American’s seem to come in very many varieties “Italian-American”, “African-American”, “Chinese-American”, “Dutch-American” etc
Was anyone ever “English-American”? Other than someone whose parents were English?
WASP
white anglo saxon protestant - typically used to refer to the subset of that ethnicity who have some inherited wealth, generations of success in university and the professions, and ancestors of hisorical note.
Yankee - this term has a lot of different meanings, but it’s used by some political scientists and other academics to refer specifically to white Northeners who descend from English colonial stock in New England and upstate New York.
White Americans in Virginia will sometimes call themselves English, not Anglo American.There’s a class element there too - people who want to emphasize working class or rural roots will call themselves Scots Irish, not English, in the South. The South is the most English part of the US in terms f ancestry.
So basically being of "English"descent is something to be hidden, even if American’s came from working class England?
More likely it’s regarded, or used to be regarded, as the default. Irish-Americans, e.g., were so called to distinguish them from Americans of English origin. English origin being the default, it didn’t require a special term.
This. Members of this group will just call themselves American, and leave it at that.
eta
The English were the people their ancestors fought a war with.
Well except for those of us who are not American and are confused about
why English heritage is negated.
Well, calm kiwi, are there any English-New Zealanders? 
I don’t think English ancestry is being negated in the US. Rather, I think it’s being treated as the default.
Not negated, assumed to be the default.
300 years plus a bitter, blood drenched civil war have left people with stronger regional identities than explicitly ethnic ones.
Also, the people most adamant about English heritage were probabably Loyalists who fled to Canada after the Revolutionary War.
FWIW, European-Americans usually don’t identify themselves as such. I’ve never actually met someone who identified themselves as “Irish-American” or “Italian-American.” I’ve never heard anyone talk about “English-Americans,” but then again, I’ve never had a reason to.
The whole compound-descriptor thing came up as a way to avoid using color terms to refer to race. I suspect it also had a lot of to do with the Africans in America being kept in a state of ignorance about their historical race and heritage, and attempting to reclaim their ancestral identity.
White people never had to deal with this. The word “Caucasian” is, in itself, a geographic descriptor. It’s not so much a matter of negating an entire people, as much as people just not caring that much. I myself am of Irish descent, but I just call myself “white” and leave it at that.
“Anglo” is the usual term, when needed; I have described my own heritage as “generic Anglo-Irish-German mix”.
Some of this is also about time dilation: the main waves of English immigration were very long ago. Someone of Italian, Mexican, Chinese heritage is much more likely to have memories of a grandmother or someone who still maintained traditions, foods, and perhaps the language of the “old country”–creating a sense that their family was “different” from the mainstream because the family was from somewhere exotic. Those people I know whose families came from England relatively recently–three generations ago or less–identify much more strongly as English.
Yes you are right in we say we are Kiwi! Many of us are of English descent.
I just feel bad that everyone else gets to be a American-Something and the English are never acknowledged.
Why is being of English descent not something to be acknowledged? If it works for the Scots and the Irish?
Did the Welsh never emigrate?
NEVER? Seriously?? Well American television portrays your country poorly then. I didn’t invent the terms"Italian-American"or"Irish-American".
[QUOTE
White people never had to deal with this. The word “Caucasian” is, in itself, a geographic descriptor. It’s not so much a matter of negating an entire people, as much as people just not caring that much. I myself am of Irish descent, but I just call myself “white” and leave it at that.[/QUOTE]
Then why are “Italian/Greek/Dutch/Swedish/etc-American’s” a thing then?
:: Since WASP was mentioned, a drift: ::
I don’t know how cutesy this is, or was, in Israel, but the supposedly socially dominant Israeli was called a WASP (using the English/Hebrew letters/words): White, Ashkenazi, Sabra, Paratrooper
[quote=“calm_kiwi, post:13, topic:689276”]
At some point in their immigrant history, people in these groups were not considered “white.” that may sound quite absurd but I’m afraid it’s true. If you ever need proof that race is a social, not biological construct, try and figure out why the Irish weren’t considered “white” but the English were as white as they come.
In 1908 whether or not a Finnish person could be considered “white” was the subject of a trial in Minnesota. Decision here. (Finns found to be “white” and not, as the government contended, a species of Mongolian).
The three largest ethnic groups in the U.S. are the following:
- German
- Irish
- English
with German being a little greater in number than Irish and Irish being a little greater in number than English, and this has been true for the past century or so.
Which ethnicities get mentioned depends on several things. Sure, ethnicities that are extremely rare are seldom mentioned, but ones that are almost default answers aren’t mentioned that much either. People mention their ancestry if there’s some reason to make a point about it. If you’d expect someone of that ancestry in that particular position in society, why mention it?
What’s going to be increasingly true in American society is that everyone is going to eventually be of such mixed ancestry that it’s going to slowly become harder and harder to talk about a person’s ancestry having some relevance to a point you want to make. I’m of German, English, and Swiss ancestry, and I think of myself of being of relatively unmixed ancestry among Americans today. The daughter of a couple I know is of Philipino-Spanish-French-Portuguese-English-Welsh-Belorussian-Italian-American Indian ancestry. She can hardly hang around with only people of her ancestry.
It’s complicated, though, because “African” is ethnicity #2, but it can’t be broken down by country. And “Mexican” is now ahead of “English”.
But I agree that many Americans don’t even know their full ancestry. My family has been here for hundreds of years, and we usually say “Irish, English and German”, but I would be shocked if that were the whole story.
I didn’t include “African-American” in the list because it’s really a race rather than a ethnicity. As you say, to do it right you’d have to break it down by country, and that’s not possible. Mexican-Americans are not larger in number than English-Americans. There are more Hispanic-Americans than English-Americans, but if you limit it to Mexican-Americans, there are less Mexican-Americans than English-Americans. There are also problems in the counts of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, and English-Americans, but I don’t want to go into that. We’ve argued about that in previous threads, and it would hopelessly screw up this thread to have to go into that once again.
I
Virtually everyone I know who cares about those things either knew the immigrant family member, or, at most, knew someone who knew them (i.e, their grandmother talked about how HER grandmother came from .) This makes the connection to a particular other country much more immediate, and means that it is sometimes relevant when you are talking about your tastes in foods, how your family does weddings/holidays, how your family dynamic works. And, as I said above, the people I know whose grandmother was a WWI war bride talk about being “English” as much as anyone with an Italian-American grandmother talks about being Italian. There just aren’t as many of them.
Yes, but that assumes no on-going influx. I promise you, the grandchildren of my Serbian, Bosnian, Nigerian, Mexican, and Iraqi kids will identify with those nationalities, even if the other 3/4 of their backgrounds are generic “American”–because those will be the things that make them feel unique.
This is not at all my experience. Most white people that I know can flesh out their ethnic background (“Polish”, “Slovak”, “Armenian”, “Irish”, etc.,) sometimes in great detail and sometimes not, but they almost always identify with to some degree.
I think it depends on where you live. White people in New England and the Great Lakes areas (the only places I’ve lived), in my experience, tend to identify with their ethnic roots much more so than (I’m told) people in Appalachia or the South.