White Americans: Are you a "hyphenated American"

In My Humble Opinion
81

This one really, really depends on context. For most purposes, I’m just American. But if I’m filling out a survey, I’m always tempted to scratch out ‘white’ and put in Scandinavian-American.

A light-skinned friend of mine was born in the US, grew up in Nigeria, then moved back to the US for college. She described her experience as being American-African, and said that it was really unsettling to feel at home in Nigeria, but be the wrong color and get treated like an outsider, and then come to the US and feel out of place but be treated like she belonged. She had nothing in common with African-American culture, it’s a completely separate culture from where she grew up.

The US is a fantastic place for identity crises, what can I say.

82

Well yes, technically.

But most people I know who are themselves immigrants, or even have parents who were immigrants, don’t call or consider themselves non-hyphenated Americans. They will even just call themselves ‘Korean’ or ‘Russian’, seemingly noy identifying as ‘American’ at all. And they can have stronger ties to another country and culture than to America, regardless of legal citizenship. I think that’s different than someone like me who has a complete lack of any personal or familial non-American identity.

83

There seems to be some misunderstanding of semantics here. If you’re an American citizen of course you’re American. But unless you are Sioux, or Cherokee, or Crow, or Arapaho or some other indigenous Native American your heritage and ancestry originated from some other country. That is a fact and there is no gray area.

84

Probably just my problem. In my head, I hear a big difference between ‘I don’t have much of any other heritage to speak of’ and ‘nobody’s more American than me.’

But I understand the point you are making.

85

Exactly my point. They have an American passport [or identity papers] and are American.

No. They are American because they happen to be citizens of America. There was no country here before the europeans came over. There were a collection of indiginous residents of several thousand different tribes, some of whom believed in land ownership on the individual level, others who believed in communal ownership of land and were territorial, and others who were nomadic and ranged an area they considered their hereditary territory. If a Cherokee decided to emigrate to Germany [god knows why] he then becomes German [if he can pass the German citizenship requirements] It is an accident of history that they came to this territory via wandering 20 000 years ago instead of on ships like everybody else. They could have just as easily kept heading south or turned around and headed back across the Bering Strait.

86

No. You’re confusing citizenship with ancestry. The Cherokee who emigrated to Germany would become a German citizen, but his ancestry will always be Cherokee.

87

American with relatives in the distant past who came from parts of NW Europe, and points east and south of that until Africa is reached.

Apparently I’m white.

88

I don’t even know much about my heritage. I think there is some German in my background. My surname is almost certainly British. Beyond that, I know little about where my ancestors were born.

89

Normally I consider myself an American. But if I had to hyphenate, I’d be:

Jewish-American
Gay-American
Atheist-American
Senior-American

and probably a few others.

90

I’m very rarely asked this, but when I am, I always answer “African-American.” Ultimately, we all are, and quibbling about where we’ve been in between always seems a little silly.

91

Would you think it rude if people didn’t want to call you Polish-American?

Because you are. All of us have bits and pieces of cultures from other countries in our lives, some are parts of our heritage, others are simply things we like. Each of us is unique but still the same.

Which, to me, sounds like you think you are above anyone in this country who doesn’t have a more or less purebred pedigree and/or culture from somewhere else handed down by their ancestors. Yes, your culture is different than mine, but that is the point whole point of the US of A - tons of choices all in one place. If you want to hang onto and identify with your ancestors, no skin off my nose, but do you really want to make it look like you think you are better than those who you call “just” Americans, just citizens?

92

My background is as far as I know mostly northern European, at least half my family tree is German, but I have no identification with Germany in particular or Europe in general, thus, I’m just an American.

93

I don’t personally have a lot of identification with the countries my parents’ families come from. I’m almost totally assimilated - there are just a few small things, like we celebrate holiday x or we eat food y. People look at me and see white American, and that’s what I see when I look in the mirror too.

It’s a privilege I have from being ‘Gen Y’. My parents (Baby Boomers) reached adolescence in a time when people were wising up and becoming more accepting of other cultures, but I think they still felt like they were marked as ‘different’, and there are still remnants of that remaining in our society.

94

I agree with you, but also IME, people don’t say “I’m Irish-American” out loud: they say “I’m Irish”… and no, damnit, even if all eight of your great-grandparents were born in Cork, if all four grandparents were born in the US, your parents were born in the US, and the only time you’ve been outside the US for more than three days it was two years on location in Mexico - you’re Irish-American but you’re not Irish, your foreparents were. No, I wasn’t rude enough to say it out loud, I merely thought it.

I had so many American coworkers who identified as “Irish”, “Polish” or “Italian” that I almost hugged the first one who drawled “well, ah’m from Sah Cahlina”.

95

Yes, for all our talk of ancestry and hyphenation, when Americans travel to other countries, we are seen as American. We may not be a homogeneous bunch, but people tend to know us when they see us.

My ancestors came to America in the 1600s. Maybe I’ll say I’m Colonial-American.

96

Can a non-white person chime in?

I can understand both points of view. If you’re all “mixed up” and there are few if any customs in your family that stand out as “non-mainstream”, then I can see how going by just “American” makes sense. However, if you grew up celebrating certain holidays, eating certain foods, hearing and saying certain words and phrases that can be traced back to an “old country”, and most importantly, people pick out your differentness, then I say it makes sense to identify yourself as hyphen-American.

I identify myself in different ways, depending on why I’m being asked to identify myself. I don’t speak with any accent (not even “Southern”, really) and there isn’t anything about me that doesn’t scream “AMERICAN!”, but I still stick out as different because of my appearance. So usually, when a white American asks me to identify myself, saying “American” won’t cut it. They’re looking for something more specific. So I usually say I’m a “black American.” I’m essentially saying I’m the descendent of Africans and that is why I appear the way I do. My departure from whiteness is not due to Indian or Asian ancestry. But to African ancestry.

If another black person–anyone of the African Diaspora–asks me “what I am”, I generally say, I’m “African American.” Because usually black people can recognize my African-ness. They are trying to pinpoint a particular culture, and most black people know what I mean by “African American” (as opposed to Haitian, Jamaican, Nigerian, Ethiopian, etc.). Or maybe they are trying to figure out (coyly) if I’m biracial or just light-skinned. If I were biracial, I’d probably say, “I’m biracial, but identify as black/African American.” But because I’m not, I just say, “African American”. That’s usually sufficient.

Growing up in the South, where the world was “black” and “white”, whites didn’t do the hyphenated thing and I wasn’t constantly asked “what are you?” When I moved to New Jersey, this no longer held. There were plenty of people who were “mutt” whites, of course. But you could quickly tell who were “mutt” whites and whites who had grandparents who were right off the boat. They would even do the same code-switching that black people often do. So in my eyes, that marked them as different; if they chose to go by hyphen-American, it would have made perfect sense to me. Just as it made sense for me to distinguish myself from folks with family from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Egypt–even though I superficially resembled all of them in appearance. It’s not being divisive. It’s just a realization that there are different ways to be an American. I don’t see this as being a bad thing.

97

Ditto, other than the Czech part. We’ve been here long enough (both sides of the family came over in the 1630s) that we’re too far removed from our “English roots” to be even remotely English. We also have some New Amsterdam Dutch in there, and I’m sure random bits and pieces of other nationalities. We’re everything and nothing.

98

I agree. I think it’s a matter of growing up in an area where people in general have a strong ethnic identity, even if it’s not the same one. The neighborhood I grew up in was mostly Italian and German. There were Italian delis and German delis, and the same went for butchers , bakeries, social clubs , catering halls etc.It’s not a just a matter of the ethnicity running the shop - I couldn’t buy landjäger at the Italian butcher or cannoli at the German bakery. One Catholic church had a German Mass and another had an Italian Mass. I was an adult before I realized people actually did buy presents for weddings- I had only been to Italian-American weddings before that, and the standard gift at those is a check or cash. The area is changing a little now , (probably due to gentrification a couple of neighborhoods over ) and there are now Polish delis ,bakeries etc. . Other nearby neighborhoods have Chinese bakeries and butchers , or Dominican , etc.

99

I don’t agree. There plenty of white or black or Asian or whatever Americans whose ancestors came to this country long enough ago that they don’t identify with any other country. For many of them, the ancestry isn’t from any particular country but several. And even those who are first-generation Americans (parents emigrated to the US and then they were born here) or even zero-generation Americans (born overseas but perhaps came here quite young) may not identify with any country other than this one, despite outward appearances.

100

Nationality (citizenship) is not the same as identity.

Some Americans identify with an ethnicity or national heritage that is not the country of their citizenship, but their ancestors’. Some don’t. For those that do, sometimes the connection is real, sometimes it’s tenuous, and sometimes it’s made up. In any case, when an American says “I’m Lithuanian,” it means one of five things:

  1. I’m a visitor from Lithuania.
  2. I’m an American originally from Lithuania.
  3. I grew up in America, but steeped in Lithuanian culture.
  4. One or more of my ancestors came from Lithuania.
  5. I really like Lithuanian culture.

It’s just shorthand, because it’s easier to say “I’m Lithuanian” than to bore others with the backstory of how and why. Usually, context will separate #1 from Nos. 2–5.

It’s just one layer of identity. In most parts of the country, “white” isn’t a remarkable identity, because it’s the mainstream American culture and so it’s unmarked (unnoticed) until you travel outside the U.S. or spend a lot of time within one of the distinctive subcultures or with people from those groups.

I like the fact that some of my ancestors came from Switzerland. I think it’s cool. I discovered this through genealogy (my grandfather thought that side was French, and my father never thought about it at all), so it would be beyond foolish to claim that heritage. Nevertheless, I can say “I am a Swiss-American,” meaning a part of my heritage was religious nutballs who abandoned Switzerland for Ohio in the 19th century. It doesn’t mean I have anything in common with a Swiss person, and it’s more a historical factoid that a statement of identity as when I say “Italian-American.” Even in that case, my geography and my career and my gender and my sexual orientation etc. form a larger part of my self-identity than the heritage cultures, but most people are more complex than “American” or “X-American” could sum up, anyway.