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Notes -
From Europe, Poland to be more specific.
For me "American Midwest family with Germanic ancestry they don't even know about is more German than they will ever be" is absolutely laughable position.
No, just because you can trace some Polish ancestry does not make you Pole. You have no genetic memory etc. You are welcome in my country but if you start talking in English (not knowing any Polish and having meme-level understanding of Polish culture) how you are Polish then I am surely not going to agree with you.
Just because your grandfather could say 10 words in Polish, 5 of them being curses does not make you Polish. If all your grandfathers and grandmothers were Polish but you lost language, lost culture that makes you white, not Polish. (though if someone wants to recover that, it is entirely welcome to do so and I would be happy to help if I would encounter such person)
I have quite high bar what I would expect before I would consider someone to be Polish. But at least in theory it seems possible to me for someone green/yellow/black/purple/German to become Polish. And there were cases of this happening.
And yes, specially for our resident SSman: many people with Jewish ancestry were Poles, some of them were Poles practising Jewish religion, for some of them they were distinguishable only by genealogy and surnamed. (some failed to do so or had completely distinctive cultural identify). Though nowadays it is extremely rare as German murdered millions of Poles and Jews after invading. And while under communist occupation many were kicked out. Or preferred to escape from communist paradise.
And we had and have Poles with German, Belarusians, Russian, Ukrainian ancestry. Maybe if you would look really hard you would find some Poles with other skin colours (note: I can easily find some prominent people with Polish citizenship which are yellow/black, this does not make them Poles).
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