Hmm. I assumed he meant he was ethnically Indian but from the UK, like actresses Fiona Wade and Parminder Nagra.
I suppose the problem with understanding the OP comes from the disconnect between nationality and ethnicity. We’ve had threads before where folks from the UK have been annoyed with Americans who, when asked their ethnicity, give an answer other than “American,” like saying that they’re Irish or British; despite how the questions are worded, what they were actually expecting the answer to be is our nationality, not ethnicity. Americans don’t consider American, Canadian or Australian ethnicities (except when talking about people of aboriginal decent), though obviously some people do.
I know damn well what he meant.
But he hit a pet peeve of mine.
He’s telling me that his primary identity is Indian and he happens to hold British citizenship. He used “British” as a modifier and “Indian” as the noun. As long as they carry on with that language in Britain, and I assume everyone there uses the term, I can’t see it leading to a full identity as British for an Indian immigrant or his/her descendants. It brings up visions of Pakistani enclaves in Britain housed in apartment building festooned with satelite dishes picking up broadcasts from outside the nation.
My beef is particularly cogent given the OP’s OP.
He’s a minority that doesn’t claim to be an Indian type of Brit perhaps because he’s not white. And he asks ,misinformed as he is, why American minorities
think only whites are Americans?
Ever hear the term British Scot?
I’m an immigrant myself. I’m proud of my Dutch heritage. However I’m Canadian, and when it relevant, I’m a Dutch-Canadian.
What JXJohns said, and also that the use of “Canadians” for black people is disputed. I’ve worked in foodservice and I’ve never heard it outside of this board. Ours is a really damn big country with a diverse range of opinions and day-to-day experiences.
:rolleyes:
If you know damn well what he meant, it’s not a problem, is it?
I can speak for Koreans, at least a little. Even though I’d never lived in Korea before I was 21, it was terrificly easy to obtain an F-class visa for my stay. Why’s that special? F-class visas give you many of the same rights and benefits as full-fledged Korean citizens, but you don’t have to have ever been a Korean citizen. All you have to be is provably of the blood by having your name recorded on a Korean family registry.
Koreans often call White people Americans while identifying minorities more by their ethnicity. I figure most Asian cultures would do the same simply due to the emphasis on blood relation. You’ll notice that in many Asian cultures family (or clan) names are still somewhat important and create identifiable mini-dramas in their communities.
To use a different ethnicity as an example, just ask a Hmong Moua what the stereotype is of a Hmong Vue.
It may also be due to the mostly homogeneous population of the Korean peninsula. Minorities are identifiable to an extreme, which really isn’t that different from America. It’s typically very easy to notice minorities in America. Koreans (and Asian countries like them) are accustomed to identifying citizens based on less a national identity and more an ethnicity. When a Korean in Korea says he is Korean, do you think he’s first referring to the Republic of Korea or his blood?
Erm, no - most British people of South Asian ancestery refer to themselves as Asian. They call themselves British when they leave the country. We have multiple identites depending on circumstance.
Wow, you are extrapolating a lot just from 2 words mate. I actually DO refer to myself as British in the US. The thing is, many Americans can’t get over the fact that I’m not white, so I add “Indian” to avoid confusion.
Britain is a land of immigrants and always has been. The Angles didn’t arrive until after the Romans left. The Normans, Jews, Hugnenots etc. It’s just a matter of time, everybody blends in eventually.
What’s this got to do with anything? If anything, many Pakistanis now refer to themselves as Muslim above anything else.
I am misinformed - that’s why I asked the original question.
No, that’s cos the Kingdom of Scotland predates the existence of Great Britain by many centuries. Scottish people are too used to referring to themselves as Scottish.
There is also the phenomenon of being the “All-American” kid (in the non-sports related context). If someone is referred to as an “All-American Boy or Girl” it invariably means someone white, and overwhelmingly blond.
I suppose the simple answer is that americans sometimes refer to ethnicities independent of our shared citizenship… but that we are Americans, is understood. I am white, somebody might be black, or Chinese, or Mexican, or Puerto Rican, or Japanese, or Vietnamese, Laotian, Brits, etc. But we are all American and I think of them as Americans first. In my vocabulary it really is no more than a physical descriptor or like telling somebody what state your from. The only time that I might be called an American as a caucasoid descriptor (Band Name!), meaning “Honky” would probably be outside of The U.S.
If that is what you meant? I’m not sure of your OP?
It does stand though, that Caucasians (Basically Viking stock), Blacks (Ivory coast tribe Africans), and Hispanics (Mediterraneaen and Aboriginal Populations) own equal rights to the last 500 years of the Americas Heritage.
Most Caucasian Americans are not “Viking stock”, unless you’re talking about Minnesota. Most are descended from German (the plurality), British, Irish, Mexican, and Italian populations.
I agree with other posters that I would call myself “American” if asked to specify my ethnicity. My last name is Welsh, but I don’t really know anything else about my ancestry except that we’ve been here a very long time, so it would be very silly to report myself as being a Welsh-American.
I tell people of non-american or Foreign Nationality that I am American. But I tell Americans that I am of Welsh-American Heritage with some possible Indian Heritage, that Part of my family is from WV and were coal miners and hillbillies by that welsh heritage. That I am German on the other side… possibly a German-Jew by Name, but we converted to Catholicism to assimilate.
Well they served as an extreme visual example of a south Asian community whose identity is clearly not British, and more like foreign settlers.
In retrospect, using Pakistanis in Britain as an example of a south Asian community was inconsiderate given the deep religious division that over rides ethnicity. I should not expect Indians to behave like Pakistanis in Britain.
Most Caucasian Americans are from Germanic stock… The “Vikings”, and “Germans”, “Angles”, and “Slavic” peoples and even the "Gauls"are from the same linguistic and tribal heritage and stock. Invaders and conquerors led to many bloodlines, that we nationalize, breaks our greater ties.
Yes, most Americans are from proto-Germanic stock. That is not the same thing as Viking ancestry (actually, I was being generous with the Minnesota area, since Viking are really mostly just Icelandic, which is not a significant percentage of the U.S.), in the same way that all squares are rectangles, but all rectangles are not squares, i.e. all Viking-descended people are Germanic, but all Germanic people are not Viking-descended. The whole question is silly besides, since there is so much intermixture.
Actually, I would argue that no genome in Europe is untouched by the Viking seed. As the most far reaching, invading, and intrepid Germanic tribe/influence/settlers, I would say that even the Italians, Spanish, and Greeks have viking blood and culture by Warring rights.
Race in America is probably one of the most complicated subjects out there.
That said, it’s extra difficult because we don’t even have the vocabulary to talk about white American culture. We kind of pretend like it doesn’t even exist. Or we treat it as the default culture. We treat white American culture as “American culture” and other American cultures as spin-offs.
Anyway, we can’t talk about it meaningfully because we don’t even have words to begin talking about it with. Of course things get all mixed up.
Well, why shouldn’t he identify himself as whatever he feels is most accurate? When he says “British Indian” you know right away what he means. And indeed, if he had just said he was “British” you’d probably lose a little bit of the understanding about where his post was coming from.
My old bosses where American citizens of Indian heritage who spent most of their childhoods in Kenya and most of their adult years in Britain. They identified as British-Indian because thats what they felt they were. Are you going to go tell them they ought to think of themselves as something else?