I was born in Ohio but currently live in Northern Virginia. The only Southernness of my ancestors is that, being Irish Catholic, they immigrated into Baltimore in the 18th century and then farmed in northern Maryland about 5 miles south of the Mason-Dixon line. In 1788 they moved to the Alleghenies of western Pennsylvania and never looked back. So my claim to being Southern is about as tenuous as can be without being altogether nonexistent. Nevertheless, I cry tears when I listen to the Indigo Girls singing “Southland in the Springtime” (When God made me born a Yankee, She was teasin’), and what’s more I’m a fan of the Dixie Chicks.
You’re in! See how easy that was?
I was born there, grew up there, left, came back, went to college there.
And fled, it’s awful. Racist and backwards and terrible.
There’s your other data point.
ETA: Make no mistake, I’m a Southerner, though. Not really proud of it, why would I be? It’s an accident of birth, nothing more.
Note the point that I make in this thread about ethnic groups in the U.S.:
I linked to this map:
(The ethnic groups were determined by what people put on their 2000 census forms.) There’s something very interesting there. For about half the counties in the U.S., the largest ethnic ancestry in them is German. Nearly all the others can be characterized as follows:
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New England and nearby New York and New Jersey, where the largest ethnic groups are English, Irish, French, and Italian
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Nearly all of Utah and nearby parts of Idaho, Wyoming, and Nevada, where the largest ethnic group is English
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Large parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and some counties elsewhere, where the largest ethnic group is Mexican
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Certain counties where the largest ethnic group is American Indian
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Certain counties where the largest ethnic group is Norwegian
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Certain counties where the largest ethnic group is Finnish
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Certain counties where the largest ethnic group is Dutch
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An area that corresponds almost precisely to the South (“Dixie”) in Garreau’s map, even down to including the same parts of states that he does
In that last area that corresponds to what we think of as the South, there are just two ethnic groups that are the largest ones for those counties. One is black. The other is “American.” This means that people either couldn’t or didn’t want to specify their ethnic ancestries on the census. I find it interesting that white people in this area (which, again, is almost precisely what we think of as the South) are most likely to not want to specify their ethnic ancestry.
Yeah, what’s up with that? I’ve been wondering. One such map I looked at the other day said the choice to be ethnically “American” was either for ignorance of one’s ancestry or for political reasons. Can anyone elaborate?
The best guess is that one of the two things is true for those people who put down “American” on their census forms:
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They honestly don’t know what their ancestry is. They have never discussed it with their parents. Nobody around them discussed it, so they don’t ever get a chance to find out.
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They are offended by the question. They’ve been told that they shouldn’t identify themselves in any way except as an American. They refuse to say anything about their ancestry on the form.
The interesting thing is that most blacks (and especially those in the South) don’t accept this at all. They probably think that, whatever whites may tell them, they aren’t considered to be some random ethnic group just like all the others. They mostly know perfectly well that they are considered to be different.
No one in their family may know for sure other than in a vague way. A lot of pure white Southern heritage families have really deep roots that no one knows much about anymore. It is usually some combination of English, Scottish, Scots-Irish or Irish but they may not even be able to nail it down that far if their most recent immigrant ancestor came over 300 years ago or more.
That is the case in my family. I never knew much about mine growing up either but I did develop an interest in genealogy as an adult and piggybacked off the work of other relatives. I don’t have any ancestors that came over after the Revolutionary War and the vast majority arrived in the early 1600’s - early 1700’s. I am also 1/8 Native American (Comanche).
If someone asks me about my ancestry, I can either give them a 3 hour lecture starting at the 1st Colony at Jamestown or I can just say ‘American’. There is no political reason for the latter answer, it is just the most true short answer that I know of. There must be a time-scale where a family becomes ‘native’ to a particular land and 300 - 400 years sounds like enough time to me. I am sure many people that answered the question as ‘American’ did it for similar reasons.
Even if we disagree on our definitions, I thank you for adding your data point. Feel free to elabourate on the “racist and backward and terrible” if you wish. I am all ears.
I disagree at least in part with Shagnasty. Yes, I suppose it could be true that white Southerners are most likely to be ignorant; I’m not going to fight hard against that proposition. But there is a definite tendency among redneck-ish type conservatives–the same ones who will buy mugs that say “these colors don’t run”, as we saw in the most recent episode of Breaking Bad–who take exception to that question. They speak dismissively about “hyphenated Americans”–if they are capable, that is, of stringing together that many multisyllabic words in a row. They may even on some level understand that they are throwing a wrench into the works for librul sociologists and political scientists.
Wendell, I love maps like those; thanks for linking to it.
My Grandfather told me his family was Irish; he told my Uncle they were Scots. 
I think that it’s usually a combination of both of those reasons, and a few others, as well.
I think that it’s at least as likely as those two explanations that the people of The South have just historically seen racial lines drawn in a quite binary way. Either you were white (“American”), or you were black - other distinctions didn’t much matter. It’s not like there were three separate drinking fountains for whites, blacks and “others” - everybody was just crammed into one of the two groups on a case-by-case basis. After a while, those binary lines effectively blurred out any others.
Quite right. Consider the various ethnic migrations to the U.S.:
Italians arrived in large numbers in the 1880s, and settled on the East Coast, Florida, and California.
Poles arrived in large numbers in the 1870s, and settled on the East Coast and in the Midwest.
Scandinavians arrived in large numbers in the 1820s, and settled in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Pacific Northwest.
Russians arrived in large numbers in the 1880s, and settled on the East and West coasts, and the Dakotas.
Where low-wage recent white immigrants were competing with other whites, ethnicity was important. It mattered a great deal whether one was an Italian or a Pole or a Swede, so these distinctions endured.
In the South, where low-wage competition was between whites and blacks, and which did not receive comparable numbers of ethnic immigrants, what mattered was whether one was black or white.
ETA: As a personal anecdote, my mother is from Michigan. Her parents are proud Swiss, second-generation immigrants. Her father speaks a far bit of Swiss German, and they’ve returned there a few times over the years. My father is from Kentucky. He’s an American, and nothing more; his family has no ethnic traditions to speak of, just Southern ones.
Isn’t it only good sense that a population without a strong ethnic identity would place less value on the ethnic identities of others? Just as a blind person would likely underrate the value of sight, or a person who doesn’t watch sports would underrate their value relative to a sports fan, who’d overrate it, people who didn’t grow up as Italian or Irish or German or Polish or Russian or Jewish or Norwegian or African or Peurto Rican or what have you, would turn a cynical eye toward the self-celebration of those who did.
Thus, it’s the ignorance (though of a benign sort; ultimately, who cares where one’s great-grandfather was born?) that fuels the tendency you speak of, it’s not a separate phenomenon.
Do you really think that most of the people in those large number of counties that stated “German” have a strong cultural identity of Germanism or whatever? I live in one of those counties, and I don’t see it. I don’t think there’s any Oktoberfest celebrations in these parts, a lot of sauerkraut being eaten, etc. I think people have a vague sense that their name was German way back when, and that’s about it. The same kind of white people down in the South would perhaps be more ignorant, or more likely just be more stubborn about refusing to answer the question.
ETA: Voltaire and Human Action do make good points too.
Strong? Maybe not. Stronger than “none”? Absolutely. I don’t know where you live, but consider Chicago, which is deep in the blue German belt on the map. They have a Von Steuben Day parade, and German food is plentiful.
To put one’s ethnicity on a Census form, which is what that map is derived from, requires only an awareness of the ethnicity, which is something that’s not very strong in the South, due to the aforementioned historical factors.
Maybe. I don’t know how you’d measure, either way.
I know Chicago does have strong ethnic traditions. But I live in the “heartland” a few hundred miles west of there, near the Missouri-Iowa border, and here it’s just very “all-American”. Friday night high school football, homecoming, prom, Fourth of July parade, the county fair…those are the only traditions I see on display. Nary an identifiably ethnic element to any of it, but still we are one of the many “German” counties.
Sometimes this sort of thing can be very, very local. I live in NYC, and my county is definitely not one of the German ones on the map. And my neighborhood isn’t German at all.But a ten-fifteen minute drive brings me to a neighborhood with German restaurants, German butchers, a German school, a German sports club, a German catering hall, and a unit of the Steuben society.
Meaning that, when asked, the residents of your county nonetheless self-identify as being of German descent, unless you think the Census Bureau is fudging numbers (though, “Largest Ancestry” is presumably a mere plurality).
Southerners largely identity as being either American, or African-American.
Why might this be so? Because the history of the South and of Iowa differs.
Who settled Iowa?
Who settled, say, Alabama?
The German-coded states were settled by immigrants who moved from the Northeast, westward. The American-coded states were settled by residents of other Southern colonies-turned-states, and their slaves. In fact, most of the white Southerners are ethnically English, Welsh, Scotch, or Irish, but those distinctions ceased to matter. What mattered was being white, or black.
As for your theory that identifying as American is purely a political statement…that could be true, but why would it be so uniquely Southern? Is the political culture of the South that different from Kansas or Oklahoma or Iowa?
I grew up on a farm in northwest Ohio. You can see from the map that every single one of the eighty-eight counties in Ohio is plurality-German, except for one county that’s plurality-black and nine counties in the south that are plurality-“American”. I suspect that those nine are either plurality-German or plurality-English, if you actually traced their inhabitants’ ancestry. As soon as I was old enough to formulate the question, I and my older brother asked my parents about their ancestry. They each knew the names (and maiden names) of all of their grandparents and what country they or their ancestors came from, so I was able to say that I was five-eights German, one-quarter English, and one-eighth Swiss from an early age.
Everybody I knew could tell you more or less what their ancestry was. Nobody was ashamed of it. On the other hand, nobody made a big deal about it. There were some German ethnic events somewhere I guess, but neither I nor anyone I knew attended any of them. Boasting about your ancestry or disparaging someone else’s would both have been considered obnoxious.
Growing up in a small Southern town, hardly any white person could do that. I notice that SlackerInc likes to join the terms ‘Southern’ and ‘ignorant’ as much as possible and I suppose that is technically true for this question but there was also a reason for it. The only white people that I knew that had any ties back to any old country whatsoever where a few from Hispanic descent. Almost everyone else’s lineage was older than the U.S. itself and family memories fade over time so that none is left by the 15th or more generation. We were just Southern Americans. The same is true for black Southerners. Almost all of them had families that had been in the U.S. for hundreds of years and the overwhelming majority have white ancestry too.
There doesn’t have to be any political reason for answering ‘American’ to your ancestry. Many Southerners have pure American lineages that go back 300 - 400 years and that is plenty of time to be considered a native to me. It was a shock when I moved to the Northeast and people my age still routinely had artifacts or even photos of their immigrant ancestors. There was no such thing where I grew up. If people try to pry and ask me where my homeland is, I simply say ‘Virginia’ because it can’t be traced any further than that even with the best efforts after 400 years.
Growing up in a small Southern town, hardly any white person could do that. I notice that SlackerInc likes to join the terms ‘Southern’ and ‘ignorant’ as much as possible and I suppose that is technically true for this question but there was also a reason for it. The only white people that I knew that had any ties back to any old country whatsoever where a few from Hispanic descent. Almost everyone else’s lineage was older than the U.S. itself and family memories fade over time so that none is left by the 15th or more generation. We were just Southern Americans. The same is true for black Southerners. Almost all of them had families that had been in the U.S. for hundreds of years and the overwhelming majority have white ancestry too.
There doesn’t have to be any political reason for answering ‘American’ to your ancestry. Many Southerners have pure American lineages that go back 300 - 400 years and that is plenty of time to be considered a native to me. It was a shock when I moved to the Northeast and people my age still routinely had artifacts or even photos of their immigrant ancestors. There was no such thing where I grew up. If people try to pry and ask me where my homeland is, I simply say ‘Virginia’ because it can’t be traced any further than that even with the best efforts after 400 years. Shakespeare was still alive when my ancestors that gave me my last name left Merry Old England.