Who is more ethnic—a WASP or a Jew? A Russian or a Mexican? A Catholic or a Buddhist? The English word ethnic can be traced ultimately to the Greek word for “people” in the sense of “foreign nation.” (“People” meaning “the general populace” was expressed in Greek by demos.) Thus the idea of otherness, as measured by such attributes as nationality, religion, language, or race, is central to ethnicity. But the question is, other than what? When the adjective ethnic is applied to such cultural items as food and dress, the presumption is generally of a difference from a surrounding norm; Thai food is considered ethnic fare in the United States but not in Bangkok. When it comes to people, the same assumption of departure from a presumed norm is sometimes made, as in this passage from Newsweek magazine describing the Greek-American presidential candidate Michael Dukakis: “For a lot of people, the governor of Massachusetts was too liberal, too ethnic, too cold—maybe even too short.” However, the concept of ethnicity as it relates to a society as a whole is today generally considered to include all groups, each of which is equally “other” in relation to the rest. That is, we generally consider our own group—WASP, Jew, Russian, or whatever—to be just as ethnic as anyone else’s, and we respond to questions about our ethnicity as readily when we belong to the majority population as when we belong to the minority.
