Ethnicity refers to a shared cultural identity based on things like national origin, language, traditions, religion, food, and history. Italian fits this definition because it connects to a specific place of origin, a language, a cultural heritage, and a set of shared customs and traditions.

Race, on the other hand, is a broader, socially constructed category based primarily on physical characteristics like skin color. White, Black, and Asian are racial categories — they group together enormously diverse populations under a single label based largely on appearance, not shared culture.

For example, “Asian” lumps together people from vastly different ethnic backgrounds — Japanese, Filipino, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, and many others — who share little in common culturally or linguistically. Similarly, “Black” encompasses people of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and African immigrant backgrounds, each with distinct ethnic identities. “White” includes people of Italian, Irish, Polish, Greek, and countless other ethnic backgrounds.

This is also why someone might identify in both ways simultaneously — a person could be racially white and ethnically Italian, and both descriptions would be accurate, just operating at different levels of identity. Ethnicity tends to be more specific and culturally grounded, while race operates as a broader social and political category.