Ethnicity

The concept of ethnicity refers to cultural differences between social groups (which includes things like national and regional identities, religious practices and the like) and while it is usual to refer to major ethnic groups based around concepts of nationality, this is clearly a very crude form of categorisation.

For example, although we may refer to "Asians" as an ethnic group, a number of very clear problems emerge with this type of crude categorisation:

• "Asian" is a very broad category, covering a range of different nationalities (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and so forth).
  

• It makes no distinction between those born in "Asia" and those born in, for example, England.
  

While this is not the place to discuss the concept of ethnicity on any great depth, you do need to be aware that it is used in a very crude way when comparing "educational performance" in our society (in basic terms, statistical studies tend to refer to ethnic groups such as "Whites", "Asians" (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi), "African" and "Afro-Caribbean").

This is very evident when we think of the concept of "Whites" as an ethnic group - this crude category covers a wide range of national and regional variations as well as a range of different class variations, for example.

The basic point here is that while the concept of ethnicity is an advance on the concept of "race", it should not be taken to mean that different ethnic groups are:

• Self-contained and mutually exclusive (it is possible, for example to be a Black Englishwoman).
  

• Homogeneous (that is, containing people with the same social characteristics).
  

On the contrary, ethnic groups may be just as fragmented and heterogeneous as any other social group in our society.