Like, in the South, hardly any white folk do the hyphenated thing. The exception (in my experience) would be 1) Jews, 2) recent immigrants, and 3)Northerners who have immigrated to the South.
But in the Northeast and Rust Belt, white folks tend to not be shy about identifying themselves as Irish-American or Polish-American or whatnot. I’m guessing it is because those identifiers make sense in places where ethnic groups have not been pressured to completely assimilate. Like, why the hell wouldn’t you identify yourself as Italian American if you or your family still lives in the section of town called Little Italy and you worship in a church that is full of other Italian Americans, as opposed to the church your friend goes to which is comprised of another ethnic group?
Growing up in the South, I was led to believe that the hyphenated American identity was something that black Americans had invented (and thus, only black Americans deserve to be scolded over). But when I moved to NJ, I realized this was bullshit since almost everyone and their mama is a Something-American. Every weekend in NYC, there would be a different “Something-American” festival or parade.
It’s odd to bring up an ethnic label when it isn’t relevant to a conversation. But if we’re talking about why people in a certain neighborhood or city have certain traditions or customs, then it makes sense to discuss what their ethnicity is.
I gather there is a ‘Southern American’ culture that’s different in some ways to ‘standard American’, does that also mean there’s a ‘Southern American’ ethnicity?
I agree that he is in some ways more Scottish than many a Scotsman, but ethnically he is still Scots. But that does not exclude any other ethnic origins he has, and Americans tend to have a varied mixture. As to what confers ethnicity, that I really can’t say, but I would make the supposition that having some Scottish ethnic background is part of it. Not many people take on an ethnicity that they do not have, but it is certainly not unknown. But, as we know from Europe and the vexed post-Versailles issue of ethnic origins, ethnicity is something that can be played up or down to taste. To give an example, since you mention the Czechs; the Sudetenland that became prominent in 1938 was an area of prewar Czechoslovakia that was ethnically German, in terms of the origin of the vast majority of people that lived there, but they had also lived in this area for up to 350 years. Whether they were Czech or German depended on one’s point of view, and at that time, poltical orientation. As with the other ethnic German communities in eastern Europe (the Volga Germans, the Germans in Romania), the Germans themselves tended to either use them for political purposes or else sometimes looked down on them slightly as being not quite German. In the aftermath of WW1 the topic of ethniciity has acquired a nasty back-taste in Europe. But it’s OK if it is just a matter of knowing your roots and indulging in some cultural fun.
I used to live in South Florida. Down there, everyone of Hispanic/Caribbean heritage is a Something American. I worked with a lot of Cuban Americans who didn’t hesitate to identify themselves as such.
I had a white coworker who thought this was divisive. She thought people should just identify themselves as “American” and stop with the hyphen thing.
But practically in the same breath, she would talk up her Southernness. She fashioned herself as a redneck southern belle. She was fond of reminding anyone who would listen that she was Southern and proud of it. She played up her cultural background way more than anyone else.
I have a feeling if a Southern American ethnic identity was made into an official thing, she wouldn’t have a problem with it. I personally wouldn’t have a problem with it. But I do have a problem with people who think their ethnic identities are respectable but other people’s somehow aren’t.
When I was five or six years old and first going regularly to school, I found myself surrounded by a batch of other little girls asking me, “What are you?” I said, “I’m American!” They said, “We know you’re American, but what are you?”
I did manage to figure out that they’d accept the country my family originally came from as an answer. So when I got back home I asked my mother what country my parents were from, so I could answer them. My mother said, “Tell them you’re Jewish.” I knew almost nothing about Judaism, but I knew enough to say “That’s not a country, that’s a religion. They want to know where we’re from.”
My mother sighed, and said “Tell them you’re Jewish. That’s what they want to know.”
I went back to school and told them that. She was right; that was what they wanted to know: not necessarily what country we were from, but what category of “other than us” they could stick me into.
And that categorization as “other than us” is also what people are doing who say they have no ethnicity. They’re saying that what they are is the base, the normal, the state that everybody’s assumed to be in unless proved otherwise. The people who they see as having an ethnicity are the ones who are “other than us.”
See, I’m not sure about this at all. There are plenty of Pakistani-Scots, Ugandan-Asian-Scots, etc. who are unquestionably* ethnically Scottish (as well as Pakistani, Ugandan-Asian etc.) in a way that “people 3000 miles away who have a granny and a costume”. just aren’t. Simple ancestry really doesn’t mean that much beyond broad-brush racial classification;cultural links are much more pervasive and intangible than things like festive meals.
(I think this varies though. Some ethnicities do seem to rely more on ancestry - e.g. Japanese AIUI. I suppose a good diagnostic would be “would an adopted baby grow up to be a member of this ethnicity or would they always be considered ‘other’?”)
For me it comes down to something like: if you spent a month among people of [ethnicity] without telling or even hinting that you thought you too were [ethnicity] then what, after that time, would they say you were?
*Well, unquestionable to me. I won’t pretend there aren’t racist Scots, but their attempts to deny e.g. Humza Yousuf is Scottish don’t carry much weight with the populace.
Pakistani Scots? That might be a case of divided loyalties, as is always the case with anyone with a more complicated ethnicity. In Europe it is of little more than curiosity value for, say, German and English, and intriguing if have a have more exotic mix. I noticed that at university there were fellow students who had a one or more German parents or Slavonic parents (mainly Ukrainian or Polish, occasionally Russian), and they tried to make a thing of their background through studying the language. Not necessarily with any great success due to their background in itself; the advantage of speaking the language better than average for the class diminished quite quickly, and Poles quickly found out that Russian is not the same!
In all of this, there are cultures and ethnicities that are very family- and inheritance-based, to an extent that might seem excessive to most Westerners.
In all of this, I recall reading recently a case of two babies that got swapped by mistake in the hospital. One was Ashkenazi Jewish, the other was Irish. This only came out many years later, and possibly after their deaths, when somebody did some DNA tracing. It turned out that each of them matched exactly the culture aspects - stereotypes, if you will - of the group they had been assigned too.
But in general, it is one thing to know that you have a certain percentage of xyz genetically, and another to feel an attachment to the culture of xyz. I’m told that my mother’s family has some Huguenot French somewhere along the line. I couild not care less!
I have found that most peoples’ understanding of the concept of “race” is very fallacious. There really is no such thing as race on a genetic level. What there are, are phenotypes - that means, in layman’s terms, “what you look like.” This is passed on through genes. But human genes have been mixing for many thousands of years.
The closest you could get to dividing up humanity by “races” is to say that certain geographical regions have a greater ocurrance of certain phenotypes, and that some regions have had more mixing of phenotypes than others and therefore more variety of different looking people (combinations of skin tones, facial features, and - somewhat more controversially - heights. How much height is determined by genetics and how much by upbringing is still a matter of debate, to my understanding.)
Do the Japanese look more phenotypically homogenous than…say, the British? Yeah, they do. The British isles were inhabited variously by tribes from continental Europe with diverse origins, from the Iberian/Mediterrenean region to the Nordic countries. That’s why you can have a guy like Colin Farrell who frankly could pass as a native Mexican, though I have no doubt that his Irish ancestry goes back thousands of years.
This situation also applies to the Levant, i.e. the territories colloquially known today as “the Middle East.” I’ve seen a recent flurry of memes on Facebook saying, to the effect of, “Jesus was not white! He was a person of color!” and displaying illustrations or computer renderings “from DNA analysis” depicting a very dark man, with pronounced [and popularly misconstrued] “Semitic features”, as if there’s just one Semitic “look.” Well, no. Here is a photo of present-day Samaritans from Galilee. Do they look like “people of color?” Is Bashar Assad a “person of color”?
Similarly I remember a ridiculous incident several years ago where a Palestinian photojournalist was accused of Photoshopping photos of Palestinian refugee children to “try to make them look whiter” and therefore more sympathetic to Western audiences. No! Palestine is full of people who naturally look in a way that would commonly be read as “white.” But of course it also is full of people who would not. That’s how it is when a region is a literal crossroads between three continents.
“Czechoslovakia” is an interesting example, and I mentioned it just randomly. Is “Czecholslovakian” even or race, nationality or ethnicity? There were German/ Czechs and Slovaks living in the nation, which doesn’t even exist anymore.
Thank you, and thorny_locust. I must concede then that I have no textual basis to assume the modern concept of race or racism existed in Western antiquity, outside of mere ethnocentrism.
I’m still not sure about that Chinese source (see #15), specifically the 種 character which might translate to seed, kind, type, species, breed, ethnicity, race, etc. Where I translated “macaques are their own kind” that could also be read “macaques are their own species”, but I’m no expert in Chinese, and certainly not in the Han or Tang dynasty. If taken literally that would amount to a modern concept of race. It could also have been an insult like “you have a monkey-face”; but that would essentially be saying that Wusun peoples have monkey’s faces, apparently an inferior physical trait which also sounds like the modern concept of race to me.
Didn’t you ever hear a kid call their own sibling a monkey-face?
It’s a general sort of insult, nothing to do with the modern concept of race. In the USA, because of history, in some contexts it has racist connotations and in case of doubt should therefore be avoided; but to assume that in ancient China it has anything to do with a modern USA concept of race seems to me to be a really unreasonable stretch.
I think it’s different to say an entire race (?) of people is monkey-faced, or more accurately, red-haired and of the same species as monkeys. An entire what of people?
Does the text say the humans are of the same species as monkeys, or just that they look like them?
And calling them the same species, even if so, still wouldn’t be a modern concept of race – or of species, for that matter. Even overt racists don’t currently think that black people are actually monkeys. It might be racism, but it’s unlikely to be our modern sense of the term.
– on the other hand, it occurs to me that arguing with you in particular about what words mean rarely seems to go anywhere useful.
I’m not sure. It could also mean they are descended from monkeys.
Let us look back at the original argument that I was making, in response to kswiss, was that “ancient peoples from […] China equated physical characteristics with social class. And they considered certain physical characteristics not native to their tribe ‘barbarian’, ‘descended from monkeys’, etc.” DPRK pressed me for textual evidence. The implication from Yan Shi Gu’s annotations in Book of Han is that the physical features of the Wusun people made them inferior to the Han. They are oddly shaped, with blue eyes and red hair. And they are either descendants of monkeys or they literally breed with monkeys or they just look like monkeys.
Is the nature of that monkey remark anything but racist by modern standards? Remember that it was not yet known that all of humanity is descended from primates. I need not point out that blue eyes and red hair are both physical traits absent from the Han peoples. And surely you will agree with me that describing a people as being like monkeys, or descended from monkeys, or literally monkeys, is an insult. What is the difference between denigrating a people because of their skin color, and denigrating a people because of their eye or hair color? In the modern sense of the word, how can the former be racist while the latter is not?
Unless you are defining race as being limited to classification based on skin color, I fail to understand your objection.
It’s ironic because the only person in this thread that has suggested “British” excludes having any ethnicity is you.
On the contrary, several Brits like myself have been repeatedly trying to tell you that this is wrong.
We don’t do the hyphen thing, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have different ethnicities and that we don’t celebrate that diversity.
I know the OP has been banned, but eschrodingerrecently made me aware of this great podcast that goes into the origin of race. It is episode two of Seeing White from Scene on Radio. A transcript is available for download, too.
