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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27242 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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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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