After class I have found myself often thinking about the difference between ethnicity and race—is there one?—and why we in our American society feel so much safer using the word ethnicity/ethnic rather than race. I definitely agree with a point that was brought up in class on Monday about how though ethnicity and race are not necessarily the same thing, ethnicity is very often a code word for race. I personally have been in conversations where in order to remain “politically correct” people ask about someone’s ethnicity instead of their race even though everyone knows what they are really asking.

I also definitely agree with Zack’s assessment that in the United States, people are gradually assimilated into an ethnic-neutral society. In the US we say we value diversity, but in reality it is safer to wear what everyone else wears, eat what everyone else eats, etc etc, and therefore assimilation into an ethnic-neutral state, at least in a formal setting, is inevitable. I’m not sure what we can do to reverse this, and I’m also not sure that eliminating race in favor of ethnicity would be helpful or plausible. The majority in society is always going to attempt to define “other,” or the minority, and giving the concept of “otherness” a different name doesn’t help to overcome it. So I think defining ethnicity versus race is important but we shouldn’t concentrate on deciding on the importance/validity of one over the other.