What do race and ethnicity mean?
The terms “race” and “ethnicity” can both be used to refer to people of similar cultural, religious, tribal, or geographic ancestry, yet they are both notoriously difficult to define. Scientists have called for using other forms of classification that are more strongly based in biology.1, 2 Despite these troubled terms, health disparities do exist along the blurry lines of “racial” or “ethnic” groups.3, 4 How do doctors classify racial or ethnic groups? One of the difficulties of tracking health differences by race is that racial groups are defined in many different ways. The American Heart Association uses the US government definition of Hispanics as persons who trace their ancestry to Spain, Mexico, the Spanish-speaking countries of Central or South America, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or other Spanish-speaking cultures, regardless of race. It does not include people from Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad, Belize, and Portugal, because Spanish isn’t their first langua
