I might have some insight. I’m Italian-American. All 16 of my great great grandparents came from Sicily, at least officially. I know their stories individually because we tell them every year at Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. We have primary sources from their lives like diary entries and newspaper clippings as well as heirlooms like a rosary made of olive pits from when one of my Aunts several generations ago was in the convent. A lot of it is oral tradition to fill in the gaps, but those stories get told over and over.
I am not Italian, though. Like, by any modern standards, I have no connection to Italian culture. I would never claim to be from Italy or to be able to relate to Italian people outside of the US. It’s more like we have a common ancestor. Most of the first generation here were refugees from the Risorgimento, so the bits of language I know are from dialects that only existed prior to the unification of Italy and the recipes I know were largely the result of Italian immigrants learning to work with food that was available in America. But it was still a distinct culture which we’ve preserved as a family, so Italian-American is the closest we can get (Italian American culture at large is also an assimilationist white settler culture, but our family’s managed to push back on a lot of that following issues with the church. The rest is an ongoing project.)
This is all actually pretty alienating from most other white Americans I know. The ideas of having family stories that go back over 100 years, of sharing family recipes, of seeing your cousins almost daily, or seeing your extended family like a dozen times a year, they’re all very rare. Whiteness is truly about seeing yourself as the default more than anything else, so whatever culture my white friends have, it’s rare that they can even see it, identify with it, and appreciate it. By the 5th generation, most white people don’t think about their heritage at all because it’s just been replaced by American consumerism and white supremacist respectability politics. There’s a reason fascists appeal to this empty feeling of the hole in your soul where community is supposed to exist. These people just seem so lonely.
I’m not gonna act like my family is perfect. There’s plenty of fucked up shit and I’ve been really lucky that we haven’t done the whole protecting-the-abuser-because-he’s-an-elder thing when things do come to light. That also seems to be a common theme in other families. But in a world where most people have maybe 2 siblings and 3 friends, I’ve got all my cousins. In a world where noncommercial Third Spaces are all but extinct and homelessness is on the rise, I’ve got 4 houses within walking distance that I could walk into unannounced and spend the night, no questions asked until breakfast the next morning.
My partner is mostly Swedish and Irish, so their first time meeting my family, we did a potluck and I told them they should bring some Swedish food and they looked at me like I was nuts, but started googling how to make Lutefisk on like AllRecipes. Instead, they ended up asking their mom to teach them how to make Swedish meatballs. It straight up hadn’t occurred to me that they wouldn’t know how to cook some Swedish food. I have a lot of little experiences like that.
So I think white Americans overreach their cultural footprint because they straight up have no idea what existing within a cultural footprint even looks like. They see themselves as existing with default settings and when they see a question they answer it because that’s what questions are for and white people aren’t trained to consider how much space we’re taking up in a conversation like that.
One day I hope to belong somewhere. I barely have enough emotional stamina to go outside these days.
Found family is good too. Our rule is, if you come to the house twice for dinner, on the third time you’re family and you help wash dishes. One of my friends took that real literally and ended up hanging out at our house more than their parents’ in high school. I wish you the best of luck, friend.
Thank you, I was worried I was stepping over a line by making it about myself
Most of the first generation here were refugees from the Risorgimento, so the bits of language I know are from dialects that only existed prior to the unification of Italy
I read a really interesting article about this. The author said that when he went to Sicily and spoke using the language their grandma taught them, the locals said he sounded like an old person.
10/10 post makes me jealous I have no real culture beyond consumerism.
they looked at me like I was nuts, but started googling how to make Lutefisk on like AllRecipes. Instead...
Thank God there is an "INSTEAD" right after that previous statement lmao. Lutefisk is definitely an acquired thing. None of the Norwegians I know eat it ever, not with regularity.
This resonates with me as well. I'm also Italian American in this sense, and growing up I always assumed that most people had those stories still in their family. But we I grew up I realized that wasn't the case. Some of my older relatives actually spoke an Italian derived pigeon which no longer exists, so when some of my younger family members learned modern Italian, they weren't mutually comprehensible
Thanks for sharing, that's pretty cool! I'm lucky enough to have a fraction of that experience from my German grandmother's part of the family, less direct community because she was first-gen and her family's still over there, but it's enough to have a few idiosyncratic family traditions and also sound strange to all my friends who never even talked to their grandparents.
Well have you ever thought about how rude you're being by talking about something that isn't in the United States? Pardon us for just trying to contribute to whatever you're talking about but also its probably a lot less important than the United States. You ask a lot of questions about what makes someone "from" a culture but the more important question is: how are they like Americans? Do they like our movies? Do they know english enough that I could travel to their country and yell at them loudly and slowly and they'd understand? I just think you need to find a new perspective on this because yours is currently very whacky. Perhaps you should be come more American at heart.
Fair enough comrade, it’s pretty obscene if it were sincere America-centrism
Wow grumpy pants! Perhaps you need to take some time to chill out in front of a good Marvel (c) Cinematic Universe (tm) movie about how cool it is when we all work together in a light-hearted, irreverant but inspirational way towards the ultimate benefit of the United States
You're right, except it's not Anglo Saxon culture - which actually has a rich history and long traditions - but capitalism that homogenized all culture in the West (in north america specifically) and disconnected people from culture entirely.
There are a couple of different questions here, but at least as far as the "I don't live there, but…” part goes, my guess is that part at least has something to do with empire. If you talked to someone in Spain during the height of their empire, or Britain during theirs, I'd bet they'd be just as likely to have loads of opinions on places they've never been either.
It’s typical Anglo behavior, similar behavior can be seen at various points in history in Australian, Canadian, and especially British “people.” The pharyngial steppe of the Anglo brainpan is underdeveloped due to generations of inbreeding and centuries without sunlight, along with poor diet. [1]
Contemporaneously speaking, it’s only apparent in the Amero-Anglo populace due to the high cost and poor bandwidth of Australian internet [2], the effect of arctic conditions on the coccixial-blumpkin of the Canadoo-Anglo brainpan [3], and the high levels of phydigial acid in the cooking oil used in chip shops post Brexit (which, obviously, has a depressing effect on the onlineicity of your average Briton) [4].
On :reddit-logo: you get Americans who complain about America amoong themselves, but the second someone from outside of the genocide land says this they all start waving flags and chanting "USA."
It's an odd thing, really. I'm not sure if it's uniquely American, but maybe because their ethnic identities and national identities have never been 1:1 at any point, it's easier to map and identity onto something else. Americans do have a keen sense of immigrant identity, whether materially real or stolen valor, even those who have assimilated completely into American culture. Many large immigrant groups lived as close to the exact same as they did in Italy, Ireland, Germany, Nordics, etc as was possible, so modern Americans seem to idealise family heritage as an ethnic identity in and of itself.
Just spit balling, but that identity probably wraps into the American dream subconsciously. That the family didn't have any when they arrived, and now they have everything (a Ford F150).
I've never been there, but <stereotype that's at least 2 decades out of date>
- Random Cracka whose input was neither asked for or welcomed.
I will occasionally comment in a thread that's not addressed to me because I want that thread to have more visibility so that it finds more relevant people than myself (who I want to hear the opinions of) as activity is part of the algo.
Like I am doing right now responding to a thread addressed to Americans as a non-American.
Compared to most other nations, the US has its foundation laid recently and plainly upon white supremacism
Undermining us USians' understanding of ethnicity, race-pseudoscience history, and national sovereignty is critical to ensuring that most USians never have to confront the fact that their national identity is morally unsalvageable
Am unfortunately :amerikkka: , but I've heard this play out before and it's always so awkward and embarassing. Someone tried to explain the political situation in my friend's country to my friend full well knowing my friend was from that country and could talk just fine about the current situation
Tbf does being from a country mean you know shit about that country, especially politics? How many Americans are there that know fuck shit all about American politics
Every country in the world is full of liberals
Americans when someone asks if someone from country X is on this site: “I’m not from country X, but…”
specifically in regards to this one: Americans are definitely overrepresented as a share of the global population on this site. Likely a majority of this site are Americans. If someone asks "People from [non-american country]...", and someone replies " I'm not from [non-american country], but...", they're just most likely Americans by a roll of the dice given the demographics of this site.
Im not sure if this is about ppl like me or not since my parents were pretty FOB but what do u expect Americans to do? Be loud and proud about being born and bred from one of the most cooked countries on the planet and in case of diaspora possibly a former or current political enemy and also potentially a war crimes do-er to the country their parents or grandparents are from? And what is your opinion on indigenous ppl saying they don’t belong to the USA or African americans that want to secede from the US?
- if you were not born or raised somewhere.
- if none of your close relatives were born and raised in that place.
- if you have no, or only superficial, cultural connections to the place.
- if youve never been to the place.
- If you have no Connections to people living in the place.
- if you do not know the language, history or politics of the place.
It's funny, I don't really disagree with you at all. And yet every one of these applies to me, but...I actually have a valid passport from the other country in question. I could go there tomorrow if I wanted to. So uh, yeah, the list above isn't entirely comprehensive.
if you have no, or only superficial, cultural connections to the place.
How would you define this?
I understand the point and am sympathetic to it, but I'm just a bit cautious putting that into practise. Identity is a tricky thing and tightly defining it like that isn't often easy. A lot of immigrants saw assimilation as the peak goal so that their children wouldn't face the racism they did, so some of the latching onto identity is a form of resisting that racism from some people. Further, some oppressed minorities that fit into your definitions; for example, African Americans who still identify strongly with West African or Caribbean connections that fit your description but, due to their non-whiteness, wouldn't be considered fully American for most of America's history.
Again, not to say you aren't correct, but that identity is really slippery and the material reasons for why Americans are that way can make some sense in historical context.
Yeah, again, not disagreeing with you necessarily, just spitballing about identity formation and how it's claimed in various ways. I wrote on this in uni, so got to thinking about it again. All good
Yet at work I have a coworker - Angel - who said he was inbred because there were “rules” that his mom had to maintain German bloodlines and as a result one of his eyes doesn’t work :jesse-wtf:
But he doesn’t claim he’s German
i'm between 2 and 3 generations off the boat. of all my grand parents, 3 were first generation born here. the 4th is not known, but probably themselves only one or two generations from immigration. all came from northern europe, but very different areas. the details are not known regarding the circumstances, but all of them were illiterate.
the stories i got growing up started with simple details, like what country they came from. always that they were proud of being from there and wanted their children to be proud too. as i got older, the stories of these people became darker. extreme poverty. alcoholism. intimate partner violence. early teen pregnancy. religious fanaticism. sectarianism. an "evil" side of the family we were to stay away from.
when someone mentions one of those countries my great grand parents came from, it's hard not to imagine if things would have worked out better had they stayed. i don't think of people in those places as "my people" or anything, though admittedly a lot of americans seem to. the chuddier parts of my family totally would, because they are weird racists. the libs probably would too, because that kind of thinking is always under the surface, and of the older cohort, they remember conversations with the first generation immigrants and their weird pride for being born in a place they left.
i think a lot of children of settlers feel they have to come up with some story for their emigration/displacement, especially now that so much political discourse in the US is about how immigrants are not "coming the right way" or whatever the current rhetoric being deployed is to obscure how it's always been racism.
