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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27241 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Please, just because you are either unable or unwilling to trace your ethnic origin or mix back a few hundred years when your (European) ancestors showed up doesn't mean that you get to call yourself just "American" and consider anyone else of a different skin color as being something entirely. The only relevant characteristic in a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants is whether they hold citizenship. Have it? Congratulations, you've just been transmuted into an American, here's your card letting you call yourself a member of the Greatest Nation in the world (unironic endorsement).

Ethnically American, not even indigenous, can't make this shit up if you tried.

just because you are either unable or unwilling to trace your ethnic origin or mix back a few hundred years when your (European) ancestors

I am both able and willing, and can find my great grandfather's grave in the old country, and know which town of a few hundred where my great-grandmother was born. But that great grandfather wasn't American, and neither was the great grandmother. The two of them were not American, and neither was their daughter, but her husband was, because his family had been in a half-dozen states over two centuries prior. He was of borderer stock, by the way. So don't confuse me staking out this position with apathy or ignorance.

and consider anyone else of a different skin color as being something entirely.

My white great grandfather wasn't American, and neither was his white wife. Nikola Jokic and Kirstaps Prozingas and Luka Doncic and Dirk Nowitzki are not American, despite their skin color, because they have their own ethnicities, their own homelands, their own people. They can be citizens, and maybe their children could be, depending on their mothers, but they are not and will not be American.

The only relevant characteristic in a nation of immigrants

Not immigrants: colonists. My family has been in this land since before the country existed. Where you say immigrant, I say foreigner, where I say founding stock, you say immigrant.

Have it? Congratulations, you've just been transmuted into an American

No. That's simply not true, as much as people like you want it to be true. I will not concede it and I will continue to contest it whenever the assumption tries to slip in. It especially rings hollow when your coethnics are applying the same logic to Britain, or Arab muslims applying to it France, neither of which have ever been a nation of immigrants. It reveals the motivation for such arguments to be anti-white animostiy, jealously and bitterness at the glories of the British and American and French empires, resentment at the success of the fairer races, and revenge for old grievances.

Ethnically American, not even indigenous, can't make this shit up if you tried.

You Know Nothing.

It seems to me that for an ethnicity to exist in practice, you need a critical mass of people to identify with it to the exclusion of other identities, and that is what "Americans"/Amerikaners/white Americans of colonial British heritage/[insert your preferred neologism here] lack. Ukrainians are fighting a war not to get lumped in with the Russian ethnicity and Palestinians have fiercely resisted decades of attempts to group them with Jordanians or Egyptians, but I doubt even a lizardman's constant of your founding stock American ethnicity conceive of it in the same terms you do or would lift a finger to assist any political mobilization on their behalf (unless it were disguised as garden variety civic nationalism, which is what liberals have been paranoid about for decades despite it almost never happening).

It did and does despite constant demoralization efforts that you seem to have fallen for.

Have you never heard of unhyphenated Americans (as opposed to nonspecific Americans of any background)?

I'm not sure who coined the phrase or brought the group to prominence, but I heard of it from here:

Here’s something else cool. We can’t track Borderers directly because there’s no “Borderer” or “Scots-Irish” option on the US census. But Albion’s Seed points out that the Borderers were uniquely likely to identify as just “American” and deliberately forgot their past ancestry as fast as they could. Meanwhile, when the census asks an ethnicity question about where your ancestors came from, every year some people will stubbornly ignore the point of the question and put down “America” (no, this does not track the distribution of Native American population). Here’s a map of so-called “unhyphenated Americans”, taken from this site:

I think that there is a vast gulf between the phrase "unhyphenated American" and the phrase "ethnic American".

I do not find the former objectionable, people are free not to care about their past. But the later term implies that there is a distinct American ethnic, i.e. that the US is an ethnostate, which seems both objectionable and wrong. If you only count people who only have ancestors which inhabited the British Colonies, then the "ethnic Americans" would probably have be a small minority for a century. And if you include people with ancestors who were immigrants to the US and mixed with others, then there is not much of an ethnic left.

I have certainly heard of "Americans". My annoyance is at the claim, by KMC, that such a claim is restricted to the subsection of the citizenry that are of European origin, and so phenotypically similar that it's not immediately obvious if they're pure 100% German, 30% Irish and 70% Italian, or anything in between.

I have no objection to people imagining some undifferentiated jumbled Caucasian American as the default when they hear "American", they're still barely a majority in the country after all.

There are people who have forgotten their ethnic origins, people who nobody wishes to interrogate about them, and people where it's not immediately obvious if they have any divergence from Default American™ as it existed in 1950. That doesn't mean that African-Americans, Indian-Americans and every other visibly obvious minority can't be called American, or that the typical white dude is somehow "more American". Just within whites, there are millions who identify as Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans.

"Ethnically American" is a retarded statement when applied to anyone who didn't have ancestors dwelling on the continent before Columbus showed up. Certainly as used by KMC, it carries a not even veiled implication that they're somehow more American than the rest of them.

"Ethnically American" is a retarded statement when applied to anyone who didn't have ancestors dwelling on the continent before Columbus showed up

I don't think so, though I would not personally limit "ethnically American" to borderers or even to European stock. One reason your claim doesn't hold up is that "Hispanic" is the most widely-recognized ethnicity in the Americas, and all it means is "descended from Spanish (and maybe Portugese) settlers of the New World." Most Hispanic people are additionally descended from aboriginal Americans, but many are distinguishable from Old World Europeans only by the accent of their Spanish.

Remember that "ethnicity" is a word that was added to the English language less than one hundred years ago, and was not even a dictionary entry until 1972. It was intended to replace "dated" (the source says "tainted") terms like race, nation, and minority. From the link:

Today, “ethnicity” tends to describe any group that is characterized by a distinct sense of difference owing to culture and descent.

People who say they are "ethnically American" today are broadly asserting that they experience a distinct sense of difference owing to culture and descent. You appear to essentially be using "ethnicity" as a synonym for the older concept of "race." Which you're free to do, but it kind of violates the whole point of the word's coining. Which you're additionally free to disagree with, if your focus is more rooted in DNA etc., but you should then be at least conscious of the controversy.

Certainly as used by KMC, it carries a not even veiled implication that they're somehow more American than the rest of them.

I suspect this is partly due to the overlapping meanings of "American." Even Scott Alexander has noticed that "American" tends to tag the "red tribe" in at least some contexts. Of course, it is also the abbreviated name of two continents, and one nation, so using as the name of an ethnicity that is predominantly of European descent is clearly going to be fraught. As usual, when seeking clarity it's probably best to taboo our words--but of course, asking a large group of people to stop using their preferred ethnic tag tends to go over like a lead balloon.

One reason your claim doesn't hold up is that "Hispanic" is the most widely-recognized ethnicity in the Americas, and all it means is "descended from Spanish (and maybe Portugese) settlers of the New World." Most Hispanic people are additionally descended from aboriginal Americans, but many are distinguishable from Old World Europeans only by the accent of their Spanish

I don't see how that contradicts my point, for the same reason that African-American is a convenient moniker because most of the ADOS have no idea which particular region within a whole continent their ancestors came from.

People who say they are "ethnically American" today are broadly asserting that they experience a distinct sense of difference owing to culture and descent. You appear to essentially be using "ethnicity" as a synonym for the older concept of "race." Which you're free to do, but it kind of violates the whole point of the word's coining. Which you're additionally free to disagree with, if your focus is more rooted in DNA etc., but you should then be at least conscious of the controversy.

I do not think that KMC has such ambiguous aims. If he or you can concede that in principle, an American of Indian origin can "feel ethnically American" as well as, I would have no objections to this weird approach.

As usual, when seeking clarity it's probably best to taboo our words--but of course, asking a large group of people to stop using their preferred ethnic tag tends to go over like a lead balloon.

He can call himself whatever he likes, it's the not particularly principled exclusion of other American citizens who look different that makes me annoyed.

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