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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I've noticed how more and more people use the term "ethnicity" to mean "race". Here's an example from 1:26:20 in the latest Honestly with Bari Weiss podcast episode "Has Freedom Failed Us? A Debate" (which is otherwise excellent, I might do another post on its contents later):

Patrick Deneen: "If you read the context it's clear he means a kind of cultural tradition, and not a kind of ethnicity" [while talking about a Viktor Orbán speech]

It might be pedantic, but this annoys me. My understanding is that ethnicity is cultural: If a Hungarian couple adopts a Chinese baby and raises it in Hungary, that child will be ethnically Hungarian when grown up (but it will "have Chinese decent" or more controversial "be racially Chinese" or "be racially Asian").

I understand that people tiptoe around the word "race" since misusing it can get you cancelled but replacing it with another word that means something else is just wrong.

This is the end of this rambling. Has anyone else noticed this?

This doesn't fit how I use ethnicity, how nearly anyone I know uses ethnicity, or how most literature (meaning everything from fiction, articles in the popular press, or academic concentrating on the subject -- Connor, Kaufmann, and the literature on ethnic nationalism more generally being good examples) uses the word. The popular conception of "ethnonationalism" as opposed to, say, civic nationalism with the stipulation of jus soli is further evidence. That aside, you can just look at the word's own etymology.

I would also disagree that it's used an euphemism -- in my own writing (both on the sub and elsewhere), I've insisted on using ethnicity because it denotes more specific groups of the same basis (ancestry) as race, which is important when someone has to deal with international comparisons (where, for example, "black" could denote a group including both African-Americans and Kenyans, or just the former), where the distinction between broader races and specific ancestry-groups will create unnecessary confusions if ignored. I don't think there's a better word for doing this (even something like nationality is better, if still somewhat inadequate, for the sort of relation which OP is describing), or one more commonly used for such purposes.

It's been going on for a while, very much like how I remember being taught to say gender rather than sex ("it means the same thing, it's just more polite"). It is indeed annoying.

The originators may be people who legitimately believed that observed differences between races were due to ethnicity rather than race, but people who want to promote that view should argue for it explicitly rather than trying to smuggle it in via definitions.

Like some others here, I have never heard "ethnicity" used to refer to anything other than ancestry in the past several decades I've heard the term. The person of Chinese descent living in Hungary is ethnically (Han or whatever his biological ancestors were), and culturally Hungarian, if it's important to make the distinction. Or if not, he is Hungarian, and racially Asian.

This may be because I'm American, and the usage is different in Europe. But if it's different, it's not recently different. If a person's biological ancestors are from France, but he's raised by Greek Americans, he is ethnically (some kind of French) and culturally American or (regional) American or Greek American, depending on how much he participates in Greek specific cultural customs. Calling him ethnically Greek would not so much confuse people as simply miscommunicate his background. And nobody calls anyone ethnically American unless they're emphasizing that they don't know where their ancestors are from.

The Census categories in America differentiate between Races and Ethnicities. With Hispanic being the only allowed ethnicity. This is because Hispanics can be pure European in ancestry or any amount of European, Native American or African.

It's especially ironic you use Hungarian as your example. Since the Magyars were originally East Asian Siberians. It's laughable for a Hungarian to talk about the dangers of race mixing.

Yeah, and I find that kind of odd, and refuse to answer that question. Apparently my state is about half and half hispanic and non-hispanic; hispanic is larger by far than non-hispanic white. This seems a little silly. "My abuela speaks Spanish, so I guess that's my ethnicity." Especially since it's asked as a yes/no question on forms, with no other options.

Come to think of it, I have heard "ethnic" used in a cultural adjacent way before -- "ethnic restaurants" serve food that can be traced back to a more specific culinary tradition than non-ethnic restaurants -- be that India or Ethiopia or Serbia or whatever, but are not regionally prevalent. American diners and Mexican restaurants are not ethnic in my region.

It's especially ironic you use Hungarian as your example.

I used it because the OP did -- I admittedly know nothing about Hungary, and they may well use different distinctions than Americans. If a Hungarian-American said they were ethnically Siberian, I would believe them.

The point is race is a legal term in the USA. It used to be the case up until the mid 20th century that only people of the 'white' race could be naturalized as citizens. There was a case brought against Finnish people who sought naturalization and eventually the judge ruled that they despite being originally of East Asian Siberian origin were of enough Nordic stock to be considered white to be naturalized as citizens.

See also miscegenation laws.

From what I gather, the Magyars were a warrior nobility who converted the central European peasants (who were not really that genetically distinct from the Germanic and Slavic people around them) to speaking Hungarian, but were never that huge in number and were mostly wiped out in wars with the Mongols and the Turks. Meaning today's Hungarians aren't really all that mixed, but ... not in the way you might think.

Anyway, the census categorization that calls 'Hispanic' an ethnicity is using the word 'ethnicity' in a somewhat non-standard way. Perhaps it has to, since the people of Latin America have, like you say, such a wide spread of degrees of admixture, from pure European, pure Amerindian and pure sub-Saharan African, to any combination of the above, that there aren't really neat boxes to put people in where ancestry and culture are tightly matched. But it's not an ethnicity in the sense that, say, Welsh, or Igbo is an ethnicity; more just a hold-all cultural category for 'people from south of the US/Mexico border, at least some of whose ancestors spoke Spanish'.

I don't think you understand that Europeans are themselves descended from extremely deeply diverged races. The Ancestral North Eurasians are as different from the Early European Farmers as modern Chinese people are from the French. There are countless examples of groups that are culturally descended from one group, but who have little ancestry from the original group. Every Uralic speaking people in Europe, the Hungarians being the most prominent, and least Uralic by ancestry, Chadic people in central Africa, even the largest ethnic group in the world the Indo Aryans who originally came from Europe. Genes and culture correlate, but not enough that having different terms to refer to these concepts isn't useful.

I don't think you understand that Europeans are themselves descended from extremely deeply diverged races.

No, I'm well aware of that. Just that after millennia of intermarriage, modern Europeans are a lot more homogenous (and largely distinct from the original Magyars, even though modern Hungarians claim continuity with them). I'm sure that the same would happen in Latin America too, given time, and barring any further large population migrations.

If you read my responses to the original poster he was claiming as an American he had never heard the term ethnicity used to refer to anything other than ancestry, despite the fact any American would have had to fill out various government forms that list ethnicity as something other than race.

We need a term to denote if someone is culturally, genetically or phenotypically like a certain group. Ethnicity seems the most obvious and widely used term to denote culture.

Turks all consider themselves the same ethnicity despite ranging from people who look like Nazi propaganda posters to people who wouldn't be out of place on the streets of Beijing.

Usually in the field of population genetics they refer to people of being of different 'clusters' or 'ancestries' usually using some specific principle component analysis or the genomes of some ancient population as a reference.

My understanding is that ethnicity is cultural: If a Hungarian couple adopts a Chinese baby and raises it in Hungary, that child will be ethnically Hungarian when grown up (but it will "have Chinese decent" or more controversial "be racially Chinese" or "be racially Asian").

I would find it a bit weird to label him either "ethnically Hungarian" or "ethnically Chinese", but if I had to pick, I'd find "ethnically Chinese" a bit better. Maybe "ethnically Chinese but culturally Hungarian". "Ethnicity" and "Race" are pretty fuzzy words with debatable edge cases, and that's because fundamentally they're labels about labels.

"English", "Chinese", "Hungarian", "Jewish", "White", "Han", "Mestizo", "Arab", "African-American" etc. are identity labels, and those often have their own idiosyncratic rules - some are defined by a state, some are associated to traditions of patrilineal or matrilineal descent, some are strongly associated to a language or a religion - often, they have a lot of correlated characteristics, such that people will disagree about membership of various people, or about which identities are mutually incompatible. And "Ethnicity" is an attempt to regroup some of those labels, and, sometimes, to resolve ambiguity, i.e. you can use "Ethnically French" to contrast with having French citizenship.

I'd say that ethnicity is a mix of ancestry, language, and self-identity (the three being often correlated), with a bunch of ambiguous cases - are the francophone Quebecois "ethnically French" ? Maybe, I don't know. They usually aren't described as such, whereas German-Americans who don't speak German might be more likely to identify as "Ethnically German" (right ?), which seems inconsistent, but eh, as I said, each label kind of has it's own rules and it's a fool's errand to expect consistency.

What's less fuzzy is that "ethnicity" is clearly distinct from citizenship - one can be "ethnically Japanes" while being a Brazilian citizen, etc. Same for the distinction between ethnicity and religion. I don't think that there's such a clear distinction between ethnicity and race or ancestry.

Are you willing to allow for finer distinctions like 'the Hungarian race' and 'the Dutch race'?

If not, your definition of ethnicity leaves us lacking a term for the noticeable differences between groups within a race* . Maybe this isn't as clear in the US where whites are all mixed together, but a Pole looks different to a Scotsman (even if there's enough overlap that you won't always guess right).

*though I think race could be dispensed with altogether as it just marks a point where the differences between distantly related ethnicities are obvious.

I would say that someone can have Hungarian decent or Dutch decent. Talking about a Hungarian race sounds weird though.

It's not my definition of ethnicity that leaves the "sub-race" term lacking, it's every definition of ethnicity I ever seen. If you need a term for sub-races, find one or make it up, but don't change "ethnicity", which is a perfectly usable term that means something else.

Talking about a Hungarian race sounds weird though.

It was normal to use it this way in the past e.g the Irish Race Conventions.

If you need a term for sub-races, find one or make it up, but don't change "ethnicity", which is a perfectly usable term that means something else.

I haven't dived into its etymology but I don't think 'ethnicity' ever excluded sub-races to begin with, it's just that it also included a grab bag of other ways of distinguishing different peoples.

The awkwardness we feel lumping something biological like race in with arbitrary things like culture seems like something modern. Traditions, styles of dress etc once seemed about as immalleable as facial features, both because culture changed more slowly and because people used to have some weird ideas about how quickly environmental changes would bring about physical differences.

"Race" has been a somewhat dirty-sounding word for a long time, and the circumstance that in US context it really seems to generally denote the vernacular categorisation (black-white-hispanic-asian-native american) that is captured by census categories and is not particularly useful unless your main objective is actually to maintain 1950s US culture rather than to make correct inferences about individuals . Since there's no other unburdened word floating around for genetic clusters (and since having plausible deniability when talking to people who strongly believe that it is nurture rather than nature and to think otherwise is evil is actually a feature), "ethnicity" had to stand in.

(Slight similarities to how in our community, "red tribe"/"blue tribe" edged out "democrat/republican" or "right/left", drifting away from its original meaning denoting specific cultural features too)

I mean, I guess languages always drift in this way were terms migrate to related but different meanings. Still, it's a bit annoying that "ethnicity" was a way to not talk about race, and then it suddenly became race-coded anyway.

What about "ancestry"?

This is interesting. In my conversations, everyone I’ve talked to uses ethnicity to mean a sub-race delineated by common genes. But looking online in dictionaries and articles, the definition says something else: a social and cultural construct. This might be one of those instances where the definition in popular use is not the definition you find in dictionaries. At least I think this is true in Northeastern USA.

Similarly, I had somewhat idiosyncratically considered terms like these to be extra-specifying taxonomic levels. Something like "... -> genus -> species -> subspecies [-> race -> ethnicity -> tribe? -> family? {already used elsewhere!} -> individual]." As I said, idiosyncratically, so it's not really of much use in communicating with anybody else, but that's the general sense I'd picked up.

If I were to speculate, it probably has something to do with Americans who think of themselves German or Italian, because they have one immigrant parent, but cannot even speak their language. Many such cases. They think that they are part of one of those European ethnicities, which is why they are confused what “ethnicity” is.

It is much clearer in Europe: people of different countries are, by and large, of different ethnicity, and some countries even have multiple ethnic groups within the country (e.g. Belgium or Russia). An Italian living in Italy would find the idea that Italian-American with Italian parent who doesn’t even speak Italian, to be his fellow Italian, rather ludicrous.

That’s because Italian Americans are their own unique ethnos with their own unique culture. But if you were some Irish American living amongst Italian Americans your whole life, you would never say you were ethnically Italian, you would say you were an ethnic Irishman who was culturally Italian. In America, someone might say they are culturally Italian and refer to Italian Americans. This change is similar to how the ancestors of modern Italians would be aghast that they speak modern Italian instead of their regional tongue.

Ethnicity is not nationality. The child will still be ethnically Chinese (or Han, to be more precise). Of course, this distinction is exacerbated by the child being of a different race, since, say, no one would care if the child was from Czechia or Romania.

What definition of ethnicity do you use? By all definitions I can find, the grown child would have Hungarian ethnicity. As far as I can tell. ethnicity is always about culture, not decent.

Genetics testing companies use ethnicity to refer to descent.

https://www.ancestry.com/c/dna/ancestry-dna-ethnicity-estimate-update

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