Yankee, as per E.B. White (via, also via):
The connotation is a rural farmer (Well, as rural as it gets in Vermont, har har) who is up with the chickens and about as well-traveled, and has Made A Virtue Of Necessity, a phrase which mainly implies they’re too poor to afford most creature comforts and therefore look down on everyone who has a new car. 
There is definitely a difference depending on the area of the U.S. you come from - especially North versus South. I would argue that both whites and blacks that have been in the American South for hundreds of years are an ethnic category of their own at this point.
My last name comes from my ancestors at the first colony at Jamestown over 400 years ago. That side of the family remained English loyalists until after the Revolutionary War (Tories - we always had a knack for picking the losing side during any of the earlier wars). I have zero known immigrant ancestors that came over less than 300 years ago and probably longer. I know that I have English heritage but Shakespeare was still alive when my direct paternal ancestors that gave me my last name came over to put things in perspective.
I am not sure how much that has to do with England today. Combine that with lots of Scots-Irish heritage and possibly some true Irish heritage and you have the makings of a modern, generic Southern white person. Those mixed but consistent lineages have had more than enough time to build heritage of their own so we no longer refer back to the parent populations from a European countries that no longer exist in any recognizable form. I don’t know what the time limit is for someone to be considered ‘native’ but hundreds of years seems to be at least borderline to me if not definitive.
I describe myself as Southern first, generic American second and Native American just a little because I am 1/8th Comanche with some recognizable features from that lineage.
The Northeast is completely different from the South when it comes to genealogy for most families. If you want to know about the old country in the northern industrial cities, you can just ask the person sitting next to you at the dinner table because the chances are good that they either came over themselves or someone that they have direct knowledge of their ancestors that did with pictures on the wall to prove it and little trinkets to remember them by. The same isn’t true in the South. Your ancestry may be from say, Virginia or Tennessee but you will not have any direct knowledge about it any further back. That is the ancestral homeland.
When I lived in Atlanta, people would ask “what are you?” and they were fine with "black. When I moved to NJ, however, “black” wasn’t good enough. They wanted an ethnicity, too. This is when I started referring to myself as “African American”, to distinguish me from an Caribbean/African immigrant and to make my identifier similar to everyone else’s.
Growing up I never heard white people refer to themselves by hyphenated ethnicity. But in NJ, no one went by just “white”. They went by Cuban-American, Irish-American, Polish-American, etc.
So it’s definitely a regional thing.
Excuse me, John Mace, but what are you talking about? Look at the table in that link you gave in your post. Here’s the link again:
Here’s the numbers it gives for the top ethnicities:
1 German 42,841,569 15.2%
2 Irish 30,524,799 10.8%
3 African 24,903,412 8.8%
4 English 24,509,692 8.7%
5 American 20,188,305 7.2%
6 Mexican 18,382,291 6.5%
7 Italian 15,638,348 5.6%
8 Polish 8,977,235 3.2%
9 French 8,309,666 3.0%
10 Amerindian 7,876,568 2.8%
11 Scottish 4,890,581 1.7%
12 Dutch 4,541,770 1.6%
13 Norwegian 4,477,725 1.6%
14 Scotch-Irish 4,319,232 1.5%
15 Chinese 4,010,114 1.4%
So there are indeed more English-Americans than Mexican-Americans.
Shagnasty writes:
> The Northeast is completely different from the South when it comes to genealogy
> for most families. If you want to know about the old country in the northern
> industrial cities, you can just ask the person sitting next to you at the dinner table
> because the chances are good that they either came over themselves or someone
> that they have direct knowledge of their ancestors that did with pictures on the
> wall to prove it and little trinkets to remember them by.
Well, no. You exaggerate here. Yes, there are a reasonable number of people in such cities who immigrated to the U.S. themselves or are only a generation or so from an immigrant, but it’s not nearly as many as you think. Most people will be descended from immigrants who came to the U.S. in the nineteenth or even the late eighteenth century and will have never met any immigrant ancestor or have any mementos from them. Those ancestors will be nothing but twigs on a family tree to them. I think you exaggerate about the South too. Yes, the percentage of ancestors who came to the U.S. relatively recently is considerably smaller than in the North, but it’s not as small as you think.
My mother’s family considered themselves Irish-American because that is the culture they identified with. My grandmother was technically Norwegian, English, and French by heritage but was brought up by an Irish stepfather and absorbed his sayings and attitude. She married a first generation Irish-American. My father’s family is Irish-Slovenian, with more of the Slovene culture in his upbringing but his name was strongly Irish so we kids were also considered Irish-American by our Nordic-ancestry neighbors.
Basically, all this did was help categorize what went on in the households in our very mixed neighborhood. The Finnish heritage family next door had a sauna in the basement. We were clearly Catholic so weren’t asked to our friends homes for dinner on Fridays because they “knew” we were supposed to be meatless that day. I asked a Jewish neighbor to teach me how to make simple kosher lunches for the Jewish kids I babysat and I would celebrate Christmas twice because my best friend was Greek Orthodox.
So it was a kind-of helpful form of stereotyping. Luckily, there was only one neighbor who took the stereotyping down to a bad level. All the other parents, regardless of heritage, made sure we knew the difference. It was a great way to learn about other people’s backgrounds and traditions. I know I was lucky to grow up in the neighborhood I did.
Well I don’t know where Chihuahua’s from, because I’ve heard it all my life. Plus in some areas, you even have neighborhoods that are considered “ethnic”. Like “Little Italy”, or “Polish Hill”. (Born and raised in Pittsburgh)
Mainly it’s because a lot of people kept their culture when they came over, and passed it on to their kids. Also, despite the phrase “melting pot”, people weren’t allowed to assimuliate when they came to America. They were pretty much isolated and kept to their own kind. You heard of the whole “No Irish Need Apply”? Then it was those “filthy Italians”, or “stupid Polacks” or whatever.
Kind of like nowadays, when people of Mexican heritage, or Muslims are discriminated against, and called “UnAmerican”. Well, back in the day, the same was said about the Irish, or the Italian.
FWIW, I’m Irish-German on my father’s side, Polish-Hungarian-Slovak on my mom’s. We still have some customs we observe (mostly culinary, some holiday traditions), and some family heirlooms that were brought over “from the old country”. 
I was in a Black man’s house last week, on a Black block of a Black neighborhood on the Black side of the city. Me, the pasty redhead.
His neighbor lady came in, and screeched, “There’s a White woman in your house!”
His son piped up, in perfect flat Midwestern news anchor dialect, “We prefer Caucasian-Americans.”
I don’t think I stopped laughing for 5 minutes.
That’s the thing…they’re really not a thing in most conversation. They may come up when it’s specifically relevant. A friend will refer to herself as Italian-American when discussing pasta recipes, perhaps. But if you want to know someone’s heritage, you generally have to ask…at least in my neck of the woods (Chicago, IL).
It seems to be used more in news stories, sometimes when relevant and sometimes not. Also when discussing real estate and neighborhoods - neighborhoods in my city are largely self-segregated by ethnic/national background. So you might talk about “Over by Foster and Clark Street, in the big Swedish-American area.” But outside of that, I can’t think when I’ve ever heard or said, “Swedish-American.” It just sounds awkward to me. Mostly we’d just say “Swedish” or “Italian” neighborhoods, with the default understanding that we’re talking family history, not people who have a passport from another country.
Interesting to read the variety of responses, though. I didn’t realize there were so many differences.
Excuse yourself. That was the 2000 census. Most of us would expect the 2010 census data to trump the 2000 data. Is it your contention that the 2000 census data is more up-to-date than the 2010 data? Because that would be… odd.
That’s the listing from the 2000 Census. He was referring to the listing from 2010 Census right below it.
That really depends on exactly where you are and exactly which dinner table you are at. I grew up in NYC and I’m sure lots of people in NYC have never met their immigrant ancestors , but lots more of them have. I am trying very hard, and cannot think of anyone I know (with the exception of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans*) who did not either know their immigrant ancestors or was an immigrant themselves. Over 35% of NYC residents are foreign born and about 60% are either immigrants or the children of immigrants.* Once you account for people who are third or fourth generation marrying more recent immigrants, the percentage of people who know their immigrant ancestors will rise. Get my cousins , spouses and our children/grandchildren together at a dinner table and you’ll have everything from fifth generation (along one line of descent) to the immigrants themselves.
Let’s see now- I knew two of my immigrant great-grandparents and the two immigrant grandparents on the other side. All of them were deceased before my kids were born, so you might think my kids won’t know their immigrant ancestors. Except that my husband is first-generation, and they knew his parents. Okay, my grandchildren probably won’t know any of their immigrant ancestors. Except that my daughter’s fiancee-in-all-but-name is the son of an immigrant. And before you think I live in some ethnic enclave, the immigrants are from four different countries.
People usually refer to themselves as Italian, Chinese , Irish etc, without the hyphen. The only time I’ve ever heard someone say they were “Italian-American” is if they were talking to an Italian from Italy although even then the heritage is usually communicated by “My family comes from Sciacca” or something like that rather than the hyphenate.
O.K., there’s something really strange going on here. Yes, the Wikipedia entry claims to take both of those tables from the respective censuses. It claims that it takes the first table from the 2000 census and the second table from the 2010 census. However, look at the footnotes for those two tables. The footnote for the 2000 census indeed refers to a 2000 census document:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/c2kbr-35.pdf
And that makes sense because there was an ancestry question on the 2000 census. However, there was no ancestry question on the 2010 census. The footnote for the 2010 table doesn’t refer to a 2010 census document. it refers to an article in an online magazine called Business Insider:
The article says specifically that the 2010 census didn’t ask an ancestry question. it says that the numbers given come from “the American Community Survey.” The numbers from American Community Survey, it appears, are not precise statistics like the numbers from the census. They are estimates based on limited amounts of surveying, and they have a considerable margin of error. Business Insider refers to the following document:
I have no idea what to believe now.
Yeah, but New York City isn’t typical of the North (if we take that to mean everything west of the Mississippi but not something usually considered part of the South). It isn’t even typical of the Boswash megalopolis. The states with the largest percentages of immigrants in today’s population are California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Nevada, in that order. There’s a table in this article giving the top 25 states for number of immigrants, and some of them are in the South:
So the percentage of immigrants in the population isn’t really hugely more in the North than in the South. Note the distinction I’m making. Not hugely more. Yes, it’s more.
Note: most people don’t say “such and such-American” in casual conversation. It’s usually just, “Oh, my family’s Irish-German” whatever. It’s generally understood to mean “Irish-American”.
And note that I didn’t say NYC is typical- I said it depends on exactly where you are.
I’ve only ever seen compound descriptors applied to Caucasians in academic writing. I’ve never heard someone say it in normal conversation or identify themselves with a compound descriptor. If other people see it, that’s fine. I can only report my own experience.
Well, now you have!
Where did you grow up? On my planet, in fact specifically in my home city, every ethnic group had a cultural organization or club or representative group with * American as the title.
Here’s a few before I got tired of linking:
Ukrainian American Club Of Rochester N Y Inc
LITHUANIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY OF ROCHESTER
Irish American Cultural Institute
ITALIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY CENTER
Since I grew up in the blue-collar ethnic “wrong side of the tracks” I passed by several of these every day just on my way to school. They were everywhere 50 years and as you can see they still exist today.
Similarly, they were in every city in the immigrant-stuffed Rust Belt for the past 100 years. Dozens of them, for every immigrant group that had significant numbers. I suppose it’s barely possible if you’re young and you lived all your life outside the Rust Belt you may not have noticed these. I would bet that if you googled for a selection of * American for your city you would find a bunch of them. And you should look, because knowing that history is better than continuing to grow up blinkered and ignorant of it.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Where did you grow up? On my planet, in fact specifically in my home city, every ethnic group had a cultural organization or club or representative group with * American as the title.
[/QUOTE]
Well, that’s kind of my point. Those terms get used by organizations that are devoted to promoting / advocating / advancing the ethnic group. South Dakota, where I hail from, has at least one such organization for “Germans-From-Russia.” I would have just called them “Germans,” but apparently they are specifically “Germans-From-Russia.”
The figures for those of English-American descent are always vastly under-reported. See Wikipedia.
Now unless a large percentage of those English-Americans upped and left the country since 1980 there’s something wrong with the figures given in previous posts.
The fact is that a lot of English-Americans don’t identify or even think of themselves as such, they’re just Americans. Add to that that millions of Americans will be of mixed English/German/Irish/French/Spanish stock, picking and choosing an ethnicity with which to identify. Given this the ethnicity rankings are pretty meaningless.