Nationalism was basically the idea that each people (= ethnicity) should have its own country, so it shouldn't be surprising that they defined it. If you have another definition of ethnicity, feel free to share. I like to define the terms I'm using.
I don't think that places like America, where much of the population immigrated in recent memory, really gets to have an "ethnic American" – except for the Native Americans, who come in many ethnicities.
Black people in Britain do exist, but they're a minority. Including the not-recent-immigrants-or-descendents-of-such into whatever model of "ethnic Briton" one has wouldn't darken up the average skintone that much, methinks.
Grabbing 10k random people off the street from each of the source countries (except that one should split up the nabbing so that the population one's nabbing from is statistically average) would still produce an average pigmentation that's similar to the Greeks (note: darker than the average of what I'd call ethnic Brits, French, or Russians), since 1. we're nabbing from the colonial homelands, which tend to have the pale-skinned people be the majority, and 2. Greece's ethnicity mixture contains mainly fellow Mediterraneans and Middle Easterners, which doesn't bring up average melanocyte production that much, and Russia's subjugated populations also are fairly pale on the global scale of things.
So yes, I do think that an average skintone of olive is possible without it being a colony whose selection process discriminated on that basis.
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I don't think that places like America, where much of the population immigrated in recent memory, really gets to have an "ethnic American" – except for the Native Americans, who come in many ethnicities.
Black people in Britain do exist, but they're a minority. Including the not-recent-immigrants-or-descendents-of-such into whatever model of "ethnic Briton" one has wouldn't darken up the average skintone that much, methinks.
Grabbing 10k random people off the street from each of the source countries (except that one should split up the nabbing so that the population one's nabbing from is statistically average) would still produce an average pigmentation that's similar to the Greeks (note: darker than the average of what I'd call ethnic Brits, French, or Russians), since 1. we're nabbing from the colonial homelands, which tend to have the pale-skinned people be the majority, and 2. Greece's ethnicity mixture contains mainly fellow Mediterraneans and Middle Easterners, which doesn't bring up average melanocyte production that much, and Russia's subjugated populations also are fairly pale on the global scale of things.
So yes, I do think that an average skintone of olive is possible without it being a colony whose selection process discriminated on that basis.