they name who built a place and who used it. Write 150 words on what the buildings and images show about who made this place, and on which communities left buildings and which did not.
For the school — how this slot gets filled
Who holds this: Local community partners: the tribal cultural department or historic preservation office of the nation whose homeland this is, the local historical society or public library’s local-history room, community organizations and elders who agree to take part.
- Contact partners before the semester begins, and ask what may be shared with students and what may be published in an online course; these are different permissions.
- Use documented sources the partners provide or approve: local archives, newspapers, city records, oral histories recorded with consent.
- Agree attribution in writing: the person, the organization, and who may revise the material later.
- If a partner says some knowledge is not for a course, respect that answer and teach the slot as it stands.
Formative check
Work through these before moving on. They are not graded — they tell you, and your teacher, whether the standard below has landed yet.
Which example shows an ascribed category rather than self-identification?
Official U.S. race and ethnicity categories have stayed the same since the first census.
Scholars call race a idea because its categories were made by people and have changed over time, even though their effects are real.
Choose one official category system (the census, a school form or a job application you have seen). Who made it, for what purpose, and who might not see themselves in it? You may answer about yourself or about a public figure; do not share anything you would rather keep private.
How confident are you that you can distinguish claimed identities from assigned categories and explain why official categories change?