Ethnicity
| An Ethnicity or ethnic group is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a common nation of origin, or common sets of ancestry, traditions, language, history, society, religion, or social treatment. The term ethnicity is often used interchangeably with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism. | |
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| wikipedia:: Ethnicity |
Might be based on sharing a common Identity, nationality, Language, Culture, History, Religion, etc. but while it used to usually imply racial or genetic identity, it is evolving to not entail that.
Ethnicity vs Race
In 1950, the UNESCO statement "The Race Question", signed by some of the internationally renowned scholars of the time (including Ashley Montagu, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gunnar Myrdal, Julian Huxley, etc.), said:
National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups: and the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term "race" is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term "race" altogether and speak of "ethnic groups"
#form/thought So, in general, use ethnicity or ethnic group instead of race, since race in reference to physical/genetic traits since correlation between genetics and cultural/behavioral characteristics are so weak. And ethnicity in general, by common usage is almost always referring to something cultural, behavioral, customary, etc. and thus to use ethnicity as if it also entails some physical/genetic trait/cause is thus likely to be false, or racist at worst. The genetic differences, in general, tend to be relatively arbitrary - skin color, etc. Even height, once thought to be largely genetic has shown to be extremely/almost entirely explained by childhood nutrition, e.g. The strongest case for identity and ethnicity as genetic/race that I know of are genetic rates of diseases like skin cancer or sickle cell anemia. But why would those be part of one's identity? Or, from another angle, there may be differential rates of a given trait between groups. But in those cases the differences within that group are almost always greater than between other groups. Ie, genetic trait x within group y might be frequency z. But when you compare the relative differences between that group's supposedly essential genetic trait x and other groups, the difference between the supposedly genetically/essentially different groups are < frequency z. Ie, the difference between the groups is less than the difference within each group, making essentializing, differentiating, othering people via genetic traits very weak/meaningless/not scientific. Ie, racism is not just ethically wrong, but false and dumb. I'm not sure if any of this conflicts with The Bell Curve book...