Minorities

Racial and ethnic minorities

Racial minorities, sometimes referred to synonymously as people of color or non-white people, are minority groups that are discriminated against on the basis of race. Though definitions vary cross-culturally, modern racism is primarily based on the European and American classifications of race that developed during the Age of Exploration, as European countries sought to categorize the nations they colonized into pseudo-scientificphenotypical groups. In the United States's system, whiteness is at the top of a hierarchy that automatically classifies mixed-race individuals as their subordinate race.