<p>I lived in Boston, a city with a pretty high percentage of Irish people. I don’t remember people talking in Gaelic, demanding that it be a second official language or to be on street signs and in buildings. As for “celebration of socially destructive behaviors thought to be typically Irish,” I have a different view. It is ok to have fun with negative stereotypes of Irish and other ethnic white minorities (Jersey shore, Mafia wives, etc.), but other ones are taboo and are a sign of prejudice and bias.</p>
<p>JHS,
Earlier in this thread, Hunt and someone else claimed that those enumerated ideas were “universal” and not unique to America, so how can they be white Protestant ideas?</p>
<p>I have noted this double standard and deliberately flout it in my postings. Most stereotypes, including the negative ones, have some truth to them. Prioritizing ethnic diversity on college campuses can lead to less intellectual diversity, because voicing certain explanations of why some groups underperform academically would be viewed as creating a hostile environment by some on campus, including administators in the Office of Diversity of Inclusion. Larry Summers was fired because his perfectly reasonable comments undermined the crusade for “gender balance” in STEM.</p>
<p>However, JHS, “basically sort of English”??? Don’t let my H’s very Irish-American family members hear you say that!</p>
<p>Though as far as divided loyalties, there used to be a fair number of Irish-Americans supporting the IRA and happy to buy them guns. But back then, no one would have assumed you were a terrorist or sympathizer or had divided loyalties just for being of Irish descent.</p>
<p>To add to that–they barely accept me for being half-English; luckily, they consider my half-Jewish side to be some sort of long lost cousins. :)</p>
<p>This is quite a statement. I wouldn’t say there was a fair number of Irish-Americans who supported the IRA and its random bombings, financially or otherwise.</p>
<p>I would bet in London, where the IRA bombings were actually happening, there might be questions of an Irishman’s loyalty.</p>
<p>@collegealum - only if they were Catholic. The Troubles were always very much a matter of sectarianism rather than nationalism per se </p>
<p>In reference to the original question, I’m at a university in a relatively left wing country, in a relatively left wing area of that country (it’s elected a socialist candidate at every election since 1935, and it’s about a mile away from where Marx wrote the Communist manifesto). I’m a politics student, and whilst the university is as a whole relatively left wing, we have had lectures on libertarianism, and it is very much the case that you can argue anything you want in coursework / exams so long as you can back it up. Just because your lecturer is left wing it doesn’t mean that you can’t be. </p>
<p>Apologies to Hunt, I guess, but if he said the ideas I enumerated were “universal”, and not the product of Anglo-American Protestantism, he’s wrong. And that’s what I was noticing: the tendency to define characteristics of Anglo-American Protestantism as “universal,” while other cultural positions are idiosyncratic. White, Protestant Americans (and their fellow-travelers) are hardly the only people in the world who define their culture as “universal” and everyone else’s as somehow not, but we (I am generally a fellow traveler) are awfully good at it.</p>
<p>By the way, I believe that many of those products of Anglo-American Protestant culture are extremely attractive to people from other backgrounds, all over the world, and I among them. Sign me up! They are good ideas! (Most of them.) But they are not innate in all humans, they are not culturally or historically neutral, they are not natural. And people who have inhabited other cultures are aware all the time how specific they are.</p>
<p>Unless those ideas are genetically race-limited (no), is there any reason we should not expect all Americans, regardless of their race, to embrace them as their own?</p>
<p>Collegealum–it is well documented that much of the IRA’s support came from America (my very pacifist H’s family was aghast to find out that Grandma was sending her pennies to them.) I don’t see a false equivalence at all.</p>
<p>H’s family were especially alarmed by grandma’s support of them in light of the fact her son and his four children were at the Tower of London an hour before it was blown up.</p>
<p>I think we don’t “expect” anyone – certainly not “all Americans” – to embrace any externally-defined ideas as their own. That’s, um, a little chilling to read, just the way you put it. It sounds like you have an ideological test for citizenship.</p>
<p>America has one, which I support – prospective naturalized citizens are asked if they are communists. I would like to broaden the ideological test in a direction you can probably guess.</p>
<p>We don’t have a test for citizenship (unless one is an immigrant) but we certainly have ideological expectations for our citizens that are embodied in our laws.</p>
<p>That’s more than a little frightening, Bay. Part of the whole concept of freedom and liberty is that I don’t need to espouse the same views as my neighbor (as long as we are civil and non-violent and don’t hurt one another and so forth).</p>