Well, yeah, that’s always a problem. In more sophisticated texts where using the french word “race” is unacceptable, you’d have to find some more specific and specialized term (probably from genetics jargon) if you want to avoid the conflation with linguistic and cultural clustering.
In common usage, “ethnicité” is used and context allows us to infer that it refers to visible genetic variations rather than just cultural ones—it’s rare that we’ll refer to Americans as being from a different “ethnie”, for example, unless in scientific contexts that pertain to populations. The usage is such that the context will usually make it very obvious which meaning is intended.
Well, yeah, that’s always a problem. In more sophisticated texts where using the french word “race” is unacceptable, you’d have to find some more specific and specialized term (probably from genetics jargon) if you want to avoid the conflation with linguistic and cultural clustering.
In common usage, “ethnicité” is used and context allows us to infer that it refers to visible genetic variations rather than just cultural ones—it’s rare that we’ll refer to Americans as being from a different “ethnie”, for example, unless in scientific contexts that pertain to populations. The usage is such that the context will usually make it very obvious which meaning is intended.