Concept: Ethnicity

Definition: (noun) the quality or fact of belonging to a population group or subgroup made up of people who share a common cultural background or descent.

Related Terms: race, nationalism, ethnic, identity, culture

Description: While the earliest use of ‘ethnicity’ is attributed to American sociologist David Riesman in 1953, the word ‘ethnic’ was used earlier in English from the mid-14th to mid-19th centuries to mean ‘pagan’ or ‘heathen,’ etymologically derived from the Greek term of similar meaning, ethnos.¹ In the United States, ‘ethnic’ later came to connote racial characteristics, with the term ‘ethnics’ used around World War II to refer to immigrant communities such as Irish, Italians, and Jews, alongside other peoples seen as inferior to the majority population of predominantly British descent.²

Historically, ethnicity has been defined in relation to processes of migration, with sociological frameworks for ethnicity in the US often contingent upon an immigrant community’s assimilation into a host society.³ Through migration, we see that ethnicity is fluid, with there being practices of “situational ethnicity” adopted in varied environments.⁴ As migrants move across social contexts and national borders, aspects of their ethnic identities are either emphasized or downplayed, whether to reduce social frictions, escape discrimination, or to assimilate, revealing their social construction. 

The entity of the nation-state holds great influence in understandings of ethnicity. Work by scholars such as G. Cristina Mora’s Making Hispanics (2014) demonstrates the role of government agencies in constructing ethnic groupings through processes of categorization, which operates alongside with the meanings produced by activism and media.⁵ Spanish-language television networks in the 1980s, for instance, broadcast programs that proliferated ideas of Hispanic panethnic identities, aligning with the construction of a Hispanic category in the US census that grouped together diverse Latin American communities.⁶

The concept of ethnicity is often distinguished from race, where ethnicity is seen as the “culture of people in a given geographic region” while race is contrasted as “the concept of dividing people into groups on the basis of various sets of physical characteristics and the process of ascribing social meaning to those groups.”⁷ However, these strict delineations between race and ethnicity continue to be problematized. Notions of race are argued to inevitably influence how ethnic identity is conceived, with sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel positing how “racialized ethnicities” and/or “ethnicized races” operate within the context of global coloniality.⁸ In Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s seminal ethnic studies text, Racial Formation in the United States (1986), early ethnicity theory is described to have guided Americans towards understanding race in the US context as a cultural phenomenon, rather than an entirely biological one.⁹ Intersecting with the politics of identity, notions of ethnicity are all at once mediated and contested, with its meanings interwoven with the movement of people.

J.Y. 2024

Notes

¹ Thomas Holland Eriksen, “Ethnicity, Race and Nation” in The Ethnicity Reader: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Migration, edited by Maria Montserrat Guibernau i Berdún, Montserrat Guibernau, John Rex
 (Cambridge, Oxford: Polity, 2010), 46
.

² Eriksen, “Ethnicity, Race and Nation,” 46
.

³ Ramón Grosfoguel, “Race and ethnicity or racialized ethnicities? Identities within global coloniality,” Ethnicities 4, no. 3 (2004): 315.

⁴ Michael Jones-Correa, “Reassessing Race and Ethnicity through a Migration Lens,” University of Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), December 16, 2020, https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/2020/reassessing-race-and-ethnicity-through-a-migration-lens/.

⁵ G. Cristina Mora, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 5.

⁶ Mora, Making Hispanics, 119.

⁷ “Race and Ethnicity Self-Study Guide,” Washington University in St. Louis, https://students.wustl.edu/race-ethnicity-self-study-guide/

⁸ Grosfoguel, “Race and ethnicity or racialized ethnicities?,” 332. 

⁹ Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States,3rd Ed, (New York: Routledge, 2015),22.