people from around the world have been immigrating to the United States for several hundred years.

While the first wave of immigrants came from Western Europe, the bulk of people entering North
America were from Northern Europe, then Eastern Europe, followed by Latin America and Asia. There
was also the forced immigration of African slaves. Native Americans, who did not immigrate but rather
inhabited the land prior to immigration, experienced displacement as a result. Most of these groups also
suffered a period of disenfranchisement and prejudice as they went through the process of assimilation.

Since its early history, Native Americans, African Americans, and European Americans were considered
as different races in the United States. The differences attributed to each group, however, especially the
differences used to designate European Americans as the superior race, had little to do with biology.
Instead, these racial designations were a means to concentrate power, wealth, land, and privilege in the
hands of the European Americans. Moreover, the emphasis on racial distinctions often led to the lack of
acknowledgment or over-simplification of the great ethnic diversity of the country's population. For
example, the racial category of "white" or European American fails to reflect that members of this group
hail from very different countries. Similarly, the racial category of "black" does not distinguish people
from the Caribbean from those who were brought to North America from various parts of Africa.

Native Americans

The brutal confrontation between the European colonists and the Native Americans, which
resulted in the decimation of the latter's population, is well known as an historical tragedy. Even
after the establishment of the United States government, discrimination against Native Americans
was codified and formalized in a series of laws intended to subjugate them and keep them from
gaining any power. The eradication of Native American culture continued until the 1960s when
Native Americans were able to participate in, and benefit from, the civil rights movement. Native
Americans still suffer the effects of centuries of degradation. Long-term poverty, inadequate
education, cultural dislocation, and high rates of unemployment contribute to Native American
populations falling to the bottom of the economic spectrum.

African Americans

African Americans arrived in North America under duress as slaves, and there is no starker
illustration of the dominant-subordinate group relationship than that of slavery. Slaves were
stripped of all their rights and privileges, and were at the absolute mercy of their owners. For
African Americans, the civil rights movement was an indication that a subordinate group would
no longer willingly submit to domination. The major blow to America's formally institutionalized
racism was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This Act, which is still followed today, banned
discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Some sociologists, however,
would argue that institutionalized racism persists, especially since African Americans still fair
poorly in terms of employment, insurance coverage, and incarceration, as well as in the areas of
economics, health, and education.

Asian Americans
Asian Americans come from a diversity of cultures, including Chinese, Japanese, and
Vietnamese. They, too, have been subjected to racial prejudice. The Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882, for example, which was motivated by white workers blaming Chinese migrants for taking
their jobs, resulted in the abrupt end of Chinese immigration and the segregation of Chinese
already in America; this segregation resulted in the Chinatowns found in large cities.
Nevertheless, despite a difficult history, Asian Americans have earned the positive stereotype of
the model minority. The model minority stereotype is applied to a minority group that is seen as
reaching significant educational, professional, and socioeconomic levels without challenging the
existing establishment.

Hispanic Americans

Hispanic Americans come from a wide range of backgrounds and nationalities. Mexican
Americans form the largest Hispanic subgroup, and also the oldest. Mexican Americans,
especially those who are here illegally, are at the center of a national debate about immigration.
Mexican immigrants experience relatively low rates of economic and civil assimilation, which is
most likely compounded by the fact that many of them are illegally in the country. By contrast,
Cuban Americans are often seen as a model minority group within the larger Hispanic group. As
with Asian Americans, however, being a model minority can mask the issue of powerlessness
that these minority groups face in U.S. society.
Full Text
The United States is a diverse country, racially and ethnically. Six races are officially recognized:
white, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian, black or African American, Native Hawaiian
and other Pacific Islander, and people of two or more races. A race called, "Some other race," is
also used in the census and other surveys but is not official.

The United States Census Bureau also classifies Americans as "Hispanic or Latino" and "Not
Hispanic or Latino," which identifies Hispanic and Latino Americans as a racially diverse
ethnicity that composes the largest minority group in the nation.

History

The immigrants to the New World of the Americas came largely from ethnically diverse regions
of the European Old World. In the Americas, the immigrant populations began to mix among
themselves and with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent, as well as the enslaved Africans.

From the beginning of U.S. history, Native Americans, African Americans, and European
Americans were classified as belonging to different races. For nearly three centuries, the criteria
for membership in these groups were similar, comprising a person's appearance, their fraction of
known non-European ancestry and their social circle. This changed in the late nineteenth century.

Throughout the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, in an effort to restore white supremacy in the
South after the emancipation of slaves, the ruling white majority began to classify anyone
considered to have "one drop" of "black blood," or any known African ancestry, to be "black." In
most southern states, this definition was not put into law until the twentieth century. Many local
governments established racial segregation of facilities during what came to be known as the Jim
Crow era, which began in the late 1800s.

In the twentieth century, efforts to sort the increasingly mixed population of the United States
into discrete categories generated many difficulties for the U.S. government (Spickard, 1992). By
the standards used in past censuses, many millions of mixed-race children born in the United
States have been classified as of a different race than one of their biological parents. Efforts to
track mixing between groups led to a proliferation of categories (such as "mulatto" and
"octoroon") and so-called "blood quantum" distinctions, which refers to the degree of ancestry for
an individual of a specific racial or ethnic group (e.g., saying someone is "1/4 Omaha tribe").

These various distinctions became increasingly untethered from self-reported ancestry. Further
complicating this fact is that a person's racial identity can change over time, and self-ascribed
race can differ from assigned race (Kressin et al., 2003).

Current Official Definitions of Race and Ethnicity

Aside from their varied social, culture, and political connotations, the idea of racial groups have
been used in U.S. censuses as self-identification data items in which residents choose the race or,
starting with the 2000 US Census, races with which they most closely identify. Respondents also
indicate whether or not they are of Hispanic or Latino origin, which the census considers
separately from race. While many see race and ethnicity as the same thing, ethnicity generally
refers to a group of people whose members identify with each other through a common heritage
and culture, as opposed to the implication of shared biological traits associated with the term
"race."
Full Text
An ethnic group is a group of people who identify with each other through a common heritage,
which generally consists of a common culture and shared language or dialect. The group's ethos
or ideology may also stress common ancestry, religion, or race.

In the United States of America, the term "ethnic" carries a different meaning from how it is
commonly used in some other countries. This is due to the historical and ongoing significance of
racial distinctions that categorize together what might otherwise have been viewed as ethnic
groups. For example, various ethnic, "national," or linguistic groups from Africa, Asia and the
Pacific Islands, Latin America, and Indigenous America have long been combined together as
racial minority groups (currently designated as African American, Asian, Latino and Native
American or American Indian, respectively).

While a sense of ethnic identity may coexist with racial identity (Chinese Americans among
Asian or Irish American among European or White, for example), the long history of the United
States as a settler, conqueror, and slave society, and the formal and informal inscription of
racialized groupings into law and social stratification schemes has bestowed upon race a
fundamental social identification role in the United States.

Examples of Overlapping Racial and Ethnic Categories in the U.S.

Ethnicity in U.S. therefore usually refers to collectives of related groups, having more to do with
physical appearance, specifically skin color, rather than political boundaries. The word
"nationality" is more commonly used for this purpose (e.g. Italian, Mexican, French, Russian,
Japanese). Most prominently in the U.S., Latin American descended populations are grouped in a
"Hispanic" or "Latino" ethnicity. The many previously designated "Oriental" ethnic groups are
now classified as the "Asian" racial group for the census.

The terms "Black" and "African-American," while different, are both used as ethnic categories in
the U.S. In the late 1980s, the term "African American" came into prominence as the most
appropriate and politically correct race designation. While it was intended as a shift away from
the racial injustices of America's past often associated with the historical views of the "Black"
race, it largely became a simple replacement for the terms Black, Colored, Negro and similar
terms, referring to any individual of dark skin color regardless of geographical descent.

The term Caucasian generally describes some or all people whose ancestry can be traced to
Europe, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, North Africa, Central Asia, and South Asia. This
includes European-colonized countries in the Americas, Australasia, and South Africa, among
others. All the aforementioned are categorized as part of the "White" racial group, as per U.S.
Census categorization. This category has been split into two groups: Hispanics and non-Hispanics
(e.g. White non-Hispanic and White Hispanic. )