Ethnicity or not?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In this thread on Gal Gadot monstro makes a claim that “South Asian”, “Asian”, and “Jewish” are not ethnic groups, but “African-American” is.

There is some interesting discussion that follows and FWIW I think the subject is of interest enough to warrant its own thread.

Now she cited a dictionary definition:

Another phrases it as

And wiki might give the least poor one:

I have little debate with calling “African-American” an ethnicity (possibly several overlapping ones), and despite her initial flippant dismissal, “Jewish” I think clearly similarly qualifies as an ethnicity that encompasses several subgroups, but I have some lack of clarity as to how those definitions apply in a broader sense.

To me it seems that ethnicity in the actual world is context dependent.

“American” is not an ethnicity in America but it might be in Japan.

Is Arab an ethnicity? It encompasses several religions, different nationalities, different culinary traditions …

I am confused.

2

I think almost any cultural group could be an ethic group if there are enough people in it.

Whether it is being Jewish, being Shawnee or Inuit, or African Americans (Which would be distinctly different from say West Africans, totally different culture) or Irish, or Chinese etc.

5 guys on a california commune?
Yea not so much

3

Perhaps my “flippancy” comes from simple ignorance. How do most Jews identify ethnically? Personally, if someone were to ask me to identify my ethnic group, I wouldn’t say “black” because that’s a label that doesn’t really say anything about my roots. I’d say “African American”, because that’s the most precise label I can come up as a descriptor of my cultural upbringing and heritage.

So it seems to me that “Jew” would be like saying “black”. If you say you’re a Ashkenazi American Jew, that gives me a good idea of the culture you sprang out of. Just saying “Jew” wouldn’t give me a cultural reference, just a religious one.

I didn’t mean to be flippant and I understand that Jew is an ethnic identifier. It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me when there are more precise words out there.

4

I had this very debate some years back with a census enumerator when I was selected for the American Community Survey. She asked me what my ethnicity was (I’m a fairly standard-issue Ashkenazi mutt), and I asked her what the options were. After making her go through the whole laundry list, I had to ask her “wait, so I can be American Samoan, but not Ashkenazi?”

Her: What’s Ashkenazi?

Me: [explanation about people of East European Jewish descent]

Her: Nope, that’s not on my list of choices.

Me: well, I actually have some grad-level education on this subject, and ethnicity means shared cultural traditions, religion, language, and a number of overlapping things.

Her: so where were your grandparents from?

Me: which grandparent? And “from”? When? When they were born, when they left, or what country it is now? It’s not the same country for any of them depending on the point in time you are choosing.

Her: well, could you give me an example?

Me: sure, OK, my paternal grandfather was born in Riga, Latvia. At the time, it was part of the Russian Empire. When I was growing up, it was de facto part of the Soviet Union, and Soviet sure isn’t an ethnicity. He told me they spoke German in the house when he was a kid.

Her: so he’s Latvian!

Me: ummm, nope, and that’s part of why his family left Latvia. The Latvians are a blond Scandinavian-looking people. My grandfather, not so much. And if you called him Russian, he’d punch you.

We went around in circles like this for a while, and she was laughing by the end. But although my great-grandparents were born in several different countries, they shared a cultural heritage, a religion, and a language. And people of Ashkenazi heritage often share genetic characteristics other than appearance (yay breast cancer!). So yeah, Ashkenazi is an ethnicity as far as I’m concerned.

5

I really don’t want this thread to be centered around the Jewish bit but to be a broader discussion.

To answer the question however, Jews, no matter Ashkenazi or Mizrahi, irreligious secular or observant Orthodox, living in America, Australia, Israel, or China, White, Hispanic, Black, or Asian, perceive themselves to be of one, for lack of a better word, tribe, with cultural commonalities, much more I suspect than “Black” has. “Black” is entirely a superficial descriptor and an extremely broad one at that. Maybe partly because our perception remains that the rest of the world will all classify us as the same other but more because we do share a common culture across cultures. Alessan may have viewed it a bit rose-colored in the other thread but the commonality of being Jewish binds across other potential ethnic identifiers and differences. Weisshund is not wrong that you need some minimum number to count as an ethnicity but I think you also need some sense of minority status as well.

Most Jews identify ethnically primarily as Jews. Not by which country their grandparents had lived in. My roots are not Russian and Polish or wherever the border was at the time. That was just who was chasing with the pitchforks for that decade. My roots go farther back.

So, bringing this to the broader discussion I hope it can be - is that the crux of ethnicity? What is the descriptor that you’d call your cultural roots?

6

Did the survey list “Jewish” as an option, then? Or “Yiddish” (which is the name of the language, not the ethnicity, but language and ethnicity often blur together)?

On the other hand, I have a friend who’s Jewish, I’m pretty sure Ashkenazi (his last name is Germanic), but he describes his ethnicity as “Israeli”, even though it’s been a thousand years or more since his ancestors lived in Israel. His reasoning is that, even though it was so long ago, they’ve still stayed mostly isolated from the Europeans they were living among.

7

I have a friend from Nigeria. If you saw him on the street you’d probably say he was African American, but he rejects that. He thinks of himself as Nigerian, and specifically from his ethnic group there. How does that factor into this discussion? He doesn’t share culture with most blacks in America but he’s likely to be treated as one by strangers.

8

I think an ethnic group that is defined so broadly that it encompasses everybody and their mama is pretty useless. But doesn’t everyone belongs to an ethnic group? If someone is the member of the majority cultural group, how can they talk about their cultural group if they don’t have an ethnic identifier?

I’d say the most important criterion is how members of the group self-identify. If you randomly select members of a “candidate” ethnic group and ask them to describe their ethnicity and they all give totally different answers, then it seems to me that grouping is likely suspect–even if “outsiders” would lump these people all together.

9

He doesn’t share an ethnicity with African Americans since he’s a Nigerian American.

10

Companies like 23 and Me offer people DNA tests as a gift idea. They’re able to identify some specific groups of people by their genes. They can tell you, for example, if you have ancestors who came from Ireland or Poland or Spain. So there is some scientifically objective basis for defining some ethnic groupings. (But not all. For example, they can’t identify genetic groups in the Americas but we’re mostly genetic mutts.) So being Italian, for example, isn’t just a matter of cultural identity. It’s possible to be identifiable as genetically Italian, even if you are unaware you have Italian ancestry.

That said, culture trumps genes in my opinion. Where you grew up is going to have a lot more influence on your identity than where your ancestors came from. If you took a newborn infant in Glasgow and a newborn infant in Athens and swapped them (legal disclaimer: don’t do this) the genetically Greek baby would grow up to be Scottish and the genetically Scottish baby would grow up to be Greek.

11

As Jewish. They may even say “ethnically Jewish” when they happen to not be religiously Jewish but still identify with the general culture. The fact that there are subgroups within “Jewish” doesn’t make that label less valid.

Telemark’s information doesn’t appear to indicate that the friend is American. He’s not Nigerian American, he’s Nigerian.

12

And yet we see that Eva Luna relays her Jewish ethnicity more specifically. Her conversation with the census taker would have been a lot shorter if she thought “I’m a Jew” was a precise enough answer.

I’m just wondering if you think she’s unusual in this regard. Because the Jews that I know don’t seem to have a problem mentioning their specific ethnicities along with their broader one.

13

Last time I checked, Nigeria is in Africa.

14

Question: is it possible to be more than one ethnicity simultaneously?

So, not American anything, then…

15

My Nigerian friend has his American citizenship. But he doesn’t identify as part of the African American community; he doesn’t share a common culture or dialect. But frankly, the same is true of other black friends, raised in posh suburbs of the northeast. They might have more in common with my Nigerian friend than with an inner city black kid from Atlanta. But I’m sure all three could relate common experiences as well.

The same is true for Jews from different regions. There is a kernel of common heritage, but there are many differences as well. In the US, the fact that I’m Ashkenazi rather than Sephardic doesn’t really inform my culture or ethnicity much as my Judaism doesn’t really impact my day-to-day life. But I still feel a sense of commonality with Jews that I meet. Most Israelis that I work with are very secular and yet we have a sense of our shared culture.

16

My theory would posit yes. Ethnicity is akin to how the same person can be “mother” and “wife” and “daughter” and “CEO of my company” … it is contextual, referent dependent.

So for example, the artist Shanye Huang would in America likely be identified as ethnically Chinese-American, and when the singer Wei Wei performs abroad she is likely categorized as ethnically Chinese. But within China each would ethnically be considered part of China’a largest ethnic minority group, the Zhuang (with the overwhelming majority of Chinese being of Han ethnicity).

Along similar lines I think nationality in general only becomes a possible ethnicity when one is not within the context of the nation as the referent. I highly doubt that anyone in Ireland would describe themselves as ethnically Irish, yet generations from having living in Ireland American of Irish descent will often identify as ethnically “Irish-American”, whether or not they speak Gaelic or have ever learned Irish dancing, even they don’t know the stories and the histories they’d feel comfortable claiming them as theirs

17

“Ethnicity” is more of a human construct than anything else, and is often context dependent. Take our Nigerian friend, upthread. In the US he is “Nigerian”. But in Nigeria, he belongs to an ethnic group not shared by all Nigerians. Ask an American (in America) what ethnicity they are, and you’re likely to get something like Irish or Italian or African-American, but that person has almost certainly not been to Ireland, Italy or Africa. And if they did, they probably wouldn’t fit into the culture there. But few of us Americans feel like “American” is our ethnicity. And to an outside observer, we certainly don’t look like an ethnic group.

I’m afraid we’ll have to file this one with “race” and “language” as things that don’t have a precise, scientific meaning.

18

I don’t think it is possible to create a grouping that is perfect–where all members of the group feel the same amount of kinship with others in that group. But surely that doesnt mean that ethnic descriptors like African American and Jew (or Arab or Scandinavian) aren’t meaningful.

19

I’d agree.

20

They’re only meaningful in context, IMO. Tell me how you plan to use that descriptor and I’ll be able to tell you if I think it’s appropriate.