News flash: ethnic identity is cultural, not genetic. If you’re a Euro-American and don’t carry on any traditions from your immigrant ancestors, you’re just white now.
Genetically, I’m probably only like 1/8th Italian, but my family is still very much run by my Italian matriarch of a great grandmother. I speak a little outdated Sicilian (dialect from prior to the Italian unification), I have a whole cook book of family recipes and I know how to deviate from those recipes to make them right. I know the stories of my family’s immigration and how my grandparents and great grandparents met and the challenges they faced with their parents not wanting them to marry (Protestants and Catholics, Italians and Swedes, etc). I’m Italian-American, for better or for worse.
I know, I know :anti-italian-action:
But here’s the deal. I describe this to so many other white people and it’s just so foreign to them. The idea that my “nuclear” family includes my aunts and uncles and cousins. All the family time we engage in. Having family stories. Apparently a lot of white people don’t even know stories about their parents’ lives, which is really weird to me. I can tell you stories about my great great great grandmother when she was living in a convent in Sicily. I know the name of the town and a description of a few of the buildings, or at least how they were like 100 years ago. I’m definitely white. But I also feel white culture in a way that other white people don’t seem to because I have something else too. I’ve always been confused when people say white people have no culture, first because I knew my family had a culture and second because I knew that broader whiteness was different and had its own characteristics.
It’s hard to explain to people whose families are fully atomized and also to actual Italians. I have very little in common with people today who grew up in Italy. The language I know isn’t modern Italian. The food I know was developed based on what was available in America and was a mix of regional cuisines. I think it also exemplifies how even people who are tied to their immigrant roots are still tied to a settler culture. My experience is shaped much more by being the descendent of immigrants than by being from Italy specifically. And I definitely have inherited a lot of the material benefit of that as well. Not a ton, but it’s enough to see the difference.
honestly there should be a blonde race and a brunette race, it would just make far more sense and be far less eurocentric
the way things are under mayoism, an Italian guy (who often looks indistinguishable from half the population of the Middle East, and is literally 80%+ Middle Eastern going by neolithic ancestry) is considered "white" simply because he is of a population geographically in Europe, and then by proxy all those Middle Eastern people that he resembles are also considered "white" which is fucking stupid because now you can have two different races born to the same Lebanese couple simply because one sibling inherited some of the darker skin genes. (Even further ironic because Middle Easterners have basically zero neolithic European ancestry, which is in stark contrast to the reverse situation)
eurocentrism is when natural skin color variation is racialized but eye and hair color variation are not (because the latter two occur frequently in europeans but the former doesn't)
worse are the useful idiots who don't understand this simple concept and larp as europeans because they have like 2 different SNPs even though they're 100% Punjabi or Lebanese or etc.
This is very essentialist, but so are the people who find your (valid) cultural ideas of ethnicity to be "so foreign", and I'm just saying that they're not even being consistently essentialist.
News flash: ethnic identity is cultural, not genetic. If you’re a Euro-American and don’t carry on any traditions from your immigrant ancestors, you’re just white now.
Genetically, I’m probably only like 1/8th Italian, but my family is still very much run by my Italian matriarch of a great grandmother. I speak a little outdated Sicilian (dialect from prior to the Italian unification), I have a whole cook book of family recipes and I know how to deviate from those recipes to make them right. I know the stories of my family’s immigration and how my grandparents and great grandparents met and the challenges they faced with their parents not wanting them to marry (Protestants and Catholics, Italians and Swedes, etc). I’m Italian-American, for better or for worse.
I know, I know :anti-italian-action:
But here’s the deal. I describe this to so many other white people and it’s just so foreign to them. The idea that my “nuclear” family includes my aunts and uncles and cousins. All the family time we engage in. Having family stories. Apparently a lot of white people don’t even know stories about their parents’ lives, which is really weird to me. I can tell you stories about my great great great grandmother when she was living in a convent in Sicily. I know the name of the town and a description of a few of the buildings, or at least how they were like 100 years ago. I’m definitely white. But I also feel white culture in a way that other white people don’t seem to because I have something else too. I’ve always been confused when people say white people have no culture, first because I knew my family had a culture and second because I knew that broader whiteness was different and had its own characteristics.
It’s hard to explain to people whose families are fully atomized and also to actual Italians. I have very little in common with people today who grew up in Italy. The language I know isn’t modern Italian. The food I know was developed based on what was available in America and was a mix of regional cuisines. I think it also exemplifies how even people who are tied to their immigrant roots are still tied to a settler culture. My experience is shaped much more by being the descendent of immigrants than by being from Italy specifically. And I definitely have inherited a lot of the material benefit of that as well. Not a ton, but it’s enough to see the difference.
Good effortpost :stalin-approval:
honestly there should be a blonde race and a brunette race, it would just make far more sense and be far less eurocentric
the way things are under mayoism, an Italian guy (who often looks indistinguishable from half the population of the Middle East, and is literally 80%+ Middle Eastern going by neolithic ancestry) is considered "white" simply because he is of a population geographically in Europe, and then by proxy all those Middle Eastern people that he resembles are also considered "white" which is fucking stupid because now you can have two different races born to the same Lebanese couple simply because one sibling inherited some of the darker skin genes. (Even further ironic because Middle Easterners have basically zero neolithic European ancestry, which is in stark contrast to the reverse situation)
eurocentrism is when natural skin color variation is racialized but eye and hair color variation are not (because the latter two occur frequently in europeans but the former doesn't)
worse are the useful idiots who don't understand this simple concept and larp as europeans because they have like 2 different SNPs even though they're 100% Punjabi or Lebanese or etc.
This is very essentialist, but so are the people who find your (valid) cultural ideas of ethnicity to be "so foreign", and I'm just saying that they're not even being consistently essentialist.
:jesse-wtf:
white people define race based on white people, and pretend other people aren't also races
somewhat less deranged than what we already have :shrug-outta-hecks:
This is also why I casually refer to European things in comparison to a non-European reference.
etc