Race and ethnicity were synonymous before World War II

Evidence

Prior to World War II, race and ethnicity were synonymous. Both terms were used to describe biological traits and cultural characteristics of groups From Protestant to Judeo-Christian Identity • 71 deemed inferior to Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 383

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the historical conflation of race and ethnicity as pre-WWII usage.
• XREF: connects to: Racial difference had to be manufactured before Europeans seemed alien; Southern and eastern European immigrants were racialized before entering whiteness after WWII — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 227; After 1945 the label race gave way to ethnicity in scholarly usage — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 696