February 28th, 2020 
In the article Best of Friends, Worlds Apart, journalist Mirta Ojito documents how Cuban immigrant Joel Ruiz often finds himself caught between two worlds. Whites see him simply as black. African-Americans dismiss him as Cuban. They tell me Im Hispanic. He has started to refer to himself as Afro-Cuban.
1) Why has Ruiz chosen to refer to himself as Afro-Cuban?
2) Why do whites and African Americans respectively see him differently?
3) Be sure to discuss the concepts of race and ethnicity as socially-constructed categories in your response.
Term of race and ethnicity
Race:
a social construction based on perceived differences in human phenotypes in which beliefs about groups differentiated largely on the basis of color are assumed to have a biological basis; in history race has at times been linked with religious or national character; racial difference is, from an anthropological perspective, more properly understood as inscribed social and cultural difference.
Ethnicity:
a group identity resulting from social relations between groups in which consciousness of difference leads to both assigned and asserted distinctions and to a negotiation of difference; racial, religious, national, and cultural factors may all figure into the formation of ethnic identity; the ethnic is both the other and us, that which one is not and that which one is.
An individuals ethnicity can be adopted, selected and/or discarded.
Race is usually fixed.
essay must have a thesis statement and be organized thematically, not by readings. You must answer all parts of the question.
Sources:
a. In your essay, you must use specific and substantive examples (through paraphrasing and quotes) from the sources that I attached. You may use additional sources but only after you have used three readings.
b. . Films and film transcripts do not count as readings. PowerPoints do not count as readings
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