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I put "White" for Ethnicity, and the specific European nations my ancestry came from for Heritage. You could put anything for heritage though, I could have also put something like "Colonial Pennsylvania".
I would say heritage is more about origins, ethnicity is more a term for one's primary culture.
I.e. if I had a great-grandfather who was from France, I could say I have French heritage. But if I spoke no French at all and had no current ties to France, I don't think I would be ethnically French.
"Race" is more a general category such as "white" or "black."
I like the think of it generically. If you needed an organ transplant and it had to be a specific match, what ethnic group would they have the best chance of finding that match ?IMO Heritage relates to a shared value system you have with people.
Lol. Seems to be little or no agreement. I always interpreted ethnicity to be the culture you belong to and heritage to be the culture(s) that some of your recent ancestors belonged to but that you aren't a part of. I don't make any distinction between them for myself, I have to go back to the 1600s to find any ancestors who weren't from the southern mountains so I consider both my ethnicity and heritage to be southern Appalachian. Anything further than ten generations back doesn't seem "real" enough on a personal level to claim as a culture. It would be like trying to sort out what part of Africa my family was living in 25,000 years ago, an interesting academic exercise but not one that I could ever feel my identity was invested in.
Lol. Seems to be little or no agreement. I always interpreted ethnicity to be the culture you belong to and heritage to be the culture(s) that some of your recent ancestors belonged to but that you aren't a part of. I don't make any distinction between them for myself, I have to go back to the 1600s to find any ancestors who weren't from the southern mountains so I consider both my ethnicity and heritage to be southern Appalachian. Anything further than ten generations back doesn't seem "real" enough on a personal level to claim as a culture. It would be like trying to sort out what part of Africa my family was living in 25,000 years ago, an interesting academic exercise but not one that I could ever feel my identity was invested in.
That's sort of what they taught us in college and that's how I still see it.
I don't even know what my ethnicity would be--I'm just a plain American, no particular group. So my culture is American. But my heritage would be colonial New England and the North of England because that's where my parents' ancestors came from, in general.
So I Googled, and guess what: there's similar confusions all over the www!
One site seemed to have a sensible approach, let me know if you agree with what they said:
"Ethnicity" is the culture/group that you grew up with, are familiar with, and shaped your identity, etc.;
"Heritage" is basically the same as ancestry- where your ancestors were from, whether their cultures directly affected you or not.
I wasn't joking... I figured whichever person/persons composed the list of topics for the "about me" pages probably had some idea in mind of what they wanted members to fill in.
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