No, you’re not “joining” the discussion, you’re hijacking the discussion to take up with anu-la some problem you (and AFAICT you alone) have with some of her posts because “[her] ‘obsession’ is getting tiresome to [you].” In reality, a thread on what culture posters self-identify with is a perfectly appropriate place for her to explain why she does not identify with the culture of the place in which she was raised. If you want to pit her, pit her; but please stop hijacking an unrelated thread to take issue with what she posts or how she posts it – especially when her posts are in fact very relevant to the discussion under way.
MrDibble, just out of American curiosity, could you explain what distinction you are making between “Coloured” and “Black”? I ask because in the States, “colored” is now a very disfavored term for people of African descent, which has been replaced by “black” and, more recently, by “African-American.” But there isn’t (AFAIK) any difference between “colored” and “black” – both mean “African descent” – so I’m curious what the difference is between the terms as they are used in South Africa. Thanks!
Me too! 
Now a great lakes transplant raising 1st generation michiganians with an Illini bastard. 
long ago my brother married into a french canadian family, 13, 15 kids?, totally excellent people, some are US citizens now, some have moved back. One is making a go of the old family fruitlands. good people, the younger grandkids havent kept the french though.
Lactobacilus Acidophilus
seriously though, basic, mundane, boring, bland caucasian mutt here, nothing special or even interesting, certainly nothing worth posting about.
move along, nothing to see here…
Acadian. This is based slightly on geography and slightly more on how I was raised.
We’re french, we’re Catholic, and we eat a lot of fricot. Americans have a lot of Acadians in their midst; our brothers-in-arms who were driven from Acadia (now various parts of Maritime provinces) during *le Grand Dérangement * and who hoofed it to Louisiana, popularly known as Cajuns [Cajun=Acadian, said fast and all slang-y like].
We’ve got culture pouring out of ears; our own music, history, even a flag. Give us a moment of reflection on August 15th. 
You’ve also got a lot of great food, cher. 
Sesquicoastal (Northeast/Midwest halfbreed) liberal retro curmudgeon-cum-nerd.
Well, sorry if I don’t like to be told how evil I am just because of what ethnic group I belong to. And I’m not hijacking the thread: she’s saying what she thinks of my culture (i.e. it glorifies racism and oppression and is fundamentally evil, according to her) and I answer with my viewpoint (i.e. it’s really not any better or worse than any other culture).
You’re an American conservative, and a Christian, I believe, Jodi. You are part of a group that is frequently slandered on this board. Don’t you ever want to correct people when what they claim you are like is just completely wrong? I’m sure you do, and you’ve probably done it many times. And this group is one you belong to voluntarily (as far as religious and political beliefs can be said to be voluntarily chosen), while none of us choose what ethnic group we belong to.
Anyway, sorry if I offended you, it wasn’t my intention.
The SA’s I’ve met usually meant “anybody not white”. I’ve never heard a White SA using the term, it’s always been people who would fall into that definition (either black or of indian descent).
White secular westerner. Actor subtype.
Thank you, severus.
That’s been my experience, as well, much as the term “Asian” is used to categorize anyone not Black, White, or now, Hispanic.
OK, but bear in mind there are lots of parentheticals to follow:
“Black” - someone of (mostly) pure African origin (usually) speaking a non-European mother language e.g. Xhosa, Zulu etc. People from the rest of Africa like West Africans or say Masaai, would also be considered Black (even if francophone or lusiaphone) - but not say Egyptians.
“Coloured” - someone of usually* mixed African/European/Malay/Other origin, usually (but again, see *) speaking a European-derived language, either English or Afrikaans, as mothertongue. Here, I’ve never seen it used as a synonym for Black.
“Mulatto” is a semi-synonym. The US “Biracial” is also somewhat close in flavour, but South African Coloureds are their own cultural groupings going back several centuries, and are usually very distinct from Black groups, just on language alone (and note, we have 11 official languages here).
The Wikipedia article actually gets the *gist *of it pretty well, but again, see *.
- An exception here is that “pureblood” Khoi-San peoples (Nama, Bushmen, etc.) are usually considered Coloured, even when they may speak a native language at home (very rarely these days, most speak Afrikaans) and have not a drop of Euro blood (also rare, but may have Xhosa or Tswana blood). This is because they are usually not 100% pure pre-contact ancestry, I guess. Our race relations are Byzantine.
Yeah you’ve probably got it pegged. Definitely not northern. But I love it. Where else can you live 7km out of the city, walking distance to both PUB and beach and have horses next door?
*the one with the astra… hmmm It might be too early on a monday because I’m not drawing any conclusions.
Floridian, but not like fishbicycle’s Floridians. My Florida is urban, multi-ethnic, tolerant. My area is home to people – and cuisine – from all over the world. At the same time, I grew up respecting Florida’s nature and heritage. I’ve been all over the country, and I’m never as comfortable as I am here, with people who grew up here.
Also, I’m gay. That’s a culture all its own, with its own lingo and sub-types and stereotypes.
In addition, while I do not belong to any specific Hispanic culture, sometimes I feel like a Caribbean Latino. Much of the music I listen to originates there, and I adore the food.
I grew up a bit near Atlanta, which the prevailing culture seemed to be what you’d typically expect from that area (white, Southern, Protestant). I rarely experienced any overt racism, although I suppose I did suffer from what is now termed as the “model minority” stereotype, which basically means my teachers expected me to be the perfect student simply because I was Asian. There were a lot of tensions between the Asian students and the black students, although I will freely admit there was blame on both sides. I was insufferably snobby as a child and I took little pain to hide it.
I also grew up a bit near Seoul. When I first got there, I was the only student in my entire school that had lived abroad and caused a bit of a sensation. I think they expected me to be a girl of loose morals simply because I hailed from the US. 
Korean culture is still very conservative - students are expected to wear uniforms and are beaten by their teachers; girls are supposed to get married and have a family, etc. It’s changed a lot in the past decade but not as much as it thinks it has. I found it extremely stifling and was very happy to move back to the US.
The culture that I actually grew up in (not geographically, but which affected me the most) is something I would probably describe as 2nd generation Asian-American, even though I’m technically a 1.5er. My parents were more Korean than American, but I myself was desperate to be as “white” as possible and purposely stayed away from Korean students that hung out in groups and were generally labelled as FOBs. When I was in Korea, most of my friends were Korean Americans like myself; outside of Korea, I generally find myself the “token Asian” in a group that generally consists of upper-middle-class white people. Asian-Americans tend to either be desperate to “reclaim” their heritage or desperate to be white… I was most definitely the latter.
(I’m kidding about the two extremes of Asian-American culture. Mostly, anyway.)
Well, nobody outside a few counties in Arkansas these days knows what it means, but my primary family culture is “Suggins” – a term used in Woodruff, Jackson, Independence, and parts of White Counties in Arkansas for lower-class white river rats of Scotch-Irish descent, at least on my dad’s side. Bottom of the barrel, socially speaking. Mom’s side is one step up the social ladder – sharecropper, though my grandfather on that side did well enough to be able to buy and operate a small country store at the back end of beyond (almost literally – it was directly across the Arkansas River from the state’s Cummins Prison Farm). Both of my parents almost-but-not-quite got away from that as young adults – my dad did quite well in school, even had a partial scholarship for college, but couldn’t come up with the rest of the funds required, so he joined the Army (nobody would hire an 18-year-old in 1957 who was subject to the draft, and there weren’t many options in that part of the world to begin with). Mom did one semester of college, made a “C” in Spanish and my grandfather decided she wasn’t serious enough about it and declined to fund her education further. My dad ended up in Japan in the Signal Corps, my mom in Memphis working secretarial jobs, before they both came back home where they met and married.
I grew up near that part of Arkansas, very much in that culture if not always of it (I was a voracious reader from age 4 on). My parents encouraged academic and intellectual activities, despite being from a culture that plainly didn’t (particularly my dad). The TV was often on at night when I was a kid, but my parents were as likely as not to be ignoring it in favor of whatever they happened to be reading at the time. From fairly early on I had a sense of being something of an outlier relative to my peers in school, though I still managed to fit in fairly well.
My dad got an opportunity in his late 30s to finish his college degree in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and while there was still a hefty contingent of redneck/hillbillies around, most of the kids I associated with had parents associated with the university in some way (all educated and most from elsewhere in the country or the world), or who were college-educated professionals, so that’s the culture I consciously aligned myself with – generic American academic liberal. My dad became the first in my family ever to get a college degree, and I became the first to go to college straight from high school and graduate in four years – the first, in other words, to enter adult life with a college degree. I went straight from college into a Ph.D. program in English lit, and while I decided fairly quickly the academic life wasn’t for me and bailed out, I remained very much the pseudo-intellectual/80s-counterculture/urban post-teenage slacker type for the first several years of my twenties.
Now, I’m a fairly typical suburban dad type with three kids, a stay-at-home wife, and a technology consulting job that has me on the road across the whole country much of the time – which is very much in keeping with the culture where I live now (northern suburbs of Atlanta). More liberal than many, though more conservative than I expected to be (particularly as an academic in the humanities). A little less typically, I’m also a convert to Judaism, after being raised Methodist in Arkansas and going through the usual agnostic period as college student and just after.
I’m pretty sure I’m totally bereft of a culture in the typical sense.
My father, of Venezuelan and Dutch ancestry, if you can imagine such a combination, had the unique honor (horror?) of being the son, grandson, great grandson, and nephew of librarians (yeah, I know, Twilight Zone odd), and was drafted into the US Military when I was two. My father’s great, great grandfather, to my utter disgust, was a slave owner in a place called Conecuh, South Carolina (I’ve never been there). My mother, with a solid African-American lineage traceable to 5 generations back, had never been out of New York until she met my father. Not only are my parents of different races, but different religions as well, so I had an interesting childhood, to say the least.
My father’s military obligations, which, in short order became his career, took us all over the world. I lived in Okinawa (Japan), Nuremberg (Germany), Luzon (Philippines), Canal Zone (Panama), Alaska, Hawaii, and 13 of the contiguous US states all before I was 18. I also lived in three ‘Waiting Wives Homes’ in Kansas at various periods in my younger childhood when my father was deployed to Vietnam.
The combination of my family moving quite a bit throughout my childhood, coupled with the then oddity of my siblings and me being the only biracial children on Earth, as far as we knew, didn’t bode well at all for the cultivation of friendships.
Since finishing college I’ve moved 10 times. I go where I can get the most money for my skills. The prospect of living in one place more than 10 years makes me uneasy. Right now my base is Southern New Jersey, but only because I got a fantastic deal from a home builder I didn’t want to pass up. I’m not married to the place, and when something better comes along I’ll sell my house, and possibly my cars, and move again.
I don’t have any first-hand experience with what it truly means to be African-American. Most of my knowledge in this area is anecdotal from family members on my mother’s side. However, I do have very strong feelings and opinions regarding the injustices perpetrated on African-Americans, probably because it’s a part of me I’ll never really get to know. I’ve never had Black friends, nor associated socially with African-American people in general. I don’t fit there, for many reasons other than simply my appearance.
I don’t have much first-hand experience with what it means to be Caucasian-American, because I’m not, even though that’s a more socially acceptable fit for me, for reasons definitely other than my complexion, which would probably best be termed wheatish. I’ve never had any true White friends, unless you count the ones, which I don’t, who were drawn to me through a fascination for what they saw as exotic. Those associations never lasted.
I can also say I don’t have any first-hand experience with what it truly means to be Hispanic, especially since in no way do I feel such, my father’s generations-old link with Venezuela notwithstanding, even though my experiences with Hispanic and Native-American peoples have been the best and most welcoming of my life.
Somewhere in my teens I gave up religion (it just made no sense to me) and embraced atheism. My parents and a couple of my siblings are confused and dismayed by this, but hey, they’re the ones who are willi…well, enough of that.
As far as the local culture here in my part of NJ, I’m not completely sure. It seems to be mostly blue-collarish with a smattering of white-collar enclaves here and there. People seem to be heavily into the Igles (yes, you read that right, Igles…that’s how they pronounce it). There seems to be, not actual disdain, but a lack of strong emphasis on higher education and academic achievement. Many public school teachers are barely coherent, exhibiting little command of the English language (talk about scary). Many of the mothers I meet seem little more than poorly enunciating baby factories with husbands who live for beer and “hayogies” as evidenced by their huge bellies and umbilical hernias. {shudder}.
Sheesh! Is it time to move yet?
California white lower class.
My family is one of those old school blue collar liberal families that you don’t much find anymore. This has been transformed to what is basically white trash by the time I was a child in the early eighties. Now that time has gone by, my family has moved up and I have moved on to some strange places (college. big city. Cameroon.) but I still remain at heart a kid from the ultra-multicultural projects of Sacramento. The more I move around, the more I realize that California really has had probably the largest effect on my cultural identity. And although I’m now in a different social class than I started, I’m still most “at home” in the kinds of settings that I grew up in. I was always waaay more comfortable in Oakland than San Francisco.