I’m new to this. Long time lurker.
Culture is not ethnicity. Like I said above, Ethnically I’m Cape Coloured, but culturally, not in the slightest.
“So are Welsh,Northern Irish,Scots ethnic groups within the context of the British Nationality?”
If they live in the UK and are British citizens, yes. People with, for example, a Scottish background who are US citizens? No.
So my brother-ln-law who is of Scottish heritage, took to learning the bagpipes, marches in parades wearing a kilt, took the family to Scotland, is not ethnically Scottish?
I grew up in Chicago, and when I was a kid, one of the more popular small talk questions with kids we didn’t know well was “What nationality are you?” Some kids would proudly reel off a laundry list of backgrounds. “I’m English-Irish-Dutch-Swedish-Danish-Polish-Greek and Hungarian” Like they were trading cards or something.
Now me? I’m German-Latvian, first generation, and yes I am close to my European roots. I love the hoghocks and sauerkraut. I think sour cream makes most things taste better, and I mean sour cream, not creme fraishe or however you spell it. I think fish is better with the eyeballs still in it, and liver done right is mm-mm-good.
I have a Latvian first name which most people cannot pronounce without help. I have been told I speak with a faint German accent, and have been asked if I’m Pennsylvania Dutch. (I’m not) Regardless of any accent, I cannot speak either German or Latvian, because my parents thought I should speak only English as an American. Maybe that had something to do with both sides of my family being on the losing side of World War II, but I’ve always regretted not being able to speak the languages. I suppose I could learn, but I’ve never had the time.
As for what being an American is, I think it would be an ethnicity if I were in a foreign country. But here in the USA, it is simply what I am. I don’t really think about being an American. In fact, I base my cultural identity more on being a Chicagoan than an American. But I base my identity on being German and Latvian too. Especially Latvian because it’s more exotic, and harder to know.
“So my brother-ln-law who is of Scottish heritage, took to learning the bagpipes, marches in parades wearing a kilt, took the family to Scotland, is not ethnically Scottish?”
He certainly is! But if I misunderstand you correctly, he is not a citizen of the UK - nor of Scotland, if it ever becomes independent.
Yep, similar experience growing up here. I was the first generation to be born here in Chicago (well, there is a caveat: my paternal grandfather has technically the first to be born here, but they moved back to Poland after my great-grandfather passed away. My grandfather would have been around eight or so. He then moved back to the US in his late-40s/early 50s. Regardless that he was born here, I have never in my life heard him speak a word of English, and he lived to 97.)
Any, I digressed a bit. Growing up, ethnicity was very much a normal question. “What are you” or “what kind of name is that” was a fairly standard question for me in my neighborhood in the 80s. It sounds a bit rude these days, but I never considered it as such in those days. I could tell you the ethnicity of pretty much everyone in my 8th grade class: it was about a third Polish, with some Irish, some Italian, some German, some Czechoslovak/Bohemian, some Lithuanian, some Mexican, and the very occasional English. And we didn’t really use “[ethnic]-American” type of constructions. We’d say “I’m Polish,” “he’s Irish,” etc. even if we were American citizens (as most of us were.)
As far as keeping “ethnic” there are some traditions we still do with my family. My parents are both around, I’m married with two kids. For Christmas, we do a traditional Polish wigilia on Christmas Eve. We do a Polish-style basket for Easter and go to the blessing of the eggs. Food-wise, I still love my Polish deli, so at least once a week I’m at the local Polish deli and buy up various hams, smoked sausages, wieners, pickles, Polish rye bread, etc. I don’t cook a lot of Polish per se – we visit my parents every Sunday and get plenty of Polish food then – but I do occasionally, and I make other Central/Eastern European dishes (particularly Hungarian) reasonably often. I don’t speak Polish with my kids, so that hasn’t been passed down. If you stepped into our household, there wouldn’t really be anything particularly “Polish” about it, but I do still consider myself “Polish” and do feel a connection to Polish, general Slavic, and Hungarian culture.
My grandparents came here from Hungary, so they were immigrants. My father was a first-generation American, so that made him ethnic. But he married a generic Anglo-Saxon, so that made my siblings and I ordinary, non-ethnic people from Chicago, with a slight preference for sour cream and paprika in our cooking and Magyar folk songs in our music.
I appreciate and appreciate you sharing your experience.
This is me, except replace “Irish and Scandinavian” with English. Though I am very proud of my Maori heritage, and it factors into my life on occasion, generally I was brought up very Pakeha (white European) culturally and the Maori side of things only came up for special occasions.
It’s since been hard to transition away from that, as there’s very little about my Polynesian culture I feel connected to. It’s there, it matters, but it’s also separate to my daily existence. When I went to back to the Marae for my brother’s funeral last year, who had embraced our culture far more than I have, it was so heavily Maori-infused I was moved, with pride and awe, but also not a little bit of shame as I realised I had neglected an important part of my life just by happenstance and unconsciously letting it fall by the wayside. I spoke to a lot of people there who clearly seemed disappointed by my inactive participation.
Sadly, I don’t think I’ll change. I’ve gone too far by now, and it still doesn’t speak to me on the level that it did for my brother.
I’m glad to hear from some non-americans. My OP focused on the American experience, but I am learning about other societies too. Please keep them coming.
Quite. What is ethnicity if not multicultural experiences?
He is certainly an ethnic Scot? Am I misunderstanding you correctly? Never claimed he was a citizen of the UK or of British Nationality. Just saying he is ethnically Scottish .
And poppy seeds on your noodles?
Some do. President Obama had Kenyan heritage but he identified as African American.
But it has been my experience that most immigrant Americans of the African Diaspora identify ethnically with their nation of origin just like all other immigrants do. So an immigrant from Nigerian will identify not as a “African American”, but as a Nigerian American. Such a person tends not to see themselves and others like them as belonging to the same ethnic group as members of my group–folks who the descendents of American slaves and have lived in the States for many generations. We might fit in the same racial box but culturally we are different.
When I lived in South Florida, it wasn’t unusual to hear folks–both black and white–refer to black people by very broad ethnic categories. The Haitians were distinguished from people from “The Islands” (Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Barbadians, etc.) who were distinguished from “regular” black people–meaning African Americans. My boss once used the “regular black people” descriptor in a conversation with me, and I was both amused and annoyed. Amused because I knew what he meant but annoyed because we “regular” black folks actually have a ethnic label–African American. I felt like he should have known this seeing as how he was raising a black child.
I’d always understood that ‘African-American’ was a descriptor born out of the fact many black USAians don’t know their precise origin in Africa. So not relevant to Nigerian-Americans or Jamaican-Americans.
In the UK, the standard descriptor we have is ‘Afro-Caribbean’. Being white, I don’t know how black people feel about that, but it does appear on Government forms and the like. Black-British is increasingly preferred, I think.
How do you pronounce Paprika?
I don’t know if this is specific to the US, but there are a lot of people whose families immigrated from Great Britain before 1800 who identify more with the region they settled in than any other “ethnicity”. In New England for example, old British-origin families tend to identify as Yankees. In Appalachia and its diaspora (which includes a lot of the South), there is a tendency to pugnaciously describe oneself as American, with the clear subtext that any other immigrant populations are not, although Scots and border English are where their ancestors mainly are. These identities come with accents, traditional foods, moral codes, and everything else.
Personally, my Brooklyn Jewish (Latvia and Ukraine) dad married my German-Swiss upper-Midwest farm girl mom and the result was … 1950’s White. We had lox and bagels and schmears every Sunday morning and that’s about it for Jewish although one of my sisters eventually converted and married a Jewish man.