<p>I’m actually lower class, and kind of anti-American. The way you guys put this is a little bigoted/rigid I think, because American is an identity as well. If you don’t feel like you belong to it, or that you truly don’t as your family participates in more than just holidays but actually speaks the language and has relatives in the native country, I don’t think you are in that group of middle-class Americans with no identity in little boxes on the hillside (and they all look just the same).</p>
<p>Your identity is whatever fabrication you create, and people are sheep. I am not defending myself, and I actually don’t feel like I “belong” in any culture. Rather, I reject my family’s culture in many ways- not out of rebellion or disrespect, but because I don’t identify. People choose what they identify with. One can change their accent or appearance and conform elsewhere if they desire to. WantsBrown, I actually have friends with parents like that. I think its a bit strange, but rather than create a tribe, they have this delusion that they are very Native American when they really aren’t, so they participate in this tribe’s activities. So, perhaps some of it is like this, but to group 350 million people in such a stereotype is close-minded bigotry IMO.</p>
<p>Lol @ the European elitism. I quite enjoy my country, thank you, and I’ll take American culture over any other country’s any day.</p>
<p>No one is a native of anywhere. The native Americans traveled from Asia, and the Europeans traveled from Africa. The fact that your ancient ancestors moved to their present continent before mine is irrelevant. We’re all immigrants.</p>
<p>In addition to that, people constantly move and marry with other ethnicities. There’s no such thing as “pure British” or “only German”. Your grandparents may both be British, but their ancestors could have married an Indian centuries ago. </p>
<p>I am American, but my family a few generations back pretty much all came from the same country. And my last name is still very ethnic. So while I am definitely American, I still retain some cultural and biological traits from my ancestors. I still identify as American, but it’s not like I was created from nothing and have no past.</p>
<p>What about celebs who do this? A lot of notable Americans self-identify as being _____-American. Conan O’Brien’s family, on both sides, came from Ireland a handful of generations ago. He calls himself Irish nearly every broadcast. Kurt Vonnegut, even in his last writings, referred to himself as being German-American. Jonathan Davis, vocalist from crap-rock band Korn, always refers to himself as being Scottish-American. etc, etc</p>
<p>Aren’t these people’s lives interesting enough without extra titles?</p>
<p>It’s not surprising that a person in the UK might be ignorant of ethnic and national identification in the U.S., because it’s complicated. It also varies significantly be region of the country. For example, in the South, whites are much less likely to think of themselves in terms of their European origins. In northern and midwestern areas, though, this is very different, in part because of more recent waves of immigrants. As other posters have noted, many Americans retain customs and foods from their countries of origin. In some cases, this is also connected to religion. (Interestingly, hardly anybody thinks of himself as being an English-American, though.)
Still, most of these people still think of themselves as thoroughly American, and have no particular allegiance to the country from which their ancestors came.</p>
<p>“I can’t see the difference. Like I said, it’s a middle-class white phenomenon. You are self-identifying in place of having a unique ancestry. You’re American.”</p>
<p>Wrong. Many African-Americans still identify with an entire continent(not simply a country), even if their lineage includes Europeans.</p>
<p>What you’ve described, in the case of African-Americans, is an entirely different phenomenon. Read some Harriet Martineau or Orlando Patterson and you’ll see the drastically different effects, and resulting phenomena, of forcibly stripping away ancestry and voluntarily hanging on to parts of it.</p>
<p>Wow. 50% of this thread is rationally-reached opinion meant as a contribution, and 50% is a bigoted, you’re-wrong-I’m-right-end-of-story point of view. To have read a couple of books on the subject (which is just an opinion, not facts) doesn’t make you an anthropological scholar. If you don’t have a degree on the subject, it seems inappropriate to preach what you know as fact.</p>
<p>I already feel stupid for saying that, time for the meat grinder! And this wasn’t meant for anyone in particular.</p>
<p>You’re absotootly right. It’s all conjecture. I just got a little heated when the comparison was made between post-slave ethnicities and bored, old whities. I said it!</p>
<p>@hellojan: awesome! When I get really insulted in these threads just by reading the ridiculous opinions of people that can see beyond themselves (we all know those posters), I think of it this way:
OKAY, IT’S AN ONLINE FORUM! These people are too afraid to vent their obviously cruel bigotries in real life anyhow, so I close it. And hope that someday, these people see how better-than-thou really makes you worse than everybody else.</p>
<p>America is all about diversity and roots. We don’t all know our histories or where we came from, so it’s interesting to find out these things about ourselves and others. This might be hard to understand for someone in Europe who lives in a country where everyone has the same ethnic background and there’s nothing interesting about tracing it back. Even though I might talk about my ancestry with my friends, I don’t claim to be of that culture. If I were in Europe I wouldn’t identify as anything other than American, and I don’t think any other American would either.</p>
<p>“This might be hard to understand for someone in Europe who lives in a country where everyone has the same ethnic background and there’s nothing interesting about tracing it back”</p>
<p>This is not really applicable to the U.K.(OP’s home country)</p>
<p>Definitely! Depending on what part of the U.S. one is from, it may be very common to be first or second generation, especially for those of us over 40. Where I grew up, many of us had parents or grandparents immigrants from from “the old country.” :)</p>
<p>“What you’ve described, in the case of African-Americans, is an entirely different phenomenon. Read some Harriet Martineau or Orlando Patterson and you’ll see the drastically different effects, and resulting phenomena, of forcibly stripping away ancestry and voluntarily hanging on to parts of it.”</p>
<p>I did not mean to imply that African-Americans did not have a unique culture and you’re correct that it was an unfair comparison on my part. Let me try and understand your position more clearly. White Americans, past first generation immigrants, “fabricate” their own ethnic identity, yes? African Americans, on the other hand, have no need to fabricate an ethnic identity as they have a far greater degree of shared history and hardship among themselves? Their identity is a uniquely African American one that, even though it resembles certain aspects of traditional African cultures(ex. oral traditions)? White Americans do not have much of a shared history. Their ancestors came from different areas with different cultures at different time periods and emigrated for different reasons. European emigrants differed from their African counterparts with regards to the circumstances of their exodus. Because the Africans were enslaved and sent to America against their will, a shared culture around their hardship and suffering emerged. This culture was sustained as they gained emancipation, citizenship, voting rights, and eventually civil rights. European Americans, who lack this sustained, shared hardship, do not have similarly strong cultural ties. Thus, they look back to the ‘Old Country’ for some source of ethnic heritage and pride, unsatisfied with being simply ‘American’. </p>
<p>Small comment: isn’t there a shared human component to all of this? I think EVERYONE needs to identify. If you look at pretty much every American city, there will be the Little Italy or Tokyo or Chinatown; entire towns of Scottish/German/Polish immigrants were founded in rural areas. These places have intense cultural ties that have melded over time with the other cultures, creating “American” culture. Of course, the individual family unit is different from culture to culture. Some ethnicity have a village ethic, where everyone communes, everyone is family. Some are very private and personal about who they admit into their tradition. So, I would say that due to different circumstances and cultural tradition, African-Americans have a different way of identifying. On the other hand, so do all these other cultures. </p>
<p>The only real fabrication of identity occurs when there is none to start with: the Americans who were raised American, that had a great-great-uncle from Germany that makes them “German”, but knows nothing of any other culture but American. This may be a majority or a minority, I don’t know, as I’ve grown up in areas with 60-70% 1st and 2nd generation immigrants.</p>
<p>I grew up in an area with almost no recent immigrants except for a few Latinos. It is actually very common for people to say things like, “I’m German, so I eat meat and potatoes.” I find that a bit annoying, since most of them don’t even know what danke means, and they use Americanized pronunciations of their last names. </p>
<p>I try not to identify too closely with any nation in Europe because my ancestry is so mixed. I know for sure that it includes Germans, Irish, French, English, and Dutch, and there are most likely several others mixed in there somewhere. To further add to the confusion, my last name is rather rare, and doesn’t appear to resemble any word in any language. While it’s correct to identify myself only as American, it does make me feel a bit empty to think that I have no particular “old country.” This is why so many Americans are Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.</p>
<p>Yeah, I do get what you say, and I understand it is kind of laughable when people claim to have a particular culture but don’t really know the connotations of belonging to that culture.
To rant about it with such conviction and animosity seems a bit extreme though. You grew up around very few immigrants, whereas I grew up around mostly immigrants. My family has a huge European influence: my uncle spent most of his life in Germany, and his family speaks nothing but. He doesn’t consider himself American, yet some people would say the simple act of moving to America forces you into that category. (Crevecoeur, famous words) I am used to both ideas, as this is a split argument in my family as well, with recent and not-so-recent immigrants alike. I think it really shows how attached you are to the American ideal. </p>
<p>I guess an easy test of your culture is if you have an accent, no? </p>
<p>Oh, and the proper term for descendants of immigrants that maintain much of their “blood” (50-100%) is they are part of the “___ diaspora”, the dispersion of peoples outside of their original locale. Most people in America say “I’m Irish”, when in reality the term would be “I am part of the Irish diaspora.” Everyone has a history, to not recognize it is a terrible thing.</p>