What's the Difference Between "Race" and "Ethnicity?"

Since the 1970 Census, the federal government has distinguished between race and ethnicity. But what do the feds mean?

When confronted with his having tried to get affirmative action privileges by pretending to be “Black or African-American” on his college applications, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani should have said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I haven’t done that since I was 17.”

But because he tried to pass it off as justified by how complex his identity is, his supporters have jumped to his defense by citing how nuanced his thinking is, which isn’t doing any good for the survival of affirmative action. It’s reminding Americans that affirmative action isn’t just for the descendants of American slaves: its beneficiaries include immigrants, including elite immigrants like this son of an Academy Award winner and an Ivy League professor. America has been very, very good to these South Asian folks with zero justification for reparations from the United States, so why their son should think he was eligible for a thumb on the scale invented for American blacks is not really a question that defenders of racial preferences should want to be having at the moment.

But nice white liberals keep stumbling into these mistakes in part because they tend to be strikingly ignorant about affirmative action. The defenders of race quotas who really understand it, like college presidents, much prefer that everybody just shut up about it, because the reason they have affirmative action is because descendants of American slaves just aren’t bright enough on average to come close to equaling their share of the population in intellectually elite institutions without a helping hand. So, they also want to let in foreign elites to pad the black statistics.

But no college president wants South Asians teens like Mamdani dreaming up bad reasons to let in even more South Asian teens.

But the kind of naive white liberals who have taken to social media to defend Mamdani are clueless about such matters.

From the New York Times news section:

How Do You Self-Identify? For Many Americans, Checking a Box Won’t Do.

The New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani said that his background doesn’t fit neatly into simple categories. Others say they’ve struggled with the same issue.

By Shawn Hubler

July 8, 2025

Natalie Bishop was a little girl in Texas the first time she was asked to specify her race and ethnicity on an application. The daughter of a South Korean-born nurse and a white military veteran, she asked her mother what box to check on a form from school.

“My mom said check the ‘white’ box — it’ll give you more opportunities,” Ms. Bishop, a 38-year-old manufacturing engineer who now lives in Los Angeles, said with a laugh. But as she grew up, omitting the Asian half of herself felt wrong, she said, and even now, queries about her race still feel a little like trick questions.

The Census has let you pick more than one race box since 2000.

Some people of more than one race check more than one box, while others refuse to acknowledge some of their ancestry. For example, on the 2010 Census, the President of the United States refused to identify with his mother’s half of his ancestry, choosing to identify only as black.

On the other hand, residents of America have not been allowed to identify more than one ethnicity: you are either Hispanic or Non-Hispanic, choose one.

“When the time comes for me to check a box,” she said, “I still ask: ‘What am I? What am I today?’”

Such questions have become more common as attempts by governments and institutions to capture the nation’s demographics have fallen out of sync with a population whose makeup increasingly defies longstanding labels.

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