this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Is it just the Jewish part that you don't get? The US has so many different active cultures going on in the same spaces that knowing someone's ethnic background can tell you a lot about them and their family. I'm sure some people want to know because they're racist, but for most people it's just a cultural shorthand. Knowing someone is Cuban rather than Puerto Rican, or half Spanish and half Irish tells you what kinds of experiences they might have had, what comfort foods they're likely to eat, how they're likely to celebrate their holidays. Stuff like that. Especially if one of their cultural identities is one that you share, or frequently share the same spaces with, you've probably just found a whole lot of commonalities with that person. Older people might ask. In my experience younger people generally won't. So either it's obvious to you or they tell you or you might not know at all.
From a governmental standpoint, they keep track of different statistics based on ethnicity, supposedly so they can make sure they're not failing any groups of people with representation, healthcare outcomes, policing, etc. It obviously doesn't always work, but that's supposed to be why the government is interested.
Aw, you guys are gonna make me answer this seriously, aren't you?
No, it's not the Jewish part that I don't get. I have been around enough to understand that Wilson is implying that she has some (presumably) Ashkenazi and some Irish ancestry, and I am self-aware enough to understand that she would sound insane if she put it that way.
The fact that she's calling it out as a shorthand for common cultural ground is the part that is strange, let alone the persistent hangup with ancestry and the weird assumption that culture is somehow genetic. I was just trying to break it down gently by being facetious about it.
It's weird, it's highly specific to American culture, and yes, I do get the very deep roots in colonialism that lead to this outcome. It's just weird to me that's where it landed and how often Americans seem to think it's universal when it's actually pretty unusual.
I was not kidding about the census categorizations that get repurposed on immigration forms, though. They are full of apples and oranges in all sorts of arrangements and I have never once felt I fit on any of the categories or that the categories themselves make any sense.
Part of the reason she’s bothering to be that specific is for the “dammit ratcliffe” joke, it would be unnoteworthy except in a a”genetically predisposed to” context otherwise, but by being unnecessarily specific the cumulative effect of the joke gives a bigger payoff.
Essentially the “two nickels” joke but she’s allergic to nickel
Do you think parents' ancestry plays zero part in a child's cultural experience in the US? Like as soon as you're born on US soil you're only allowed to eat KFC and burgers, and you can never hear folktales and history from a different country. Not to mention how cultural heritage plays into how you are perceived.
There's a difference between people saying "my great granddad was irish so I'm basically from Ireland and st paddy's day is the greatest holiday woooo!" and a Japanese American kid getting teased in elementary school for a foreign sounding name and eating pickled plums during lunch, or a Jewish kid in predominantly Christian areas never having their cultural holidays off school and feeling left out.
The one that gets me is the Brits who get irritated that “You’re not an X-American! You’re an American!” Then call anyone with any south Asian ancestry a Paki.
Alright, that one is weird, I'll give you that.
But just to be clear, the weird one is the second part, not the first part.
I'm mostly letting this one simmer, because you may be shocked to find out that this isn't my first time hearing Americans try to justify their weird approach to caste like it's actually a super wholesome thing. I know we're not gonna agree on this one.
But you did quote me directly and you are commenting about something slightly different and I think this is a more interesting angle, if we keep it civil.
So, ok, does parental ancestry play zero part in someone's cultural experience? No, of course not. I plays some part, depending on how long ago that ancestry happened, how focused on that ancestry the family is and how similar the cultures are in the first place.
Does it define one's identity? Nah. It shouldn't, anyway. I lived in a place with a different culture and dominant religion for a long time, and had I raised kids during that period I don't see how having different days off becomes a personality-forming event, even assuming I insisted on doing my own take on those holidays at home.
I interact with kids of migrants every day, and yes, the fact that we sometimes speak a foreing language between us in front of other people is different, so yeah, at some point they'll probably explain to people why that is in like the second date or whatever. But their own future kids sure won't, and the impact of their grandparent being a migrant will be almost entirely negligible. My source would be my own migrant grandparent, I suppose. Although it's weird that I pay so little attention to that connection that I barely remember that in US terms you'd describe me that way. That sounds so crazy to me, I'd never dare. It'd feel like an insult to the part of the family that actually is from the place in question and lived and died there and was a part of that culture, which I absolutely was not.
I just struggle to see a reason why cultural heritage would be a long term defining factor in one's life, regardless of how much of a "melting pot" your country is, that isn't built on appartheid. You REALLY need to keep people apart along ethnic lines pretty hard for any of this to be a major part of your life past a couple of generations. Well, with the exception of ethnic divisions that are visible at a glance like, say, skin color, where you just need garden variety racism. I concede those are more universal and life-defining, because we all deal with that one, unfortunately. But I've interacted with enough visually indistinguishable Americans who claim this or that personality trait of theirs is "because they are Polish/Italian/German/Irish" or whatever. That's what I'm talking about here and what so many non-Americans find weird to deal with.
Like I said, we're quite mixed here. Take Hispanic as an example. You could be Hispanic and Latino, or one or the other and consider yourself white, or black or an indigenous American. This stuff is more about cultural identity, and crucially your cultural experiences and expectations, than it is about genetics. Plenty of families are actually wrong about where they're from, for a variety of reasons. But that doesn't matter all that much. In Florida, for instance, Spanish families generally have more in common with Cubans and Italians than they would with recent immigrants from Spain because of when the most significant waves of immigration happened that have historically shaped our communities.
I'd also like to point out that all of this doesn't seem from colonialism either. Lots of people leave their home countries for lots of reasons and end up here. There is a vocal minority of people who don't like that and think their kids aren't American enough, but to the rest of us they're American as hell. So you can be American and whatever, and doesn't make you any less American. It can't be universal, because most other places don't have this kind of population. But it's relevant here because there are so many American experiences that if you want to know where you share cultural touchstones, or experience and acknowledge other cultures, it gives you a place to start from.
I really appreciate the child of colonizers telling the children of immigrants how they should act.
Bang up job.
You are making a lot of assumptions there, all incorrect.
Bang up job, indeed.
America is a melting pot of ethnicities and cultural heritages, so it's useful to be able to identify when those of a common background. I'm German and Jewish, and saying so lets me find common ground or complimentary differences with those I meet that are of similar or different backgrounds. I might discover that someone I met has a shared culrural heritage including foods or traditions I share, or have experiences entirely different than mine. I'd rather know the difference if the person I meet celebrates one set of holidays or another, so I might be polite and not assume. I don't think it's strange at all, as though culture isn't entirely tied to ethnicity, they frequently overlap greatly. It often has nothing to do with ethnicity as well, as often someone will reference how they were raised as a cultural background and not as the arbitrary boundaries we place between people that look slightly different.
It has nothing to do with useless categorization and everything to do with a country filled almost entirely with immigrants from around the world. Other than indigenous peoples, everyone that lives here has only been here a few generations at most. The people around me during my day to day life have dozens of different backgrounds and languages, which is true in many places around the world but especially in a country of immigrants. We don't have a long shared cultural heritage like most countries do. We bring our histories with us from everywhere else. Race is an entirely social construct, so being able to distinguish oneself as German rather than French, or Turkish instead of Armenian, or Japanese rather than Korean can help the person you're speaking to have an idea of what cultures you've been exposed to, since such a blend of different ethnicities means it might not be apparent. I certainly don't have any of the common traits of anyone of my heritage except my skin tone, so when I meet someone with shared heritage we can connect by simply saying so.
McDonald's is older than Iceland, I'm gonna say you guys are past the statute of limitations for "we are a young country without a shared cultural heritage".
It's been 250 years, guys, you are pretty much the median age for a country at this point. I think you can let go of that one now.
It's not about the overall age of the country, it's how long on average most people have been here. The majority of Americans haven't had family here for more than a few generations, and that number is skewing rapidly towards the shorter side as more and more people emigrate and mix with people already here. How can you expect a people where most come from a different country far more recently than the founding of the US to have a shared cultural heritage? It's the same type of talking points the American right espouses to denounce immigrants, as though they need to assimilate into a shared culture, when they're really just being racist.
There isn't some shared culture; America is a very rich blend of cultures. My first generation neighbors are no less American than I am, who have had family here for three generations, and I'm no less American than my friend who can trace their family back to the original 13 colonies. The cultural heritage of America isn't a shared one, unless you only care about the culture of the European settlers, a minority. Most countries just don't experience this level of blending of different people from around the entire world. It isn't the most diverse country, and doesn't have the most immigrants each year, but it's mostly populated by people that trace their heritage back to somewhere else. A lot of the Americas share a very similar tradition of distinguishing what parts of their past trace to different cultures, because the people that live on these continents now, unfortunately, are almost entirely not the original people that lived here.
Man, I get why Americans think this makes sense, but it really doesn't. Yes, America is less ethnically uniform than most other places, but migration flows have been high on many areas from very heterogeneous sources. And there are plenty of countries out there that have extremely complex ethnical and cultural makeups built right in (trust me, I know, we were killing each other over it here within my lifetime).
It's the exceptionalism that gets me, I think. You guys USplaining to the world how reconciling different groups of people under a single republic works like nobody else had to deal with it is kinda nuts. Normally Americans, particularly progressive Americans, aren't bad at recognizing the ways in which they're weird or outliers. You point out health care or guns or the weird electoral system and the average American is very much on board, if not mildly frustrated that you're explaining obvious issues they have to deal with back at them. Rightfully so.
This thing? Not so much.
I think your prejudice is blinding you to something that makes good sense in context. I don't expect to change your mind, or even that I could, but it seems odd to blanket denounce a behavior present throughout North and South America on such a weak premise as "we don't do it here." How can you be blind to the use in communicating shared histories in an increasingly multicultural society? I think you'll find that the same behavior is present in many primarily immigrant nations. The US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and others. It's just a shortcut we make because those categories, however arbitrary, mean something to us and allow quicker sharing of information. "America bad" is such a tired argument. Americans may have a generally high opinion of themselves, but I think you'll find similar behavior in the defensive nature of those that belittle them as well. Humans are humans wherever you go. Step down off your high horse and recognize that maybe a behavior that naturally develops among hundreds of millions of independent people from different backgrounds entirely might be due more to its intrinsic value than some bizarrely specific American thing. Because it isn't. Americans are just an obvious example of it since they have such an overwhelming presence online.
Well, my observation is that it's not the same as in other places through North and South America. Canada yeah, South America, definitely not so much. I could see it in Argentina, where the migrant waves match a bit closer and you sometimes hear the Italian and Jewish diaspora bring it up a little more over time, but even then definitely not to the same degree, definitely not as universally identity-defining. And that's Argentina. None of the other people from Central and South America I know ever hit me with their ancestry unprompted, but I know which of my US friends "are" Polish or Italian or Irish or whatever, almost without exception. It's so bizarre.
And the argument isn't "America bad", by the way. I actually like Americans. I think the country itself is weird, but it's not necessarily weird in ways its inhabitants are on board with, like I said. America is a weird country full of very normal, often quite charming people.
What I'm saying is this specific aspect of it doesn't match that pattern. This is more transversally weird and people get more defensive about it.
Right.. because I've never met a European who verbalized their white ethnic backgrounds before.
Huh. I'm trying to think, because that's a good point. Have I?
I mean, it's not like I've never heard something like "my father was from Germany", I definitely have, particularly when prompted. But "I'm half German"? That's more specific, and I genuinely can't think of an example of people who weren't dual nationals themselves. It gets complicated, too, because Americans tend to think of ethnicities as nationalities, but Europeans don't. So if we're talking about Europeans it's not "I'm half German" as much as "My mother was Swiss-Italian" or, "my surname is Flemish", or "I spent summers in my grandfather's hometown in the Basque Country".
But that's why I brought up colonialism earlier, my impression is that Europeans value integration highly while Americans value ancestry. I've met nonwhite Europeans who got VERY testy at the implication that they were "from" the place their parents or grandparents originated, and considered that way of phrasing it deeply racist. The example of this that always comes to mind is that time Trevor Noah had a fight with the French National football team for saying that the black members of the team were "African", because at the time that argument was popular with the French far right. So in France people thought that saying "this black athlete is African" was a racist thing nazis say to pretend that black people aren't "really" French, while Noah was coming from the colonial perspective of pride in an ongoing heritage that isn't superseded by personal history as much.
So have I met a European who verbalized their white ethnic background as a matter of their own identity rather than the identity of their relatives themselves? Yeeeeah, maybe? But mostly in the context of advocating for seccesionism or just being a nazi, I think.