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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?
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.
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