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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44937 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?

"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)

What about "ancestry"?

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