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 By the 5th generation, most white people don’t think about their heritage at all because it’s just been replaced by American consumerism and white supremacist respectability politics.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.