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Nationality is a legal relationship between a person and a state. Ethnicity is a social relationship between a person and a people. One is issued by a government and can be granted, renounced, or revoked. The other is claimed, inherited, and negotiated within a community — no ministry involved. That is the clean version. The…

The textbook answer is quick: race refers to perceived physical characteristics; ethnicity refers to shared culture, language, ancestry, and heritage. Race is about how you look. Ethnicity is about where you come from and how you live. That answer is correct enough to pass an exam and too shallow to be useful. The interesting part…

Ask ten people to define ethnicity and you will get ten answers that all sound reasonable and none of which agree. That is not a failure of general knowledge. It reflects a genuine, century-old disagreement among the people who study this for a living. Here is the definition that holds up best: ethnicity is a…