ABSTRACT
The paradox has its roots in the use of language. Here is a term which is understood to mean one thing by a social scientist from Great Britain, but something quite different by an analyst of the Northern Ireland situation. The kind of identities conventionally classified as ethnic in Britain are, to quote some of the pre-coded categories from the census form, ‘White’, ‘BlackCaribbean’, ‘Indian’, and ‘Pakistani’. These labels illustrate a strong concern with geographical family origin but, above all, an obsession with the visual cues of ‘race’ which seem to dominate British interpretations of ethnicity. For example, Smith (1989:13-14) deliberately bypassed the ethnicity model in her analysis because, she points out, ‘in the British context…ethnicity has become a euphemism for race.’
