People have a need to know where they came from, and who their ancestors were. America is almost unique in that we don’t have an ethnic background. That’s been a major strength, but it does IMHO contribute to a lack of identity. What’s an American? What does he look like? What does he eat? It’s true that some nations have more than one, but they pretty much all have at least one. America does not, and that makes a lot of people subtley uncomfortable with themselves.
I know a lot of pasty-faced people who dislike being called “White.” I know some who dislike being called Black, or actively prefer to be Black over some hyphenation like African-American, specifically because it has a meaning they don’t like. I grant the difference may be in the ears of the listener, but identity is always a little subjective.
I understand your point. I’m not sure I agree with it. You can use “Polish-American” to mean whatever you want it to mean. I’m not convinced the rest of our fellow citizens interpret the term as you suggest. I’m also not dead certain they interpret it as I do. But reading the posts in this thread so far, it seems a lot of people have adopted a post-immigrant identity & tend to reserve the term Whatever-American for either immigrants or folks with a strong old-country cultural connection.
Using the term in your sense *is *logical. But … I’d suggest it’s also a bit like adopting hypenated last names after folks get married. As a first generation thing it makes some sense for Bob Smith & Sue Jones to (both?) become Smith-Jones.
But when little Jimmy Smith-Jones grows up & wants to marry young Ashley Rodriguez-Nakamura, we see a need to truncate the labels.
Are your kids Polish-American by your definition of the term? Will your grandkids be?
Not trying to be snarky here; I’m just curious to learn about an approach I’d not seen before.
Correction:
*Some *people have a need to know where they came from.
And it appears you’re part of that group. Which is a fine way to be.
Others really don’t care. I for one have lots of extended family I’ve never met & don’t care to. I have no hostility to them; they’re just no different to me than any other bunch of random names plucked from phone books from halfway across the country.
How many people sit where on the continuum from caring deeply to curious to not caring at all would be an interesting research project.
I’m 3/4 Slovak and while I don’t say stuff like “I’m Slovak-American” I do say stuff like “I’m 3/4 Slovak” or “I’m Slovak.”
I feel bad for people who don’t know their heritage or who’s pre-American heritage is so many bits and pieces of things that they are just “mutts.” I’m proud of my heritage, I think it’s neat. I’m sure it’s neat to have had Mayflower-era relatives but I feel much closer to my WWI-era relatives.
If you are caucasian you are of European descent. If you are black you are likely of African descent. Asian and Hispanic - same thing.
And we are all American because that’s how America was populated… people came here from somewhere else. Unless you’re a Native American, in which case you are the First Nation.
[nitpick]Genetically speaking, you’re Indo-European. IOW, Asians from India/Pakistan/etc. are Caucasian[/nitpick]
Which makes it all even more non-sensical. Talking about people’s skin color is one thing, talking about their racial group is another, and their heritage is a third.
Well, I look white. Genetically I am African-American if you subscribe to the “one-drop” theory. But by culture and upbringing (and preponderance of genetic material) I am certainly Irish-American. When I refer to going “home” I am talking about the family farm over there.
I realize the convention is overused, but in my case it wouldn’t be an accurate description to call me simply “American.”
I consider my Polish-Bohemian ancestry to be an integral part of who I am but I still consider myself American first.
However, I think some people get a little misinterpreted when they speak about ethnicity in terms of “I’m Italian” or “I’m Polish” or “I’m Irish” because the assumption (in my mind) is that the American part goes without saying. I might joke that my mother is being a “good Polish woman” but it’s not because we don’t predominately think of ourselves as American.
I am one small thread in a tapestry made of innumerable people. In that part of the tapestry of humanity that I am genetically linked with are the First Royal Governor of Massachusetts, a robber baron who owned a series of mills employing thousands of immigrants, a hardscrabble Amish farmer, a Dutch merchant-prince. A random German guy who got off the boat with $35 in 1835. Who is the most important to be related to?
Not one ancestor is more important than another, not the governor, nor the German guy who lost one of his sons to the north in the Civil war. If it wasn’t for millions of people coming to this land to start a new life, none of us would be here either. If it wasn’t for the sweat spent making new farms, building cities and towns, building a tapestry of roads and railroads and canals our country would not have had the resources to build schools to educate our children, hospitals to heal our sick, universities to research the future. Does it matter that some of those people were ex-slaves, children of slaves, ex slavers, children of ex slavers, abolitionists, new immigrants? I am one of your mutts, and damned proud of it. There is a word for us, hybrid vigor. Every person no matter where they came from and no matter how or why they got here contributed to the melting pot that made us strong.
Here’s a good analogy - my wife and I live in DC but we’re both from Pittsburgh. So we both have strong Pittsburgh affiliations, as can be expected. So our kids will probably grow up in DC but in a “Pittsburgh home”. I think they’ll grow up with a lot of our Pittsburgh traditions but they’ll still be native DCers. My wife and I will never be DCers. So what will my grandkids be? DCers or Pittsburghers? Well, probably DCers. After all, my kids will probably marry someone from this city, not our old city. And while my kids will feel connected to Pittsburgh, they probably won’t ever consider themselves from Pittsburgh.
Likewise, while I’m 100% Polish, my wife is Irish and German, but not a bit Polish. Our household is a lot like my hypothetical kids’ marriages- one has a strong background while the spouse doesn’t. And like my grandkids won’t be Pittsburghers in any sense of the word, my kids are unlikely to feel truly Polish-American. They’ll probably say “My dad’s very Polish(-American), but I’m not.”
Now if my wife were as strongly Polish as I am, then I’d suspect my kids would inherit that identity. Not the Polish identity, mind you, but the Polish-American one, which as I said, is a different identity entirely.
Separately, since someone mentioned growing up “in an enclave”, I should point out that Pittsburgh does have a strong ethnic identity. Everyone is either Irish, German, Polish, or a combination of them. Italian is almost always stirred in with something else. During the baseball games, we have the Pierogi Race. There’s even a neighborhood called “Polish Hill”. Hell, it was years before I found out that most people don’t even know what a pierogi is! So while I didn’t grow up in a Polish-speaking neighborhood with high walls to keep “the others” out, one could say I did grow up in something resembling an enclave.
I agree. I don’t understand why it bothers someone that another person chooses to call themselves x-American. Even if you don’t think it’s true, who is it hurting if they like applying the word to themselves?
That’s my point. Many Americans don’t have a clear idea of their own identity in that sense, and that bothers a lot of people. All they can do is identify as some arbitrary category which doesn’t really say anything.
This is hard for me. I’m definitively Slovak-American, 3rd-generation on one side. On the other side, we’ve been here since Jamestown.
I feel very in-between the categories–to the extent that it informs my family traditions, I’m Slovak-American. But I still consider myself an American first and foremost, and if we went to war with the Slovak Republic I’d be rooting for the US Army.
When people ask about my nationality I tell them that my parents are of Italian and French descent but I’m “just a white guy from Boston”. I don’t identify strongly with anything about my parents’ ancestries except for a love of Italian food. Growing up in Boston is what formed a large part of my identity and that’s what I think of when asked about my roots.
