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