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Notes -
I don’t think continuous cultural sharing is what’s key for identity, though, otherwise “Yugoslav” or “Balkan” would be a very strong identity. Identities tend to be forged oppositionally, eg precisely when a significant number of people you interact with semi-regularly don’t share your identity. That’s why the one circumstance in which Balkan or Scandinavian identities are most salient is when a Croat meets a Serb or a Norwegian meets a Finn in a third country, and also why living abroad is a great way to become more aware of your own national identity. With the exception of some Eastern Mediterranean and Balkan identities, the primary outgroup of most white European peoples has been other white European peoples, hence why whiteness doesn’t have much weight as an in-group identity. While that’s perhaps changing in the US now, I’d wager the same has been true for most American identities — due to the exclusion of black Americans from competition with whites until recently and the historically fairly low proportion of Hispanic Americans, the most salient identities have been things like Catholic/Protestant/Jewish or Irish/Italian/WASP/German. That’s why I don’t think “whiteness” is an identity with much force yet, although I’ll grant that’s changing over time.
As for the over/underperformance of Asian-Americans in education, my experience as a university lecturer in the US was that Asian-Americans were significantly over-represented among the absolute best-performing students in my classes by pretty much every metric (including things like participation and creativity, areas where some have doubted Asian-American performance). I will flag though that the same was not true of my Asian study-abroad students, especially Chinese students; in that case, there were many who just did not give a fuck about doing well in class, and this was the group where cheating was most rampant. There were some notable exceptions, but these tended to be the Chinese immigrants proper rather than the study-abroad crew.
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