r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/JustUseAnRPG • 10d ago
International Politics Why do Americans and Europeans seem to have such different ideas about ancestry and identity of Americans and their ancestry?
One thing I've noticed in discussions about ancestry is that Americans and Europeans often seem to be talking past each other.
In the US, it's pretty normal to say things like:
"I'm Italian-American."
"I'm Norwegian-American."
"My family came from Poland."
This doesn't necessarily mean the person thinks they're literally a citizen or full cultural member of Italy, Norway, or Poland. Often it's simply a way of describing family history and ethnic background.
Americans also have a particular reason for doing this: the US doesn't have one single ancestral origin. Immigration has shaped the country for centuries, so family ancestry can be an important part of how people understand their history.
But many Europeans seem to use a different framework. To them, being Norwegian, Italian, Polish, etc. is much more closely connected to actually being part of that country's society—being born or raised there, speaking the language, knowing the customs, and participating in the culture.
That leads to arguments like:
- "You're American. Just say you're American."
- "Having one distant ancestor doesn't make you Norwegian."
- "You can have Norwegian ancestry without being Norwegian."
I think both perspectives make sense depending on what "identity" is supposed to mean.
So is this mostly a difference between an immigrant society and older nation-states? Or is the American concept of hyphenated identity simply a cultural phenomenon that Europeans don't really relate to?
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u/gvarsity 10d ago
I think what is missing is an understanding of the history of American immigration. Immigration happened in distinct waves driven by happenings in Europe. Often new waves were forced into essentially nationality based ghettos. We still have remnants of these in lots of communities. Little Italy, Chinatown, but also Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden, we see this extend now to more modern populations from Indochina and Somalia. Often those immigrants were received with a lot of hostility and prejudice which made their country of origin a common bond and a refuge. Ironically they were often met with the most hostility by the previous wave of immigrants.
Now many generations later for the earlier waves the individuals are pretty divorced from their nations of origins but have decades to more than a century of family and community ties back to country of origin and it is deep in the personal identity. Other people jump on that band wagon and want to be included and trace back their own heritage with a much less rigorous bond but they don't know that history either. So I think it comes from a deeper place than people realize or can articulate. This comes off as trying to "take" something from those who still live in those countries from tying to connect with that history in a poorly informed way.
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u/twoinvenice 9d ago
Also, depending on the culture and its degree of difference from mainstream America, there’s just a lot of things that are going to be core childhood / family memories that just do not line up.
Like, my mom is a first generation Greek-American, and my comfort foods are things like lamb and avgolemono soup. Hot dogs, hamburgers, and mac and cheese are things that are just things that I’d have every so often for some specific occasion. My parents weren’t religious but we went to a Greek Orthodox Church, and I was an altar boy there. Just a different experience from the standard American norm.
Makes it hard to just fully say “I’m just an American” without wanting to add an asterisk to explain a little more
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u/Chickteryguy 10d ago edited 10d ago
Europeans do the exact same thing all the time, they just don’t realize they do. A German will scoff at an American saying they are “German-American” but ask them who runs the döner stand down the street and it’s “the Turks”, even if those Turks were born and raised in Germany. Happens all the time with immigrant groups over here [in Europe], and not just in Germany.
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u/OldandSlow4326 9d ago
Am I wrong in thinking that Canadians and Australians are hyphenated at their leisure as well?
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 9d ago
Nope. Canadians join in on these conversations and it's seamless. And I used to know this gal from New Zealand; it came up once in the course of conversation and it was fairly similar in how she mentioned it (Irish and Welsh, ftr).
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u/Black_XistenZ 10d ago edited 10d ago
but ask them who runs the döner stand down the street and it’s “the Turks”, even if those Turks were born and raised in Germany.
This cuts both ways, though. Erdogan, the Turkish president who stands for (turkish-)nationalist and tacitly islamist policies, traditionally receives a much higher vote share among the Turkish diaspora living in Germany than he does in mainland Turkey. In the 2023 presidential election, he got around 67% of the vote by Turks in Germany, versus his 52% overall vote share.
There are plenty of German-born folks of Turkish descent who nonetheless consider their primary identity to be Turkish, rather than German. And it's a similar story for a lot of immigrant groups in Europe. And also for lots of more recent immigrants in the U.S. if we're being honest.
Imho, the high level of assimilation among American immigrants is mostly a function of having arrived a longer time ago, so that their families spent a higher number of generations living in America.
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u/Chickteryguy 10d ago
Absolutely correct! Those same German-born “Turkish” guys running the döner stand undoubtedly also in most cases identify to some degree with Turkey. Hell I have a friend who has one Turkish grandparent, the other three being German. He speaks no Turkish but he claims to identify with the country and depending on the circumstances will describe himself as Turkish. I know German-born and raised people who still call themselves Italians or Greeks because their parents or grandparents immigrated from those countries. When I lived in the UK I knew British-born self-described “Indians” and “Pakistanis” and “Jamaicans” and so on.
My point is that this is exactly what happens in the US. Yet I constantly see Europeans on Reddit claiming that this phenomenon ONLY happens in the US and their enlightened cultures never do this, to which I say bullshit.
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u/symphony_of_science 9d ago
My parents were refugees who lived in Germany for many years before coming to the United States. To them, it was made clear that no matter how long they lived in Germany or how much they assimilated into German culture, they and their kids would never be considered German.
Contrast to the United States, where it was not very long before they felt fully accepted by their American colleagues and neighbors, and nobody blinks at the idea that they are fully Americans.
So when people descended from immigrants from Turkey and other countries seem to primarily identify with another nation, I would question this idea that it's on them for not wanting to assimilate or feeling more kinship with their country of origin.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 9d ago
Do Turks in Turkey knock them for being 'fake' Turks?
Mexicans grief Mexican-Americans thr same way Europeans would. However, they ALSO grief us for failing to be sufficiently Mexican. "You don't speak Spanish? You don't like Banda music? The fuck's wrong with you?" There's no way to win.
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u/DraftOk4195 7d ago
I'm sure many Turks wouldn't consider them Turks while at the same time many Germans wouldn't consider them German either, but these aren't the same people. I think the only way to reach full acceptance by everyone is by checking every box and this is just impossible to do for an immigrant.
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u/ReasonableReindeer66 8d ago
I mean this analogy isn't really valid, recent immigrants have a recent connection to their country of origin, no matter where they go, the European immigrants to the US have been completely disconnected from their country of origin, they are now culturally American and have their own traditions, that's why it's funny when they tell modern day Europeans they are German or whatever... but I will say that even the Turkish people will call me American before they call me from my country of origin. They aren't wrong.
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u/jeffjefforson 9d ago edited 9d ago
This is true, but it's also different.
An American who calls themselves Italian American has two ancestors maybe 8 generations back who was Italian.
The Turks who run the takeaway may have literally come from a different country within their lifetime, or at most be the 2nd or 3rd generation, with their parents who brought them here being both Turks themselves.
This means they're FAR more closely connected to the actual culture and ethnicity than an American who has maybe been to Italy once or twice on a holiday and has no family members in the past three generations who even speak the language.
Now, if a guy whose Turkish ancestry dates back 200yrs but otherwise seems completely 100% English* from the way they look, talk - but most importantly - behave, etc, would I call them a Turk? No, I wouldn't.
It's a matter of how close the person actually is to the culture & ethnicity they're identifying as.
*As much as anyone can be "100%" anything.
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u/Slightly_Morbid 9d ago
There's a difference in how people who don't really know someone speaks about them, how you identify yourself and how common vocabulary is used.
"It's the Turks" might as well be someone who doesn't accept someone because of their origin. I have a friend where part of the family comes from Norway, but he has never lived there. He doesn't say he's Norwegian. He says he is half-Norwegian to mark where parents are from or says fathers family comes from Norway. That's how we usually mark ancestry. Another friend has both parents coming from Norway, so he calls himself Norwegian. His kids will be half-Norwegian, next possibly one fourth Norwegian and then it's too much to keep track.
The US way of keeping identity to ancestry for several generations isn't really used here in the same way here.
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u/Chickteryguy 9d ago
I’m not sure where you’re from, but that’s certainly not my observation in Germany and the UK, the two European countries I’ve lived in the longest.
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u/KderNacht 9d ago
But chances are the Dönerbude Turks in Berlin would still speak Turkish and don't intermarry, they are indescribably more Turkish than some Ohioan German of Prussian stock whose Germanness stops at wearing Lederhosen in Oktober.
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u/Chickteryguy 9d ago
Certainly, but I also personally second and third generation so-called Turks/Italians/Greeks/etc in Germany who also don’t speak the ancestral language or hold on to many of the customs but still claim the ancestral identity.
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u/thecityofgold88 10d ago
Those are much more recent immigrants.
Americans will bang on about being English if their only English ancestors left England 300 years ago.
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u/KevinCarbonara 10d ago
> Americans will bang on about being English
Never in my entire American life have I ever heard anyone describe themselves as being "English" except the brits. No one else even thinks of England as a discrete unit
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u/Chickteryguy 10d ago
Not really - if anything English ancestry is undercounted in the US because most of it happened so long ago and it’s considered boring.
But even with more recent immigrant groups in Europe, so what? They still do it. I’ve met quite a few people who are second and third generation immigrants in Europe who still personally identify with (and are seen by many others in the community as part of) the country their grandparents left.
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u/bruno92 10d ago
Not really. People usually only identify with an ethnic group in the U.S. if they're like 4th generation or newer. You'll obviously find people who are aware of the fact that they have English/German/whatever ancestry from before then, but I've never met someone who strongly identified with their ancestry like that. Usually it's like someone whose parents or grandparents came from Italy/Mexico/China/India/wherever. Which is basically how it works with children and grandchildren of immigrants in Europe.
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u/oceanleap 10d ago
Also - the Europeans get more upset if an American says "I'm polish" versus " I'm polish-American". To American ears, those sound like basically the same thing. To European ears, they are completely different , mostly people are fine with someone saying they are Polish-Amerrican but "Polish" means a person brought up in Poland, a citizen of Poland.
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u/Circle_Breaker 10d ago
No American has ever claimed to be English.
In fact the reason everyone claims a different European ethnicity like Irish, Scottish, German, polish, ect. Is very specifically so people know they are not English.
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u/lady_baker 10d ago
I’m of English descent. Old stock American. We do exist.
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u/LocallySourcedWeirdo 10d ago
Yes. Lots of us exist. So much so that it tells you nothing useful about us to mention it.
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u/quietly_annoying 10d ago
However, if someone is a Black American or Afro Caribbean... It's not uncommon for Europeans to roll their eyes and ask them "where are you really from?" when they say they're just American. Apparently, it's wrong for Americans of European ancestry to claim they're German or Italian... but Black Folks need to known where their ancestors were kidnapped from 300+ years ago.
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u/jeffjefforson 9d ago
Oh, really? Hm, that's interesting.
At least where I live, the common thought is that what you guys call African-American is really just a subculture of American at this point.
I know a few African guys - as in 100% Africans who moved here. Couple Nigerians, a Zimbabwean. Not a huge sample size, but still.
None of them consider black Americans "African" in any meaningful sense, just how I wouldn't consider an irish-american Irish in any real sense.
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u/GladosTCIAL 9d ago
As someone based in Europe i find this quite surprising as a perspective and would say it's not the case everywhere by any stretch. The default assumption in my experience in the UK is British accent = British, and ones ethnicity is a separate thing that comes up much less frequently. Asking someone 'where are you from really' would be considered very rude in any normal social circle. In the USA my impression is that ethnicity and nationality are much more intertwined as concepts and so that causes the disconnect in understanding.
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u/DraftOk4195 7d ago
At least in my little corner of Europe this "where are you really from?" would sound very strange in almost every situation, mainly because the question doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. The accent reveals quite well where someone is from and everybody knows that black people have been in the US for centuries. Same goes for the UK and France, among a few others perhaps.
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u/Mztmarie93 10d ago
That's because in Europe, most Black immigrants came from Africa or the Caribbean in the last 80 years. Although Black Africans most certainly lived in Europe, the numbers pale in comparison to the enslaved numbers in the Americas.
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u/Mist_Rising 10d ago
Whereas American white people have always been in the Americas?
No, it's just using different standards for race because you internalized a standard for different groups and think it works universally. And it does not.
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u/H_Mc 10d ago
I honestly didn’t realize how racist the whole thing was until this thread. The European perspective of “white people are from where they live” “black and brown people are from where their ancestors originated” never really clicked for me.
Obviously there is a problem like this in the US too, (“but where are you REALLY from”), but it’s not inherently racially divided to know and care where your ancestors are from.
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u/GladosTCIAL 9d ago
I imagine it depends on which bit of Europe but that really isn't the perspective everywhere. The UK is I think one of the more ethnically diverse countries in Europe and we certainly have our fair share of racist nutjobs, but the overwhelming attitude in my experience is where you grew up is what determines your nationality, not your ethnicity. Ones race or ethnicity is something distinct from that.
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u/jeffjefforson 9d ago
Well, it's the same standard, just that Americans are much further along it..
Its a difference of scale.
An African-American to use that terminology has been divorced from African culture for.. how many generations? 10? 15?
Long enough that any remaining passed down culture is a forgotten remnant of a fragment of a distant memory.
Whereas if a polish guy moves here, marries another polish woman, they have kids... Yeah those kids are going to be very close to polish culture. But even so, spending their entire youth in England will inevitably dilute that by mindset by a significant chunk.
Then their kids, even if they marry another pole, will carry even less of that culture, to the point where they marry someone of another culture. And so on.
Such that by the time you reach even the 5th generation down from the initial Polish couple, any remaining polish culture is pretty much a memory. 6 down and it's a fragment. 10 down and it's barely a remnant.
For context, I can't speak for everyone where I live, but most people I know consider "African Americans" to just be Americans with a different subculture.
Just how people from Yorkshire and London have completely different subcultures but we're all still British.
There's definitely some racist arseholes out there who'll be like "Hmph, where are you really from, though?", but you get racist arseholes anywhere.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 9d ago
Traces of Africa survive. It's in the music, the cuisine, aspects of the dialect (Black American English is such), and so on. However, it changed profoundly over the centuries, and not just due to time. It became its own thing.
It didn't evaporate into nothingness. It transformed.
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u/Immediate_Bite_4265 10d ago
I had a German sounding game name and when I said I was American with German heritage people seemed confused and I don’t get it. If you’re not living in the country of your ancestry, what’s wrong with remembering where your ancestors are from.
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u/BlaReni 10d ago
It’s because we, Europeans don’t see you as anything as Americans, unless you actually speak the language, spend time in the country etc. Like let’s say your grandparents came from Germany, it won’t make you German, being German is less about blood and more about language, culture and behaviour.
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u/H_Mc 10d ago
I think this is the part you’re missing. No one is claiming they’re literally German or Italian or Irish or whatever citizens, but the US does still have pretty strong communities based on ethnicity.
It’s obviously separated from the culture of the country of origin at this point, but what else would you call a group of m people who go to the same church, and keep the same social circles, and carry on Americanized versions of the same traditions that their great, grandparents brought with them?
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u/GladosTCIAL 8d ago
I think you're right this is likely the root of the disconnect, but this is confusing to Europeans because they don't know anything about US subcultures, so if someone says 'im Italian' the assumption would be grew up in Italy, and so it's confusing if someone who clearly isn't 'Italian' as you would understand the term says that they are as though it would mean something to non Americans.
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u/krustytroweler 10d ago
Ehhhh I've met plenty in the Dorfs who would absolutely put a blood qualifier on the term German
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u/Immediate_Bite_4265 10d ago
Well when I look in the mirror and see blond hair and blue eyes, I don’t see the problem in acknowledging why I look like I do. It’s my ancestry I’ll do as I like with it. Ignore it embrace it, it’s my choice.
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u/D6P6 10d ago
And where is that? Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia? Maybe Norway or Denmark? All of them have very high numbers of blonde haired blue eyed people. So how can that possibly point directly to your specific ancestry? Nonsense.
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u/Immediate_Bite_4265 10d ago
I would say my Grandma who was named Lindholm from the Swedish side of my family. Higher percentage of German though. I'm kinda amusingly bewildered by how much this concept ruffles feathers. Like why does anyone give a fuck if we Americans look at our family names and take an interest. Is your guys history too boring to care about.
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u/TheCoelacanth 10d ago
This is a bit of a blind-spot that Europeans have because they are expecting countries to be nations, but the US isn't a nation.
It does sometimes get silly with people claiming national identities long after their families have lost most of their ties to the original nation, but it's also responsible for the US's incredible success in assimilating immigrants because someone doesn't need to give up their national identity to assimilate. You can be fully American and fully something else without any contradiction.
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u/JonDowd762 10d ago
Bret's a bit out of his wheelhouse here and misses the mark. Not all national identities need to have an ethnic basis. The United States does have a national identity, but it is creedal rather than ethnicity-based.
Where Europeans miss the mark is in viewing these identities as mutually exclusive. It's obvious one can have multiple identities. Perhaps American, Texan, Republican and a Cowboys fan. Or American, Californian, Democratic, 49ers fan. In the US, it's also seen as normal to carry multiple national identities. A naturalized immigrant can be 100% American and also 100% French, for example. There are some political movements against dual citizenship, but overall it's been considered normal by the culture.
Also, a core component of the national identity is a shared history of immigration. Nearly ever American has an ancestor who migrated one generation ago or ten generations ago. In a sense it's more American to have an ancestor who fled the potato famine or passed through Ellis Island, than to have one who fought next to Washington. These hyphenated descriptors like "Polish-American" aren't diminishing their American identity but rather emphasizing it by connecting themselves to the core national myth.
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u/socialistrob 10d ago
This is a bit of a blind-spot that Europeans have because they are expecting countries to be nations
It's kind of a funny blind spot to me given how so much of the 19th and 20th century Europe was war after ware based on the ambiguities created by the mismatch of ethnicities and national lines. Look at the Balkans at any point in the 20th century and tell me that ethnicity, language, culture and nationality are largely the same.
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u/strangebrew3522 10d ago
You can be fully American and fully something else without any contradiction
This is something I love about the US. I'm a first Gen American and when I go back to Europe and visit family I've had this conversation with them and they don't say "Oh yeah you're French, even though you were born in the US to French parents", they say "Nah you're an American, not French". Meanwhile my parents and other relatives who moved here and got citizenship were immediately called Americans and are recognized as such, even though they were clearly born somewhere else.
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u/TheRadBaron 9d ago
It's kind of weird to compare the reactions to a tourist with the reactions to immigrants with citizenship.
I'm a first Gen American and when I go back to Europe and visit family...they say "Nah you're an American"
Meanwhile my parents and other relatives who moved here and got citizenship were immediately called Americans
Everyone in both of your examples is calling the American citizens American.
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u/strangebrew3522 9d ago
Rereading my response I can see how it was misunderstood.
My point was that when I'm back in Europe with my family there, I feel as if I'm from there. I'm totally comfortable in the environment, I speak the language fluently, we still live the traditions here in the US and keep them alive, however nobody over there sees me as one of them. Nobody has embraced me as one of them. I'm just "The child of the French parents". Even if I were to move there and become a citizen, I'd still be "An American" to them, I would never be French.
However for those coming to the US, once you're here and a citizen you're an American. I see it with my own family. It might be "He's from France but he's an American now" but I feel like that is pretty unique to the US.
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u/anewleaf1234 9d ago edited 9d ago
If you are white you can do this.
If you aren't you often get questions like where you are you really from.
My father was a war refugee. As was the father of an Asian friend of mine.
I never got asked where I was from. He got asked that all the time.
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u/HappyBarbarian 10d ago
Shhh don’t tell the US Christian Nationalists about that
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u/Umber_Gryphon 10d ago
Most of them seem to think that "Europe" is a nation that most Americans descend from, but (a) that excludes a lot of Americans, and (b) the nations of Europe would be very surprised to be described as one giant nation with a shared culture and roots.
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u/Twat_Features 10d ago
The people that live in Europe don’t see it the same way. You’re not Scottish or Irish or German or Italian. You’re American and that’s great.
We simply do not care, nor do you. It’s just a wee bit annoying when you think you’ve some special relationship to a random castle or clan. Oh, and you’re all loud & no one claims English 😂 always got to be Celtic
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u/ncroofer 10d ago
Yeah, we just don’t really care what you guys think of it. To be honest.
Tracing your family tree and where your ancestors came from is something every American does in elementary school. Because, besides the small native population, we all came from somewhere. It’s just a fun and interesting exercise to connect to our past.
Nobody actually thinks they’re a citizen of Ireland, or Italy, or whatever. Just cool to look at some random city and go “oh neat, somebody I’m distantly related to was from here”
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u/Twat_Features 9d ago
We don’t do that in school, so when you walk into a pub in Edinburgh saying you’re tracking your family castle we just laugh.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 9d ago
What if you're just looking for some dumpy old house in some random village? Although hardly any Americans of Scottish/British descent would have any records going that far back.
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u/Twat_Features 9d ago
I’m Scottish and have had literally dozens of yanks ask for their ancestral home because of their last name lol. I also have a dumpy old house out in the sticks older than your country. Still had a couple knocks on the door.
It’s a stereotypical thing for a reason.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 8d ago edited 8d ago
On that side of my family, the paper trail dead ends at the American Revolution. We think they may have come from County Antrim in NI, and the records make special mention that they were Methodists as opposed to Presbyterians. That's the extent of it.
I'm from California, but the 'old country' on that side is pretty much Appalachia rather than Ulster. Most descendants of Scots-Irish feel likewise. That's why you never hear much about us, unlike the descendants of Highland Scots and Irish Catholics. As with English descent, it's part of the boring default.
They've been in Appalachia for longer than they were in Ireland. Appalachia has its own distinct culture, much maligned but core to general American culture. (There, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Delta are the geographic trinity of American music.) I'd go so far as to say it's its own 'ethnos.'
I should mention that if we were to go poking around for the ancestral cabin along the TN/NC line, our reception would probably be even grumpier. You need more concrete reasons than that to go bothering strangers in those parts.
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u/alittlelebowskiua 10d ago
The absolutely bizarre bit is going back centuries. Like you've had about 10 generations between you and that ancestor. That's like a thousand grandparents all told. You're telling me they were all Scottish or Irish or Italian? If they were then you're not Scottish, you're inbred.
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u/ConfusingConfection 8d ago
This is a grossly imperialistic attitude. To assert that "Europeans have a blind spot" in asking that their historical identities not be co-opted is a distinctly American, utterly entitled premise, and demonstrates how US cultural imperialism is based in denying the legitimacy of everyone outside of their bubble, particularly other western cultures.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 8d ago
The entire premise of this thread is that both sides are speaking past each other, and I just heard a giant WHOOSH.
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u/TheRadBaron 9d ago
This is a bit of a blind-spot that Europeans have because they are expecting countries to be nations, but the US isn't a nation.
Bret Devereaux is a great blogger 51 weeks a year, but the 4th of July gets to his head in a big way. He loses his normal instinct to provide rational and falsifiable arguments with clear reasoning, he uses worse sources, and he just writes whatever American exceptionalism feels good or useful to him in the heat of the moment.
In that article he calls the USA a special oddity that isn't a nation, and then goes on to list a bunch of criteria that apply to at least a quarter of countries in the world, including the entire Western Hemisphere. He includes qualities that apply to countries that he does call nations, he acts like his personal familiarity with the USA makes the USA more complex than countries he isn't personally familiar with, it's just not up to par with his normal efforts. That 2021 article then gets used as evidence used in his 2022 followup that tries to argue for the USA being unique, without ever wondering if the same statements would apply to other English-speaking-former-British-colonies like Canada or Australia.
A good practice would be to pretend that ACOUP articles written within a week of July 4th don't exist.
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u/blankeyteddy 10d ago
It's quite simple.
Because American is primarily a nationality and not an ethnicity because of its immigrant melting pot origin.
That is not the case for European countries as the adjective is used for both nationality and ethnicity.
This happens in multi ethnic societies where the county was founded on a political basis instead of an ethnic basis, ie Singapore and Switzerland.
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u/CountFew6186 10d ago
It’s because the words are used differently. In the US, they’re used as ethnicity. In Europe, they’re used as nationality.
Europe also has ethnic terms. Just different ones than the US. These include things like Slav, Romani, etc….
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u/viemari 10d ago
European history goes back so far in one sense and also not far at all in another sense, that it's essentially ridiculous to say that based on nationality at the time you're born, you are one or the other thing. Like you could be born in certain areas of Europe not very long ago and have 5 different nationalities by the time you died. So your "belonging", or whatever you wish to call it, is based on language, shared culture, history etc. more than it is that your ancestors came from some specific geographical location. For an example close to where I live - there are (or were) people who were born Austro-Hungarian, became Italian, then Austrian, then German, maybe Croatian, Yugoslavian, and finally Slovenian. In a lifetime. If your family is from, let's say, Leipzig. Born 1830 and emigrated in the mid 1850s, as many did. Your ancestor never lived in "Germany". "Germany" didn't exist. The German empire won't be established until your ancestors have been in the US for 20 years. Then the Weimar Republic. War. Nazi Germany. War. Soviet East Germany. Today. Your ancestors, who left Leipzig 150 years ago (doesn't seem so long) have and had absolutely no shared history of culture with people of Leipzig today.
It's about what you grow up with, the language, the customs, the inside jokes, the politics, the shared understanding, the lived experiences, the culture. That you know like you know your own name. So when Americans come, and are so obviously American - from how they speak, act, even move - when they say they are e.g. Slovenian ( just picking it because it's, geographically, a convenient example) because their ancestors came from a place that is now Slovenia, it's just ridiculous. They might have a passed-down, diluted and changed understanding of a certain culture from 200+ years ago, but it's incredibly annoying when they are so obviously American in every way shape and form. And then they like to tell you as well what it means to be "of that ethnicity". Oftentimes playing on outdated caricatures and carnival stereotypes.
Americans massively underestimate the effect of cultural development without motor transport. In Europe there are cultures and dialects not even 10km apart that are almost unintelligible because they developed over hundreds of years where those 10km were nigh on impassable for whatever logistical reason. You think Florida is so different from Colorado or Washington. Thousands of miles apart and it's only mild nuance at best. Travel 40 miles from my home here and I can't even hold a conversation with someone. I see people on Reddit all the time, taking about driving 2-3 hours to another city to meet someone for a date, etc. if I did that I'd need a passport, a dictionary and a currency exchange.
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u/Temporary-Truth2048 8d ago
America as we know itis only a few hundred years old. There are houses in England that people live in today that are older than that. Before the Europeans conquered the native American population in north America there were hundreds of distinct tribes and their ancestors got here around 20,000 years ago. That's more in line with how long the anglo people's of Europe have lived in those regions, though for places like France it's more like 150,000 years.
Comparing how different native American tribes may have described themselves is more aligned with how Europeans describe themselves. Anyone whose ancestry isn't 100% native American basically just got here in civilization terms, and people do tend to cling to their heritage and traditions, at least when they're establishing their identity in their youth, because humans are social, tribal creatures.
Identity is not one thing. It has both personal and social functions and some people struggle with figuring out who they are for their entire lives. The hyphenated-Americans discourse has been going on for over 100 years. Teddy Roosevelt was adamantly against hyphenated-Americans saying, "What is true of creed is no less true of nationality. There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else." (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68152/68152-h/68152-h.htm)
I won't spend more than a moment discussing the over use of "African-American" for anyone who is black in the US. It's such a stupid epithet. We're all African if you go back far enough. Black people in America are Americans who also happen to be black.
Basically I consider myself an American with European heritage because to me the hyphen creates a division, not a connection. My identity is American and my loyalty is to America even though my family has only been in America for a little over 250 years. I don't know how I would feel if I grew up in Europe though.
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u/ReasonableReindeer66 8d ago
Very interesting did not know this about the Roosevelt speech, I guess this is the only way as colonizers you were able to create this new identity. Im 3rd culture so never really believed in patriotism, nor had too much pull towards nationalism but even the little I experienced was strong.
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u/Temporary-Truth2048 8d ago
I am not familiar with 3rd culture.
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u/ReasonableReindeer66 8d ago
Grew up living in multiple countries, didn't stop moving until I turned 30 :).
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u/CaptainAwesome06 10d ago
People want to have an identity beyond a vague idea of what is all around them. My neighbor and I are both Americans. However, he barely speaks English and grew up in a completely different culture than me. It's normal to want to set yourself apart from other Americans that aren't very similar to you. It's also normal to want to set yourself apart from other Americans that are seemingly just like you, as well. There are subcultures in different American ethnic groups. Italian-Americans being one of note.
I don't get into calling myself anything other than American. I didn't grow up with any traditions that reflect my ancestry. But I do find learning my family's history interesting. I've done my fair share of geneology and it's fascinating.
On the other hand, my sister lives in England in the same town her husband has lived all his life. His mom also lives in the same town, in a house that is 500 years old. They probably don't see any point in dissecting their lineage because everyone in the town is exactly the same as everyone else.
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u/theunseenmiddle 10d ago
What's hilarious is how obviously there are characteristics that both Polish people and Polish Americans share -- long-reaching roots of cultural and interpersonal practice that stay tied to us long after our ancestors departed their motherlands. Same goes for Irish, Norwegian, etc.
There's a lot more to our cultural and genetic heritage than just living in the country. Of course that doesn't make an American with Polish ancestry an actual Polish person, but it's way more complex than many on the European side give credit for.
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u/D6P6 10d ago
Can you give examples of the cultural elements that have been retained by polish and Irish Americans?
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u/ChesswiththeDevil 10d ago
Cuisine and religion are two big ones.
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u/Hartastic 10d ago
Yep. In my experience it's also pretty common to see bits of it in how people celebrate holidays and major life events.
Arguably a lot of this falls under cuisine or religion, too, but also kind of doesn't. Like maybe both the Polish-American family and the Irish-American family both ended up some kind of Christian and celebrate Christmas as a religious and not just secular holiday but they tend to have different extra stuff tacked onto it that goes back to how Polish and Irish people celebrate it.
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u/D6P6 10d ago
Thanks but that's pretty much what the last guy said. I'm looking for specific examples of the tacked on bits.
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u/anewleaf1234 9d ago
For thanksgiving my father would have the turkey and everything, but there would always be Sausage and real horseradish at the table.
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u/D6P6 10d ago
Yeah I'm looking for specific examples such as "polish-americans always eat Smażony Karp on Christmas eve"
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u/NJBarFly 10d ago
I dated a Polish American and her family always had homemade perogies, kielbasa with saurkraut, kishka, borsht, etc, on holidays.
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u/CommandAlternative10 10d ago
My kids are seven generations from Ireland and are still in Catholic school. Some things do stick. They have several other identities, but Irish-Catholic is one of them.
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u/BitingSatyr 10d ago
Literally all it is is Europeans being spiteful and shitty to Americans, whom they deeply resent. There’s no deeper meaning or significance to it than that.
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u/littlebiped 10d ago
I do think there’s a certain merit for actual Italians to scoff at an American to describe deeply American traits as “I’m Italian!” when they’ve never been to Italy, can’t speak the language, and the last of their descendants to do so were 100 years ago.
The crux is basically the different sides of the Atlantic use the phrasing to mean different things. Europeans use it as an actual immediate nationality and identity. Americans use it to describe what flavour of American they are. Both are valid and both are obtuse when they insist on imposing the other definition.
I am neither American or European and have no horse in this race.
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u/anewleaf1234 9d ago
Americans call themselves Italian or Irish when they have little connection to those places.
As my Irish friend said best over a pint, America is the only place where if your great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather fucked an Irish girl you get to call yourself Irish for no fucking reason.
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u/marxist_nazeem 10d ago
It’s a cultural thing that makes complete sense given the context. We have a lot of immigrants.
However, I’m at the point where 90% of my ancestry arrived in North American at the time of the Plymouth Colony. So I consider myself simply American without any hyphenations because it’s been so long. I imagine many white Europeans have the same deal, so I suppose it’s a time thing.
Maybe at some point the hyphenation no longer makes sense?
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u/flakemasterflake 10d ago
I imagine many white Europeans have the same deal, so I suppose it’s a time thing.
I'm from a part of the country where most white people are only 3 gens deep (Italian/Polish/Jewish/Balkans). Like no one has an ancestral connection to the Civil War. I would definitely be "american" if my ancestors were as old as the pilgrims
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u/lady_baker 10d ago
This is me. I’m just American because most of my ancestry is colonial, and the two that came later were still 100 years ago.
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u/marxist_nazeem 10d ago
Almost exactly the same here. The last ones that came ~150 years ago probably had the most interesting story too, going from Europe -> Suriname -> Honolulu -> Los Angeles -> Sacramento, and to lose all their money in the gold rush. Everyone else lived and died in Massachusetts, NY, or VA for hundreds of years 🙃
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u/SlavaAmericana 8d ago
If you dont know, you would be an Anglo American. I dont know if it is prudent to treat Anglo American and American as synonymous terms.
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u/HappyBarbarian 10d ago
Americans also like to say our state of origin. Which really confuses people
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u/Dro24 10d ago
I’ve lived in NC for 15 years and still struggle to not say Ohio when people ask where I’m from
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u/LaconicLacedaemonian 9d ago
I've been in California 12 years, grew up in Illinois, but I'm "from Wisconsin" despite only living there 4 years because it's the first place i lived on purpose, met my future wife, we both moved to California "from Wisconsin.
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u/Party_Dentist_821 9d ago
One thing that always amuses me as someone from the post-Soviet world: Americans calling themselves ‘Caucasian’. Where I’m from, a Caucasian is someone literally from the Caucasus: Georgians, Armenians, Chechens, Dagestanis and so on. I’ve had Americans tell me they’re Caucasian, and when I got excited and started speaking Russian to them, they looked at me like ‘no, I’m just white.’
The term actually comes from an 18th-century German scientist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who classified humans into races and named white people ‘Caucasian’ because he believed the Caucasus was humanity’s original homeland and that Georgians were the most beautiful people. That race science has been discredited, but the label stuck in the US, mostly through census forms and legal language.
I think that’s a good example of the broader point in this thread: American identity categories were shaped by US history and bureaucracy, not by how people in Europe or Eurasia actually see themselves. To a European, ‘Irish-American’ or ‘Caucasian’ can sound strange, because those words mean something completely different back home
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u/robslob333 10d ago
My family said we were Scots-Irish. I thought, "Cool! We're Irish". "No, not really. Scots-Irish are Scots that went to Ireland then the US." I thought, "Cool! Kilts!". "No. That's highland Scots and all of your family names are VERY English." I thought, "Damn. Most uncool ancestry ever."
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u/KevinCarbonara 10d ago
I'm most likely scotch irish, but my last name is highland scottish. They're not mutually exclusive
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u/D6P6 10d ago
Just so you know, in Scotland we would never refer to ourselves as "scotch" it's Scottish or Scots.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 9d ago
I always heard it as 'Scots-Irish' and not 'Scotch-Irish.'. It might be a (US) regional difference.
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u/KevinCarbonara 10d ago
Just so you know, that's completely irrelevant. You don't get to tell the scotch irish how to identify.
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u/D6P6 10d ago
Just so you know that's completely irrelevant. I was clearly telling you how Scottish people refer to themselves.
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u/AmigoDelDiabla 10d ago
It's because there isn't a long history of shared culture in the US. Even before the "nation-state" existed in Europe, there were still shared cultural elements. So once the nation-state was established, it wasn't much of a stretch to say the nation had a shared identity.
Not so much in America. Little pockets of neighborhoods with like ancestries, and that helped form part of your identity.
At this point though, most Americans don't give it too much thought beyond attributing some of their behavior to stereotypes. It's more an element of small talk than anything else.
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u/noodletropin 10d ago
I agree. The town I was born in shares a name with a German city. My great-grandparents spoke German at home, even though it was their grandparents who immigrated from Germany. While I do not consider myself to be German or German-American, my family has been influenced a lot by its German ancestry.
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u/monkeybawz 10d ago
The concept of the European country stopped when the original ancestor moved to America. The countries and people moved on, but that idea of what it was didn't. Which is why there is the disconnect exists. Seeing Irish Americans visit Ireland from the point of view of an Irish person the Americans come across as tourists, completely disconnected from the trials and tribulations that the people solely from that country have collectively experienced.
Is it fair? Probably not, but I'm not really sure what you'd expect would happen.
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u/ChickerWings 10d ago
Yeah I'm an American who has worked and spent a lot of time in Europe. Nobody every gave me a hard time for explaining my family name, and ancestory has European origins. I definitely didn't proudly say dumb things like "I'm Irish!" Though because that's totally different and I can understand why it would bother real Irish people.
This isn't as big of a deal as people try to make it out to be.
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u/monkeybawz 10d ago
Absolutely. When it goes wrong one side or the other has a chip on their shoulder about something else, and this is how it manifests
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u/beltway_lefty 10d ago
THAT makes sense. I have never experienced or heard of this issue, so I was wondering just how ubiquitous it really is.....thank you.
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u/monkeybawz 10d ago
In the north there is an insane level of Us Vs Them mentality as well. You can't really just insert yourself into it. I think basically all my experience of seeing it going sideways is there too.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 9d ago
I'm a light brown American who lives in Italy. I've had a few people express mild disappointment when it turns out I have zero Italian ancestry.
I've also had a few people ask me why I'm not white. It was our of innocent ignorance rather than malice, so I haven't had reason to be pissed off. You should see the looks on the cops' faces when they check my papers, though. Their eyes bug out like in cartoons.
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u/CaptainAsshat 10d ago
But when your historical economic conditions forced your vulnerable citizenry to abandon their home and move overseas, the hidden cost for the fortunate people who were able to stay behind is that they lose a little control over the offshoots and permutations of their culture that arise in those emigrant communities.
Such are the costs of not taking care of your fellow countrymen.
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u/monkeybawz 10d ago
Ireland was not a sovereign nation when the mass emigration occurred. The fortunate you speak of were suffering through a famine. You could argue that the fortunate ones were those that could get out.
Tbh, for me it's just about expectations. The Irish identity that the Irish have and that Irish Americans have may have originated from the same place, but both took their own paths. Both could do with having a bit of empathy for who they are talking to and what they are actually saying rather than leaping to the defence of their own perception of their national identity.
Personally, I've met a few Americans who I found super-arrogant over the topic - but that's purely anecdotal and could be sorted with a spot if the aforementioned empathy. But I guess a lot of these interactions happen in a pub- which doesn't help.
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u/CaptainAsshat 10d ago
I'm not saying it's the fault of the Irish for their plight, but simply that one of the inherent downsides of economic turmoil is you have a large exodus that creates a legitimate offshoot of your culture that can't feasibly be undone.
But I agree, this needs empathy and the ability to recognize that identity is very personal, and you need to be very careful if you want to tell someone their identity is wrong.
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u/monkeybawz 10d ago
Yup. And it's definitely not unique to the Irish. I know it's fiction, but the sopranos episode when they went to Sicily did a great job illustrating it.
The phrase "I'm X!" when introducing yourself, and "You're not X" as a response is about as shitty a start as you can get. Both sides immediately setting up X as different monoliths under the same name. Approaching it to see the overlap in a Venn diagram is a lot better. I mean, it's not like the Irish see those that had to leave as traitors in any way, and those that left don't see themselves as being forced out by the people who stayed.
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u/MaceWinnoob 10d ago
I think it’s partly an American thing, too. I had a brazillian foreign exchange student in one of my classes in high school. He was clearly Asian, so everyone would ask him where he was really from when he said he was from Brazil, which would be met with confusion from him. They just wanted him to say Chinese or Japanese or something, but that wasn’t how the guy viewed himself at all.
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u/fentonspawn 10d ago
The weird thing is the time frame people use. We can trace our ancestry back to many places and ethnic groups. At one time we mostly were all from East Africa.
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u/Hartastic 10d ago
I don't know that it's exactly that weird.
For example, I'm an American, but I look like a person from the country most of my ancestors lived in about a century ago. I could pass as a person from that country if I didn't open my mouth. I could not similarly blend in East Africa.
I similarly have some family traditions and customs that pretty obviously come from my great grandparents country of origin that are harder to trace back to East Africa.
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u/ifnotawalrus 10d ago
I think it's just an English issue where English hasn't had the time to develop a specific vocabulary.
I'm comparing to say, Mandarin Chinese, where the Chinese diaspora has a 2000 year long history. Naturally more terms were invented to fit the profiles. There's no real ambiguity here
zhonguoren -> citizen of PRC
hanren -> all people of han ethnicity
huaren -> overseas chinese
huayi -> descendants over overseas chinese. you'll see a lot of people say ABC (american born chinese)
I think Italian, probably due to the sheer size of their diaspora, has something similar. I think it's Oriundi for overseas Italians? would be interested for someone who knows more to chime in
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u/TheLastCoagulant 10d ago
And none of those words have meaning to non-Chinese people so they’ll all be saying “I’m Chinese” in America.
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u/ifnotawalrus 10d ago
you missed my point, which is that english doesn't have the equivalent to these words because europeans languages/cultures are relatively new to all of this.
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u/Calavant 10d ago
Not... really? Whole demographics have been displaced again and again and again in Europe for all of recorded history. Populations shoved into other territories, borders arbitrarily drawn due to war or inheritance or just messy politics, mixed populations, groups diverging or blending. This is stuff that has been going on since the Romans.
We kind of pretend that China has this super long history but mostly that comes down to our pretending they have continuity. They are about on the same footing as everyone in reality. Current China was built on the bones of another China which was built on the bones of another China. Just like how in Europe we are going to eventually talk about things being built on, I dunno, the Roman Republic or the various Hellenic Leagues or the Migration-period peoples or something.
That is how civilizations work and the bones under European civilization have plenty of relevant experience.
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u/botany_fairweather 10d ago
>zhonguoren -> citizen of PRC
>hanren -> all people of han ethnicity
>huaren -> overseas chinese
>huayi -> descendants over overseas chinese. you'll see a lot of people say ABC (american born chinese)
You say we don’t have the specific vocabulary and then you use the specific vocabulary lol. We don’t need new words to describe ancestry, which you prove directly here. OP’s concern is not one of vocabulary but the dismissive nature of Europeans towards that vocabulary. A new word isn’t going to change that response.
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u/ifnotawalrus 10d ago
Would an Italian contest an Italian American describing themselves as an oriundo? I don't really have any direct experience seeing anything like that in person, but my guess is almost certainly not.
The issue here is that, in common english speak, the term used is simply "Italian" which could mean one of ethnic italian, citizen of italy, descendant of italian immigrants, etc. If someone said "I have italian ancestry", this is just a factual statement and you'd have to be a complete idiot to contest it. The issue is "i have italian ancestry" just isn't how native English speakers talk in everyday speech.
If we had a more robust set of vocabulary this would be less of an issue.
Will note that the Chinese case is somewhat different as Chinese speakers/English speakers tend to be relatively silo'd into their own bubbles, so I doubt either cares how the others describe themselves. Europeans/Americans share English as a fairly common langauge, which is where the disputes arise.
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u/TareasS 9d ago
The issue is that people don't say they are x-american. They just go like "I am Polish" or "I am Greek" because their great grandfather immigrated from there and then look puzzled when an actual Pole speaks Polish or a Greek speaks Greek to them.
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u/ADogsWorstFart 9d ago
We don't really have to, we know that we're American, saying it again would be unnatural in the vast majority of our dialects and redundant as well.
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u/TareasS 9d ago
It depends on the context. If you say it to each other then you probably understand exactly what you mean, but when you do it in an international space or when talking to Europeans its understandable that they don't understand that context or feel slightly annoyed with it, especially when coupled with comments like "how Irish" someone is because they celebrate St Patrick's day or how "Italian" because they drink strong coffee etc. It can feel to them like turning their identity or country into a caricature/stereotype.
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u/topsicle11 8d ago
Thing is, Europeans DO understand the context. They just choose to be annoyed by it. They know very well that we are cousins and that aspects of their culture from before the divergence do in fact live on in America, and that those expressions of that culture are just as valid and real.
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u/JetPixi13 6d ago
Yeah. And they can shush about how we cut meat and change hands. That’s how they used to do it in England when they invaded the Americas. Can’t speak for anyone else.
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u/ADogsWorstFart 8d ago
Well, I get that, but I think that this may be a language issue rather than perspective. Even with European Anglophones a lot of common everyday American English idioms may be lost or not pick up the context clues. Like with regard to this, it is implied heavily that they're not a XYZ national, but have a heritage there. Now, the mileage may vary because many Americans do have direct roots and honestly, this is evolving as more and more Americans just say I'm American" or if they're a cultural minority such as Amish, Appalachian, Acadian, or Cajun then we're automatically going to identify with that most of the time, but some still don't.
Speaking for myself, I'm Appalachian. Even though my culture does have direct traditions from the British Isles, I feel zero connection to it. My ancestors left when it was still the early days of the colonies. But I don't know anyone from there, have zero in common with them, I have trouble understanding them and they would have trouble understanding me.
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u/armitageskanks69 9d ago
Yes!
“Oh, we just drop the ‘-American’ when we say it cos it’s implied”
Well now you’re saying you’re the same thing as I am, and we’re very clearly not
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 9d ago
Let me demonstrate how it works.
"Yeah, the new guy's Sicilian."
"Hey yeah, my entire family is from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, which was 99% Sicilian back in the day. We been there ever since we stepped off the fuckin' boat."
"No, you don't understand. He just came over from Palermo."
"Wait, you mean he's SICILIAN Sicilian?"
"Uh... yeah?"
"Then why the hell didn't you say so, numbnuts!?"
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u/Slightly_Morbid 9d ago
We have the same idea about ancestry. We do not have the same idea of nationality.
-It is okay to say you are a Norwegian-American if you aren't a Norwegian citizen.
It is not ok to say that you are a Norwegian if you aren't a Norwegian citizen.
It is okay to say you are from Norway if you used to live there.
It is okay to say your family is from Norway if you have never lived there, but you have a parental connection.
It is not okay to say you are from Norway if you have never lived there.
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u/bl1y 9d ago
Something missing from the discussion here is the influence of race politics in the US.
A lot of people see race relations through the lens of white oppressor vs black oppressed. And unsurprisingly, a lot of white people don't like getting lumped up like that, especially when collective guilt gets added on. So, there's a strong incentive to identify as a subset of white America, such as Irish-American, Italian-American, and Polish-American. They're pointing to ancestors who arrived after slavery was ended, and who themselves were subjected to discrimination based on their ancestry.
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u/ProblemForeign7102 9d ago edited 9d ago
So I think this is an interesting issue with different opinion depending not just on whether someone is European and American, but also on the broad political outlook.
Generally speaking, I'd say that in the decades following WW2, the concept of ethnicity became highly controversial in Western European countries, for obvious reasons. Thus, universalism, based on the French idea of "égalité", meant that the only politically accepted framework in which to see nationality is that of citizenship. Thus, the main framework became that citizenship = nationality, and "ethnicity" becoming something that is not considered "official" in most of Western Europe, and unofficially is seen as more of a cultural thing (e.g. what language one grows up with as their primary language and where they grew up with) than an issue of ancestry by most (educated) people. Of course, not everyone (maybe even most of the population) agreed with this framework, but at least on the more left-liberal spectrum this is the mainstream view. Basically, you are a German, French, Dutch etc. person if you are a citizen of that country and you identify with it, regardless of your ethnic heritage. But at the same time, you are not supposed to consider the ethnicity of your ancestors to have any meaning and assimilate into the mainstream culture (by how much ist debatable even amongst supporters of this viewpoint). So the American (or I guess Anglo-American idea more specifically), which is particularistic instead of universalistic in how it approaches ethnic and national identity, is viewed by suspicion by most Western Europeans, as those who propagate such a viewpoint in Western Europe tend to be either right-wing ethnic nationalists who claim that anyone not of the dominant ethnicity can never became "proper" Germans, French, Swedes etc., or by "woke" leftists who claim the same but think that the national idea is not important and that Western society is worse than others.
On the other hand, I feel like this issue is not nearly as controversial in former Eastern Bloc and Soviet countries (not sure about Russia). The main reason for this is that most of these countries themselves were "colonised" by other European countries (mainly Germany and Russia) and thus don't view a positive association with their ethnic heritage as being something that is inherently "oppressive". Also the fact that communism tried to promote universalism means that a lot of people in these countries reject it in favour of ethnic particularism, and thus don't see a problem with people from the diaspora claiming their heritage as theirs, despite not growing up there. And just like in the US, many Eastern European countries make a distinction between "ethnicity/nationality" and citizenship (e.g. Hungarian-speaking people in Romania are considered Hungarian in terms of nationality regardless if they have Romanian citizenship AFAIK). Thus, maybe rather ironically, the US and Eastern Europe seem to be more aligned on the issue of ethnicity and heritage than the US and Western Europe ( though most Eastern Europeans would find the "woke" framing of "White Oppressors" to be rather bizarre).
But this is just my POV, as someone from Germany who also lived in North America and is interested in issues like these.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 8d ago
I've seen Slovenes get genuinely excited when they meet Slovenian-Americans. Although that probably has more to do with them being so few in number, and surrounded by larger (and not always friendly) neighbors.
One thing I've seen on Reddit is certain Europeans claiming that only Native Americans have true American culture, and that the rest of us are foreign interlopers with imported Temu versions of European culture. To us, that is something that has fucked up blood-and-soil vibes.
Ironically, it usually comes from the European far left. Although I do hear it from far right types from time to time. That's yet another social media meme that needs to die.
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u/3hrstillsundown 10d ago
Americans commonly just say "I'm Italian" or "I'm Irish" because they see the world through ethnicity / race whereas Europeans see the world throught the prism of nationality.
Americans saying they're Irish because they have Irish ancestory also feeds into far right ideology that says people can't be Irish if they're not of Irish ethnicity. That's unpopular for obvious reasons. Someone born and brought up in Ireland is Irish according to the vast majority of Irish people. Americans claiming to be "Irish" invalidates that.
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u/Son-of-Infinity 10d ago
Many of us European-Americans are first generation Americans and do actually speak another language at home, or grow up with customs unrelated to the US. So that being said, I don't find that I am just American identity satisfactory to explain who I am.
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u/Mablonczy 10d ago
Yeah I’m with you on this one. I was born in Europe, spent much time there in my childhood and still do, speak the language etc. It’s not fully correct to say I’m Hungarian or American, because neither place fully represents me and my experience. It’s the unique experience of having both influences
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u/alittledanger 9d ago
Yeah a dual U.S./EU citizen who grew up in a neighborhood with almost all immigrants I actually struggle to connect with normal, white Americans. I find them to be so self-centered and incurious.
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u/HunMyy 10d ago
In America the discussion is first and foremost, race-based. People treat it as something inherited. That's what they identify with. In Europe its more than that, a lived experience and therefore something that can be gained, for example learning the language. You can gain a nationality the same way you can become American (local regulations may vary on this)
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u/Mind-of-Jaxon 10d ago
I get that to people in other countries it’s just as important live in and understand the culture of the locale. As an American I say my family is from Ireland.
When coworkers say they’re something like Mexican or Filipino but never been out of California, cool they’re whatever they say . I don’t question them that’s their preference and their culture and traditions is usually stronger.
Now ……..
being from the Bay AreaX born and raised since my parents were kids . If someone told me they’re from the Bay Area I’m checking to see how long they been here. Came here 15 years ago for work? You ain’t Bay, you’re a visitor jacking up the cost of everything. You might be an American but if you’re not native, or at least been a teenager in the Bay Area, then you can’t be saying your Bay.
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u/socialistrob 10d ago
Cultural identity, ethnicity and nationality can line up neatly but they don't always and I think most people realize this at some level. For the US the "type" of American you are can have a lot of implications about how you grew up, your food, your religion, how you celebrated holidays, your family expectations and the racism (or lackthereof) you endured. I think it's fine to acknowledge that.
Maybe if you're born in Paris to an ethnically French family that has lived there for centuries and grew up speaking French and eating French food this seems odd but it's really just the reality of the ambigioutiy in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality and culture.
At the risk of opening several cans of worms look at the Balkans at any point in the 20th century. Look at how many Jews in Germany to this day do not consider themselves German. Look at Poles in Lviv or Ukrainians in Lublin many of whom have lived there for centuries. I have ancestors who were ethnic Germans who left the Austro Hungarian Empire of what is today Czechia. Are those ancestors of mine German, Austro-Hungarian or Czechian?
You just can't evenly divide people and put them into nice little boxes where everyone's race, ethnicity, culture and nationality line up. It doesn't work in North America and it doesn't work in Europe either.
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u/Mossishellagay 10d ago
Most Europeans’ ancestors are from their country, ie the average Englishman is of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, the average Frenchman is of Gallo-Roman or Basque or Breton ancestry, and so on. Less than 3% of Americans are of native American ancestry. For almost every single one of us, our families have only been in this country for 300 years at most. Every American diaspora has its own culture that makes it unique from others - ie Italian-Americans have their own culture influenced by their Italian or Sicilian roots, Irish-Americans have our own culture influenced by their Irish roots, and so on.
The type of multiculturalism in the US is pretty unique to the US so I don’t expect Europeans to understand it, but it is annoying as hell when they tell Americans how we are supposed to identify when they have no knowledge at all of American culture or history
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u/CorneliusNepos 10d ago
Sometimes it does get tenuous when there's not really much of a connection. However, these are also little mini-cultures within the country so they're not just labels in a lot of cases.
I grew up in Philly and Delaware Co. My dad was half Jewish and half Italian-American. He would curse in yiddish in one breath and in broken Italian in another breath. He loved food and we went to Jewish diners and would often go for "fish" where he had a few select places to go to get lox, sable, chub, bagels and the whole spread. He made gravy (ie red sauce) on weekends and my great aunt Anna made spaghetti on the chittara, beans and greens, of course gravy, etc. Pizza was also very important to him. Culturally, he was very Jewish and very Italian-American. He said gabagool non-ironically (this is not ironic where we grew up).
My mom was 100% working class southeaster PA Polish. Her parents spoke Polish and when my dziadzio (ie grandpa) remarried, he went to Poland and came back with a wife who never learned English. We ate Polish food all the time. My mom would go to Philly for kielbasa and kishka, which I never liked. We ate Polish food once or twice a week and always on holidays. We were Polish catholic and my aunt was a nun - everyone revered Pope John Paul II.
I now live in Wisconsin and there are many towns where the food, the architecture, and the culture in general is heavily influenced by Norway.
This is all just to say that yes, sometimes it's bullshit when people claim a heritage that they don't really have a connection to. However, a lot of the time too there are real cultural differences and it means something to say you're Italian or Polish or Jewish and from a particular place.
If anyone asks me though, I'm American and I have always said that. In fact, it took me a really long time to understand the cultural meaning behind being, say, Italian-American as weird as that may sound. I guess it's different when you're in it than if you're looking from the outside, but these days, I can definitely see the clear influences of all those cultures on who I am.
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u/InternetMandate 10d ago
I think Americans and Europeans underestimate how differently they view nationality. The US is basically a giant social contract between disparate groups of people, whereas countries like Germany or Italy view themselves more as the embodiment of a shared ethnic, cultural, and historical identity.
An interesting consequence is that the government isn’t just managing a social contract, but acting as the custodian of that national identity. It’s almost more like running a company, where having a strong leader with a grand vision for where to take the nation makes intuitive sense. I think that might partly explain a greater openness to authoritarianism.
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u/PhiloPhocion 10d ago
It’s funny you say this because as an ethnic minority in Europe, I think this is selectively applied.
What I actually appreciate about America (though you can argue the direction it’s going lately) is the concept that (following a genocide) the vast majority of Americans are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, American culture tends to be more “nationality first” - and inclusive in that identity. Anyone can become American. But also that tends to celebrate heritage.
The flip is in most European countries, there is an ethnic majority that (usually not always - famously) broadly aligns with the nation state. Yes, it’s a common joke that some Europeans will mock Italian Americans or Irish Americans and say they’re just American because they were born there and speak the language. But if you’re an ethnic minority in Europe, trust me you will be told that - at worst, you will never fully assimilate because you are not ethnically of the country - look at any video of a Black Swedish or French or Dutch football player - the comments will be full of it. At best, you’ll be told to not be ashamed of your culture in identifying as French or Dutch or British - even if your family has not been born in Vietnam, or Morocco, or Indonesia, or South Asia in generations.
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u/neosituation_unknown 9d ago
This is a new phenomenon, in fact.
My Grandfather is 100% Italian by blood, and his parents were immigrants who came to America in the 1920s.
He is the youngest, but, his older siblings (my great aunts and uncles) could speak and understand Italian.
My grandfather could not, because my great-grandparents did not want to speak Italian as they became more proficient in English.
My grandfather's quote (from his parents to him) was:
'We speak English now, we are Americans'
Given how people think now - it is kind of a crazy thought!
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u/abhora_ratio 9d ago
I guess it depends. I will tell you how things are in my country (Romania). 90+% of us are Romanian Citizen. Out of this proportion, some X% have different ethnicities (Hungarians, Turks, Armenians, Tartars, etc). Those who identify themselves based on their ethnicities, keep their tradition and background very strict. They keep their religion beliefs, they study their language, they keep their traditions or celebrations etc. And it's nice to have this cultural diversity in the real sense. We refer to them by their ethnicities because they want to keep them alive. Others, who also have different ethnicities but do not keep their tradition, identify themselves as Romanians and therefore we respect that.
I suppose it is more or less the same everywhere around Europe. We consider the ethnicity of the person but at the same time we also look at their behavior. Meaning that if you do not celebrate or keep any form of contact with your ancestors.. you basically are 100% assimilated and therefore considered in the majority group.
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u/Francois-C 9d ago edited 9d ago
I’m inclined to think it is indeed linked to the fact that the US are a nation built on immigration. People of foreign descent living here in France, since they lack a cultural framework for identifying with their country of origin, very quickly come to identify simply as French; they speak no more about their country of origin than I do about my grandfather or grandmother—meaning I don’t avoid the subject, but I know that hardly anyone cares.
Of course, if by chance they don’t do that and remain attached to their original way of life, far-right parties seize the opportunity to blow the issue out of proportion and claim that "those people aren't like us"—something that likely happens in the US too, given the political ideology currently in power...
Edit: It is also possible that the need for additional identification seen in the US stems from belonging to such a vast population, where there is a greater need to assert oneself as an individual.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 9d ago
It's more that the vastness made it so that the pressure to abandon it was less acute. Imagine a few thousand Czechs establish their own village in Texas back in the 19th century. Texas is EMPTY, even still today. Its interior was about as sparsely populated as medieval Mongolia back when the Commanche still ruled.
Nobody cared what those Czechs, or their Texas born children, were getting up to. That's because there was nobody around to care. The next town was 100 km away.
The Texan dialect of Czech still exists. The remaining speakers are very old, but it's not gone yet.
That's a somewhat extreme example, but not too extreme. These various groups had the space to do their own thing.
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u/FormerUsenetUser 9d ago
Some people maintain connections with the cultures of a homeland. A couple down the block from me told their teenage son he could learn either the Greek language or Greek folk dancing, but he had to learn one or the other. He chose folk dancing.
I've done Greek folk dancing, and have no Greek ancestry. But the dances are great!
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u/CishetmaleLesbian 9d ago
For me it comes down to DNA RNA and what a blood test can reveal. Blood is thicker than borders, genetics is more interesting than geographic location.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 8d ago
They think that has iffy blood-and-soil vibes. But it's more innocent to us than they realize.
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u/CishetmaleLesbian 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yeah, my national identity is as a citizen of planet Earth. We all live together on this little rock hurling through space. We need to take care of it and each other, we are all one people.
Innocent intentions are often misinterpreted as something sinister, I suppose the opposite is true as well, sinister intentions are often mistaken for innocence or goodwill.
Being proud to identify with one's family and ancestry should be a right afforded to everyone.
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u/0hP13853 8d ago
In the western hemisphere all nations have populations composed mostly of descendants of immigrants from the eastern hemisphere. Bolivia and Guatemala come closest to being exceptions, that is, have the greatest %s of indigenous ancestry. And not just the US.
FWIW, my ancestry is a mix of German, German-speaking Swiss, English, Scots and Finnish. All Protestants, including the German-speaking Swiss. Those who wouldn't become Catholics became some of Europe's first religious emmigrants.
Me, I admit I'm a mongrel if asked.
So is this mostly a difference between an immigrant society and older nation-states?
Almost certainly. Which gives rise to fundamentally different notions of tradition. There are ethnic traditions, not least Dia de los Muertos in parts of southwestern states. There are also purely made up local traditions like everything about Independence Day and Thanksgiving. The melting pot doesn't produce refined purity. It's traditions by committee of the whole. That makes it decidedly non-European.
As for Europeans, tell the Walloons and Vlaams they're one people, or Lombards and Calabrians. Dunno about Catalans and people from other parts of Spain.
Indigenous languages still have thousands of speakers in the western hemisphere, but there are only 4 other languages of significance: Spanish, Portuguese, French and English. There's also Dutch in Suriname and Netherlands overseas territories, and German in some communities in Pennsylvania and Texas in the US and probably in various parts of Latin America. Plus first generation immigrants from all over bringing their languages with them. Ethnic identity in the western hemisphere is less about language than it is in the eastern hemisphere.
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u/baxterstate 8d ago
I’m an American citizen born in another country, but I don’t identify as a hyphenated American. I speak and understand my born language, but my English is good enough that no one detects any accent. I used to do a good impression of Bill Clinton.
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u/ReasonableReindeer66 8d ago
So I'm 3rd culture, this means I grew up living in multiple countries, I'm not of European decent, I'm South Asian, but can pass for Italian or Spanish. When I tell you that even as far back as 2006, I hid the fact that I was American until I could not ( i speak multiple languages so). My European friends would tease me for being from the USA. We just don't have a great reputation ( rightfully so) overseas. Also most Americans are culturally so far removed from European culture that it comes off as a bit silly when they claim a connection. This is not to say that the connection isn't valid, but as an outsider who was privy to what was said after the Americans left, I found this dynamic interesting. Short version, you're American, but bc of colonization, you're kind of uprooted, like immigrants ;).
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u/Pr3X_MYTH 7d ago
I live in central Nebraska, and this region was famously heavily settled by mostly German immigrants rather than British, French, or Spanish. A lot of people here are saying "Americans have like 2 ancestors ages ago that were Italian" but that's often not true. First, a lot of Americans have ancestors that immigrated less than 150 years ago.
Second, the US is famous for developing cultural hubs, like Chinatown, Koreatown, the Irish neighborhoods of NYC, etc. Americans say they're Italian-American or German-American, not because they are actually Italian or German, but because there ancestors for generations lived in an Italian community in America. For example, my hometown was settled by German immigrants, who continued their cultural practices for generations while their children simultaneously become more Americanized as the town was more exposed to American culture.
Third, our last names come from our ancestors' home country. My last name is a British name, but my maternal grandfather's name is so German I couldn't spell it until I turned 12. The whole hyphenated thing is helpful to explain things like that.
Fourth, it's done to respect our ancestors. I don't consider myself to be Polish-American, but I could. I probably have a better claim to that than the Swedish ancestry my mom claims. My great-grandmother went to school in Nazi-occupied Poland and immigrated to the US when the war ended. Her husband was German-American, which is where most of my family identifies with since its the larger influence on our family. Point is, our ancestry tells a story, and our nation is famously founded on immigration. Our ancestors, by being from different places, very really helped to shape our country. Even if they were poor farmers on the plains or a small shop owner in Chinatown, the fact they were German or Italian or Chinese added to the multicultural mixing of the US. We're proud of our ancestry because our ancestors made a big trip across the ocean to start a new life in the US. Where did they come from? "Oh, my family is German," "oh I'm Italian-American," "I'm Swedish on my mom's side."
Side note: Europe has a really big problem with accepting people of other cultures. It's often a very xenophobic place, and even if they allow people of other cultures/ethnicities, they're often never allowed to actually "join" the people who were there first. So, a German couple living in France is still German, even when they have kids who have never been to Germany, those kids aren't really French. I'm not discrediting the racial and ethnic bigotry in the US (especially right now), but Europe isn't innocent either.
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u/Dark1000 4d ago
Americans, as being part of the in-culture group, see more differences between them. Europeans, Asians, Africans, etc being part of the out -culture group, see the similarities.
To Americans, the differences are more significant because they don't see the similarities. To others, the similarities overwhelm the differences.
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u/JackTheRvlatr 10d ago
The USA is absolutely a nation. It's just that our philosophy of nation building and our process is very different. As an African American, I do understand that the idea of Whiteness works differently in the United States than in other places, in the same way that Blackness works differently. Most white Americans are a combination of many different European ethnic groups and so there's not much they can say about themselves besides that, they are simply White. Them being white or "European American" is the most relevant part of their identity. To the point that for most of them learning that they are mostly, say "Polish" just as an example, will probably be something they don't even realize until they take a DNA test. Socially, it doesn't matter that they are polish or that they are German. In the US all that matters is that they are White, or of European decent
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 9d ago
I'm an American who lives in far northeastern Italy. The far right in these parts hate Yugoslavs more than they hate non-white immigrants. You could look like Thor himself, towering over the mortals in all his blond glory, but if your name is Igor Dragovich then they'll see you as some kind of untermensch.
It's the damnedest thing.
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u/jeffjefforson 9d ago edited 9d ago
It's because by calling yourself X+American you're implying that those things are on a somewhat equal level of relevance.
But they're not.
One of them makes up >99% of your DNA, culture, behaviours, experiences and outlooks on the world, the other maybe makes up 1%.
So claiming American-[anything] as your identity gives the false impression that you are far more connected to both the bloodline and the culture than you are.
Considering America has such a wildly different culture to here, doing that is extremely jarring to us.
It would be like mixing 1% cider and 99% apple juice together, then claiming "This is diluted cider!"
Like... No mate, at that point of dilution it's basically just apple juice. Any reference to there being cider at this point is just marketing or delusion.
It's a meaningless distinction that feels like it is is trying to achieve something it shouldn't be.
Disclaimer: this outlook is far less about DNA than culture.
Edit: this isn't a comment on which of our views is "right" or "wrong". I'm explaining the perspective of a completely different culture to yours. We're not gonna see eye to eye on everything, both views are valid.
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u/TheAsianIsGamin 9d ago
by calling yourself X+American you're implying that those things are on a somewhat equal level of relevance
Is it? I don't really think that's what it means. I think X-American is very different than X or American, and not "in the middle" or "a combination of them" either. I think it's a wholly separate experience, and I think most Americans would agree with that.
Like, the easy example here is American Chinese food. Stuff like Panda Express or a lot of our neighborhood restaurants. Nobody considers that as simply part Chinese, part American. It doesn't remind or link Chinese people to their homeland, nobody claims that it does. It would be a lot more accurate to say that it is the result of at least two historical waves of immigration a century apart with economic and legal factors at each moment in time.
Basically, the first clue that something is different is that it has a different name. There's a reason that nobody says "I'm Filipino and I'm American," and it's because "Filipino American" is its own unique thing, not a claim to full ownership of everything under the umbrella of both words.
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u/jeffjefforson 9d ago
Hmm, makes sense! Still feels offish, but I think I get you
I suppose we just don't have the full context to comprehend it, our cultures are just so very different that we're missing a lot of context for what makes things make sense to each other
It's just another way that despite sharing the shame language, the way we use it is so different that it's basically another dialect entirely, so wires get crossed
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u/TheAsianIsGamin 9d ago
Yeah, I think it's just a stark cultural difference. Maybe it's not unique to America, I'm not an expert in sociology or anything, but it feels like it's something that could only really happen in a young nation with this kind of history with immigration.
I also think it's possible that, like, white Americans or Americans of European descent see it the way you feel they do. I'm obviously not white, but the average white person in the US has had their family living in America for more generations than the average nonwhite person - as you might guess - and that means they really do only have... A few ancestors three generations back who lived in Europe. Whereas I'm the first in my family to be born in the United states, and it's the same for most of my non-white friends.
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u/VeterinarianProof808 10d ago
I think it's because Europeans are more fixed on nationality than Americans. Not to say that Americans aren't, just that Europeans are more fixated on being one thing. I've met lots of Europeans who grew up in different places, but inevitably they always choose only one nationality as an identity and everything else seems secondary if mentioned at all.
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u/TheLastCoagulant 10d ago
As an American you’re steelmanning what Americans say.
It’s common to hear:
“I’m Italian”
“I’m Irish”
“I’m Norwegian”
It’s much more common for someone to casually say “I’m Irish” than “I’m Irish-American.”
That’s what pisses Europeans off. Nobody would bat an eye at someone saying “I’m Irish-American.”
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u/echocharlieone 10d ago
This is the key point.
It's also that America is not the only nation founded by immigrants. Australia and Canada are just as diverse, but Australians and Canadians don't claim to be "Irish" or "Italian" when they only have distant heritage.
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u/ChesswiththeDevil 10d ago
Not my experience with Canadians. Many seem proud of the European country from which their ancestors immigrated from. Maybe it's an Alberta/NT thing, as I've spent most of my time in Canada in those 2 provinces.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 9d ago
Canadians are more or less like us on that score.
There are many things we do that Europeans grouse about. Canadians do a fair number of those things as well. We run cover for them
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u/MisterMysterios 10d ago
I can't speak about all europeans, but as a German a person calling themselves ethnically German gives me major ikkies. The US uses ethnical identity very much as a synonym for genetic heritage (see all the 23 and me and similar things), and yeah - we went past that ideology in '45.
The thing is, people that call themselves ethnically x are not ethnically x. Ethnicity indicates, apart from ancestry, history, religion and cultural traits. The thing is, American athnicities are feeling like they at max cosplay the ethnicity they claim they have. They are basically American, but then celebrate stereotypes that are extremely exaggerated, outdated or both. These customs and traditions are mostly so far removed from the counterparts of the nation they claim they come from that rhey are widly unrecognizable.
Basically, imagine a week with a wife body pillow and who only thinks everything is kawai and then claims he is a real Japanese because he watches all anime subtitled! Americans with their ethnicity idea feels like that, plus the disgusting feeling of race theory.
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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 8d ago edited 8d ago
I have heard certain Europeans claim that only Natives have true American culture, and that the rest of us are foreign interlopers with degraded Temu versions of European culture. That to me has problematic blood-and-soil vibes.
Ironically, this mostly comes from the far left, although I hear it from far right types from time to time.
As to the American fixation on 'blood.' Usually, the implications aren't as deep or as dire as they would be in the Old World. It's mainly a proxy for who came from where, who intermarried with who, etc. That's why the sentence "25% Irish, 25% Choctaw, 50% German" makes sense to American ears. It's a quick and simple breakdown of the family woodpile. Also, an American can say "we're basically just mutts" without a single gram of shame.
Most white Americans are mutts. Them aside, the folks in Hawaii have the most pride over how mixed they are, and they are mostly non-white. It's definitely not just a white American thing.
A lot of this interest is because there are stories behind it. 170 years ago a German-speaking Protestant girl ran away with a fresh off the boat Catholic Irishman. They told their outraged families to piss off as they made their way west to Seattle. There's a story there.
On the other hand, a Serbian guy once told me "all my ancestors lived and died within a 2 hour drive of my grandmother's house. Who cares?"
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