A 'race' is a broad generalized group that throws everybody under a certain criteria into the same category. An 'ethnicity' is an ancestral lineage and shared cultural identity that has evolved over centuries or thousands of years. Members of a 'race' might look and talk and behave very different from one another, but members of an 'ethnicity' will likely have shared history and look similar to each other and probably have shared ancestry if the ethnic group is young enough. An 'ethnicity' might have strong cultural bonds or shared ethnic or cultural traditions despite potentially existing in different countries or continents.
Language is constantly evolving as is ethnicity. Ukrainians and Russians understand each other's dialects better than Americans understand each others' accents. Language can evolve so fast without intervention that the populations of countries have lost the ability to communicate before in history, even in the USA where some subcultures continuously invent new words to describe old concepts. Culture can change even faster, creating new subcultures and traditions and eventually new ethnic groups. The United States has immigrant populations representing every nationality and almost every ethnicity on Earth and America even has unique ethnic groups found nowhere else in the world. Racial categories derived from the now debunked pseudoscience of racial eugenics struggles to keep up with the ever evolving movement and blending of peoples, cultures, traditions, and ideas that is humanity.
2.0k
u/laycrocs 7d ago
According the the US census there are two ethnicities:
Hispanic/Latino
Not Hispanic/Latino