Talk:Ethnic origin
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Thisa is not a bad start, but "ethnicity" and "race" aren't quite the same thing; these discourses developed at different times and were used in different ways (so I cut the suggestion that ethnicity has replaced race) slrubenstein
Thought: "ethnicity" seems to be used as a euphemism for "race".Ortolan88
The discourse of race developed in the fifteen hundreds (or thereabouts) and was used to identify people who generally spoke different languages but who were plugged into the world economy in distinct ways -- for example, Whites were developing a world economy based on mercanitilism, in which they took land from Reds, enslaved Blacks, and traded with Yellows. The discourse of ethnicity developed in the eighteen hundreds, when capitalism was well established and the world economy was based largely on the mobility of free-labor. "white" people coming from Europe to the United States weree not classified merely as white, but as belonging to ethnic groups identified with the country of origin and natal language (thus, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans). Perhaps one could say that after the great northern migration of Blacks, they were re-integrated into the US economy as an ethnic-group (African-American) rather than just a "race." Certainly, African-Americans and Nigerian-Americans belong to the same "race," but are different ethnic groups. So I would not say "ethnic group" is just a new way of talking about "race." This doesn't mean that there aren't any similarities: Walter Benn Michaels has argued that cultural identity and ethnic identity in the US are today used as essentializing categories just as race was in the eighteen hundreds. slrubenstein
Redundant page?
Is this page not redundant, given Ethnicity? All it adds is the paragraph about statisticians collecting "ethnic origin" rather than "race", which deserves no more (and no less) than a paragraph, and would be better as a section in the Ethnicity page. Ethnic origin could redirect to Ethnicity. BrendanH 10:17, Apr 8, 2004 (UTC)