No, What I was getting at was [quote=“Novelty_Bobble, post:58, topic:916086”]
Yes, that would be utter nonsense. The culture of the parents will most likely have some effect on how people raise their children. I don’t know why you are assuming I think differently.
However, it is not guaranteed to be the only effect, nor even the most important, nor be in any way predictable or fixed and the variation will be wide and complicated.
Which was what you were getting at in your question was it not?
[/quote]
No, it was what was do people do to maintain contact with their cultural identity in a multi-cultural society?
You just keep insisting you eat Oriental food and are immune to ethnic/ cultural influences.
Oh, I can’t let this one pass. Here’s a slice of British culture I’m sure even Novelty_Bobble can get behind. We would never put a British flag in our offices.
No, it was what was do people do to maintain contact with their cultural identity in a multi-cultural society?
And the answer you got from me was that I don’t really have an ethnic identify to speak of and so I pay no attention to it.
You just keep insisting you eat Oriental food and are immune to ethnic/ cultural influences.
No, that absolutely is not the case, in my very first post I clearly stated (bolding mine)
I worked for a Japanese company for many years as a young man and the cultural impact on me from that was far more influential than the town where I was born.
I’ll just drop it now, I’m clearly not being understood.
Amen, I think our flag is fairly distinctive as a piece of design, I like it as an object but indifferent to it as a symbol. Having it in an office would be deeply weird.
I suppose for my father’s Serbian family line they retained a strongly distinct identity in the US through the immigrant generation (arrived just pre-WW I) and first generation (fully bilingual, married within the community, traditional/cultural religious faith). By my father’s second generation that became highly attenuated (out marriage, moving away from community, weakly bilingual at best, religious attachments shifted or faded away ).
By my mixed generation it is basically gone. I’m well aware of that heritage, but I don’t identify with it any serious way - it’s just interesting family history and another facet of my basic muttiness. My maternal heritage is a complete muddle, in fact nobody in that family is sure of the proportions or even the exact ethnicities involved. A lot of English, some Welsh and a grab bag of other European backgrounds that is probably best expressed as generic American WASP.
Like Novelty Bobble I don’t self-identify as any particular ethnicity. As a white American I have that luxury, I suppose.
(To the original question)
My mother is half Czech, half Polish (Yiddish). Every holiday meal had a specific made-by-Poles Polish sausage and pierogies. The dessert table had rugelach and kolachkes. My uncle spoke Yiddish fluently, my mother not so much. Neither spoke much Czech, as their father only spoke to his mother in the home language or cussed in it. (My mother was 2nd gen American on both sides).
My dad was 3/4 German, 1/4 Swedish. His mother was half German / half Swedish, but died when he was very young. Other than his love of German meats (if it was a weird wurst available only at the German butcher, he had to have it) and his ability to remember German songs from his youth, there wasn’t much. His father was 2nd gen, his mother’s family was here in the 17th century.
In looking at how we ate growing up, the consistent aspect was all dinners had a meat, two veg, starch. Not much spice. My parents didn’t have pizza until they were in their late 30’s. Lasagne until I made it when I was 12. Spaghetti was “exotic”. I know for a fact my father never ate a taco or burrito in his entire life, my mom still hasn’t had anything considered Mexican food. I figured it was more due to him having been raised on a farm than his ethnicity. My mom did sometimes make American chow mein, but my dad wouldn’t eat it.
Quite possibly, no matter. We can agree to disagree (or at least agree we haven’t come to an understanding…the world will turn nonetheless and the thread will continue )
My father was basically of English extraction and my mother was French Cajun. My mother was brought up in a home that spoke a hybrid English/French language. But since I live in the New Orleans area, running into people such as me isn’t uncommon, so I I never thought of myself as ethnic. Now, you go to see my family in south central Louisiana and most people would consider them ethnic. They’re white but have a thick Cajun accents, probably hard for a lot of people to understand. Also, they have a lot of customs and words that would be unfamiliar to outsiders.
I’m of Norwegian heritage. We try to keep in touch with our roots, and occasionally take our boat across the sound to sack a village or two. Ok, maybe not. But, growing up we were members of the Sons Of Norway. It is a social club that meets monthly, has dinners and fun events. I grew up eating a lot game, fish, brown cheese, etc. We went cross country skiing.
Heh, my dad’s wife’s parents were in the Viking Club for those of Swedish roots, but when I visited them at their trailer at the Club’s lakeside tract I never saw very much looting or pillaging.
But my dad’s wife always makes a Swedish dinner for Christmas and I enjoy it whenever I come up for Christmas even though I’m not Swedish.
My dad was first generation Italian-American. I identify proudly as an Italian-American even though I’m only half. But I look Italian - olive skin that tans very easily, dark hair and eyes. I’m a member of the local Italian-American Club. As a kid, my dad’s family traditions were followed more in our home than my mom’s (she’s German, French & Irish). We ate a lot of Italian food - my grandma taught my mom how to cook certain dishes. I guess, the food was the main thing. I was very close with my Italian grandparents. My grandma would play Italian kids’ games with me, she told me a lot of stories from her childhood. The one thing I wish she would have done was taught me how to speak Italian. We of course knew some phrases and words that I can’t even find in an Italian dictionary because they’re probably slang from their region (Calabria). They never taught my dad and uncle either. I’m guessing since my dad and uncle were born in 1938 & 1941, WWII had a lot to do with that. I think the Italians like the Germans and Japanese had to be careful. Also, they were very proud to be Americans…Italian-Americans. My grandparents’ generation worked hard to assimilate. I knew one of my great-grandmas, she was alive until I was around 12. She did not assimilate at all. She barely spoke any English, she couldn’t read or write. She signed her passage papers with an X. When they first arrived they lived in our city’s Little Italy. Everyone she socialized with spoke Italian - neighbors, shopkeepers, etc. And she didn’t work outside of the home so she had no reason to learn. My grandma used to tell me that her mother was always nagging at her to teach her sons how to speak Italian. It really upset her (my great-grandma) that that generation did not keep the language going.
No, but my first cousins present as ethnic Irish, I guess because they all have Irish names, and participate in stuff like Irish dancing, and make trips to Ireland for genealogy purposes. Lol. They seem more Irish than me though.
My dad’s parents and my mom’s grandparents all emigrated from Poland to the US in the early 1900s. Both of my parents spoke Polish as children, went to a Polish church and the church school. We were familiar with some Polish traditions, and my dad co-hosted a radio show that played a lot of Polish music.
BUT, I don’t speak the language and I don’t know much about Poland. In some ways, my ethnicity is on par with my height and hair color and right-handedness - it’s who I am but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a huge deal. I have a few items in the house from Poland that I find interesting - a couple of tapestries and some wooden plates. One of my sisters is waaaaay into being Polish, but the other 4 of us not so much.
My husband’s background is kinda mixed and mostly unknown. I think there may be lines to Scotland, England, and Germany, but his family really didn’t care and as far as I know, no one is into genealogy so I’m just guessing based on the few names I know.
I’m about like FairyChatMom. I’m Polish-Bohemian (75/25) but largely identify as Polish since that has a much larger footprint in the Chicago area. But that “identity” is mainly in the form of hitting up a Polish restaurant a few times a year with my mom, maybe visiting a Polish festival in the city, making a jokingly outsized deal out of Casimir Pulaski Day and owning a t-shirt that says “Polska”. I don’t speak the language at all (although I tried a learning tape program once, years ago) and don’t feel a real connection to Poland, though I’d like to visit some day just to see it. For most intents and purposes, I’m fine just being a white dude.
I don’t believe anybody’s saying that they are. So I don’t see what your “conceding” that would contribute to the discussion.
I think if you’d asked the question originally in that form we’d probably have a different thread. It’s the business about your having no ethnicity that sidetracked things. Everybody’s got an ethnicity. It is however true that some people try to keep at least part of their ancestors’ ethnicity, while other people don’t but instead assimilate into whatever they’re surrounded by.
I started trying to answer the question but found that I was getting tangled in a long post that included more specific family history and personal stuff than I feel like posting here. Also it would have been TL, DR. I’m American of Ashkenazi descent and both of those things matter to me; but I don’t myself directly follow much of my great-grandparents’ culture. The bits that I do follow are important to me.
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