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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?
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.
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