people conflate race, ethnicity and at times even nationality.

I mean, yes race is an social construct but it is actually composed of a basket of biological identifiers (skin colour, hair texture, eye colour/shape, nose shape/size, etc.) historically used to indicate a certain race/ancestry (Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, etc.) The REASON race is considered a social construct is that the attributes chosen to categorize humans from one another were limited to visible characteristics and grouped together somewhat arbitrarily. The only clear utility for the current race classification is forensic science and measuring discrimination/inequities. Without those uses, one could construct similar divisions according to some other arbitrary biological feature like blood type.

ETHNICITY on the other hand is shaped by shared cultural behaviors, language, shared history, nationality, heritage, etc. The only ethnicity denominated by the US Census is Hispanic. This does not mean that other ethnicities do not exist in the United States. This also does not mean that an individual can not straddle more than one ethnicity at one time, as is commonly seen in naturalized immigrants since they can claim multiple nationalities, shared histories, languages and cultures. If the US government REALLY wanted to characterize its population, race and ethnicity would be measured separately, and the ethnicity section could be several pages long.

But honestly, I am surprised so many people just passively adopt government misclassifications as their framework for describing race and ethnicity. This post and thisatruththangs dating post have kinda left me a bit mindblown this week