Race vs. Ethnicity: Understanding Key Differences

Race Ethnicity Workplace Practical tools Diversity & Inclusion

Cherokee Cierra

As a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant, facilitator, and speaker, Cherokee Cierra supports organizations in building more fair, inclusive, and human-centered workplaces. Through her work, she helps teams better understand cultural dynamics, power structures, and everyday practices that shape employee experiences, with a focus on turning awareness into meaningful, sustainable action.

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This conference aims to clarify key concepts that are often misunderstood, in order to support more accurate, respectful, and informed dialogue around diversity and equity. By focusing on language precision, it helps participants understand how confusion between terms can lead to misinterpretation, unintended harm, and ineffective inclusion efforts.

Participants explore the concept of race as a social construct rather than a biological reality, shaped by historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. The session also unpacks ethnicity, highlighting its connections to culture, ancestry, language, and shared traditions, and clarifies how it differs from racial categorization while sometimes intersecting with it.

The conference concludes by examining why these distinctions matter in the workplace. Through concrete examples related to data collection, representation, and equity initiatives, participants are encouraged to reflect on assumptions that may surface in professional interactions and to better understand why experiences should not be generalized within or across groups.