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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

The definitions I've known have remained stable until very recently. I'll stick with Race: genetics; Ethnicity: the group/tribe one "grows up" or is most shaped by; Nationality: the country you're in/from.

They can all align to (mostly) one group, like in India and China, or can be mostly aligned like in northern Europe, or a melting pot like the US.

It's the "connotations" (i.e. conflations) that are the reason that almost everything is labeled "racist".

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> The definitions I've known have remained stable until very recently

As stated, they were not. Race and ethnicity (and also words like breed and stock) were much more synonymous 100 years ago. If you aren't keenly aware of semantic shifts like this, you will misunderstand older texts.

I'm also not sure if you're actually suggesting that China and India are (by any definition) racially and ethnically homogenous. If you are, I must encourage you to study those countries more.

Please try and define "genetics" in a way that isn't, in some way, sociopolitical. To give one example out of many thousands across history, still somewhat alive today: do you consider South Koreans and Japanese people to be the same race? Do you know if those groups consider themselves to be of the same race?

The concept of race very much predates our understanding of genetics, which is a relatively modern science.

I didn't define race in any sociopolitical way -- precisely the opposite, in fact. The socio-political aspect comes from the Nationality+Ethnicity parts.

My wife is Chinese, and feels a racial kinship to Asian people from many countries: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, ... Refers to all as Asian.

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