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They will say of themselves as being Irish/Italian/other-european-nationality because their great-grandfather or great-grandmother came from there.
Okay let's play a game. Let's pretend you're Italian, you said Italian, we'll go with that. You speak Italian, you're used to traditional Italian food, you believe in traditional Italian values. Things are done a certain way in Italy, and you're used to it that way. Then one day, for whatever reason be it economic prospects, famine, war, whatever, you decide to leave Italy forever and board a ship bound for America. New Life in the New World and all that jazz.
What do you do when you step off the boat at Ellis Island? Do you:
A. Continue to speak your native language at least at home, become part of a community of fellow Italian emigrants, continue to cook and eat your traditional dishes...as best as you can with the ingredients available in this new hemisphere at any rate, do things the way you're used to doing them, retaining your traditional values...or
B. Delete all that tedious "back in the old country" nonsense and instantly become an English speakin' cheeseburger eatin' stetson wearin' rootin' tootin' howdy y'all.
Going with option A, huh? How original. We've run this experiment on real hardware literally hundreds of millions of times over the last 250 years and not a single immigrant has gone with Option B.
Okay so...now you're an American. You're still an Italian though. It's who and what you are. You get married and have children. How do you raise those children? Do you...
A. Speak Italian to them at home, take them to the same church you were raised in, feed them the foods you were raised eating, teach them the same values you believe in, tell them the tales of your home country's folklore as bedtime stories...or
B. Speak to them only in English, send them to the First Baptist Church, feed them apple sauce and happy meals, and raise them on Sesame Street and Marvel comics.
Going with option A again? Daring today, aren't we? Your children are required to go to American public school. They're formally taught to read, write, speak and understand English, and invariably put in the role of translating for their parents during doctors visits and the like. They're taught American legends like the first thanksgiving with the pilgrims and Indians, of George Washington and that cherry tree. They grow up eating the food their parents invented out of necessity, like spaghetti and meatballs, or chicken parmesan.
One day, well into their adulthood, someone asks your children a question. It might be "Where are you from?" or some similar phraseology. How do your bilingual spaghetti-eating children answer this question?
"We're Italian."
Now that we've been on that journey, I want you to imagine logging onto the internet to find some dumb fuck who never left the Old Country, who has never been to a place where "What is your current nationality" and "What is your personal heritage" are different questions with different answers and thus has no grasp at all on the concept of diaspora says "No you're not."
There are several problems there:
- Stereotypically, the Americans doing this are way further removed from their ancestry than the second-generation immigrants you describe (in fact it's completely normal and accepted for second-gen immigrants to identify as their parent's nationality as well in Europe);
- "I'm Italian" and "I have Italian ancestry" are NOT the same sentence. You seem to realize that, but many Americans don't, and the comment you replied to complained about the former, and the difference is fundamental;
- Europeans are generally not on board with the whole "ethnic identity" stuff that Americans do, for a variety of reasons that one could simplify down to "last time we did that, nazism happened". The mainstream progressive view is humanist and intentionally colorblind, and it is therefore profoundly shocking to see Americans derive a sense of self-worth from their blood, because these are the talking points we normally only hear in documentaries about Mussolini...
Now I have spent enough time reading about how American view their complicated relationship to race, ethnicity, and ancestry, to understand where you're coming from, but this is fundamentally at odds to the humanist approach of "we're all the same and who your great-grandparents were does not define who you are in any way". (Which is obviously idealist, and does tend to "whitewash" some struggles, but it is nonetheless the prevailing approach).
I don't agree with your third point at all.
I don't think I've met any Americans that use their ancestry as a sense of "self worth" in any meaningful amount. For the vast majority of people it's just a interesting quirk people like to share about their ancestry. Taking that and criticizing it because "last time we did it, nazism happened" is quite a stretch.
Mate, I've seen long-term immigrants not just of my own nation but other nations who returned and was even myself an immigrant of my own nation for over 2 decades abroad, and after 2 or 3 decades people living abroad are already culturally and even in values different from their countrymen, due to a mix of partially absorbing the values and way of being in life and society of were they live, and because their own country kept on changing over time generally in a different way in which they themselves change (it's quite funny how they have ideas about how their own country of birth is that don't really match the reality and look silly and outdated to the people actually living there).
This is a mere 2 or 3 decades for people who actually grew up in their nation of origin.
People 2 or 3 generations away from said nation are not only descendants of immigrants with a deviating cultural framework as describe above, but they have grown up in a different nation (and from all my observations living in a couple of countries, people culturally tend to be closer to the country they grew up in more than the country of their parents) and at least their parents and possibly their grandparents were already people who grew up in a different nation and only knew about the nation of their ancestors via 2nd or 3rd hand accounts.
Whatever "culture" and "value" they have from their ancestors' nation of origin is a thin slice, deeply degraded (often charicaturally so - note the mention of spaghetti eating to mean "culturally italian", something which would make me Italian and my Italian ancestors if any came over during the Roman Empire) and severelly outdated (a century or more) version of the culture and values of the nation of origin of their ancestors.
The difference for example between an American of Italian ancestry and one of Irish ancestry is token if that much compared to the difference between an actual modern Italian and an Irish: American-Italian, American-Irish and so on are but sub-cultures of the United States of America culture and draw most of their ways and values from that one, not from the cultures of the countries of origin of their great-grandparents.
In a room full of experiences like above, no one is counting the "depth" of cultural connection, nor would it be appropriate to say so. You wouldn't say "how Mexican are you?" And suppose that a 2 or 3 generation Mexican American (born US, never returned to Mexico significantly) was not still importantly connected to their heritage.
No one from America thinks they are citizens from anywhere else (unless they have the passport). But as a nation of immigration, heritage is of social interest, and all take pride in what parts they are made from. They don't think they are literally Italian or similar.
As long as you speak the language, it's fine by me. Once you stop speaking Italian at home (in this example) it's over, you can't call yourself Italian anymore.
According to the Codex Wiesonius.
TIL most people born in Ireland are not Irish.
You joke but that's what I'm been told by Italians from Italy. If your name is Angela Spaghetti but you cannot speak a single word in Italian, you're not considered Italian, maybe Italian American at best (which just means you're American to Italian eyes).
I'm also meaning it sincerely. It is a sensible distinction since "Italian" is not a blood line, but a culture.
When your country is so young, nearly everybody is an immigrant. So it's hard to take pride in a family lineage that is at most 4 generations of being American. Plus, we don't really have a unified national identity. "American" could literally mean every type of person.
funny that you say that, not all Europeans are stuck in the same nationality for 10 or 30 generations back, maybe not even majority.
My great-grandmother was German, never learned the language of what is now my nationality. My grandmother and her child (my parent) didn't speak German and have never subscribed to German nationality, neither do I (but I speak a little bit German though becouse of school not because of family). Maybe it's because the identity of the place I live in is as strong as Germany's so it's a simple choice. But for a country, whose entire schtick is "'Murica fokk yea" I am sometimes baffled how much this ancestral identity matters among people who are supposed to benefit from the whole thing (white middle/upper classes).
I suspect that's because Europe is hugelly varied whilst the United States are, in what's actually almost twice area, much less varied in terms of culture and values (for example, the whole of North American has all of 3 main languages - with English clearly dominant - whilst Europe has over 20 main ones plus another 80 or so minor ones).
Living in Europe it's very likely that you'll actually cross paths with and even know well people from the country of your ancestors (plus from lots of other quite different countries) and lose all illusions that you're culturally the same, whilst in the US one can live in blissfull ignorance thinking eating spaghetti and having an Italian great-grandfather makes them a lot like Italians, never actually having met and gotten to know well an actual modern italian.
It's actually funny: people within a specific cultural environment have a tendency to spot in great detail everybody's slight differences, which for outsiders are pretty closed to unremarkeable, and it's only when you go live elsewhere do you notice all those "great differences" were nothing at all compared to the differences in people between countries, at least in Europe. It's actually funny how for example my keen spotting of regional differences in my home nation of Portugal (which is tiny yet even that one has such things) suddenly became silly when I moved to The Netherlands, by comparisson with the great differences in people between the two countries, and ditto when I moved to England, and then as I lived longer and longer in those countries I started spotting the regional difference in people within those countries (and in the special case of Britain, the differences between people from the various nations also became sharper in my eyes).
I suppose things like an Italian-American subculture come from that keen spotting of what for outsiders are quite small differences and then that mixed with profound ignorance on the subject matter makes many confuse being "an American with a drizzle of Italian" with being part Italian.
Mind you, it's all valid. It's just that for me who have lived in a couple of countries in Europe, been to quite a few more, can speak several european languages and know people who actually grew in various countries in Europe, that kind of identification with the nation of one's ancestors in the US looks quite ill-informed.
No, this is an American thing. Other countries in the American continent have the same immigrant thing going on and we don't call ourselves Italian or whatever. We are all from the country where we were born.
This is a miss on one of the best parts of America.
This is a country of immigration and everyone has a story and a different background.
Ummm... The US was built on immigrants, what other American country is? Look at early era NY, I don't know any other country in America built off a huge influx of diversity like that. It was how the US grew, through immigration. But I'm open to being wrong if you could show me any.
For example, South/Central American countries all have their own deep, rich, and most importantly, long history of culture and heritage. The US does not, outside Native Americans that is.
What the hell? All countries in the continent are about the same age. Europeans after the wars fled to lots of different countries. Sao Paulo, Brazil, for example, has the largest number of Japanese immigrants in the world. My ancestors came from Italy, Hungary, Spain, and Portugal.
Maradona, the great Argentine football player, descended from native American, Spanish, Italian and Croatian ancestors. Another Argentine footballer, Lionel Messi, descended from Italian and Spanish immigrants. Bolsonaro, shitty ex-president of Brazil, has an Italian surname. He won the previous election against Fernando Haddad, who has a Turkish surname.
It's not about age. The US is a blend of cultures without a real single identity. It is very different than say Brazilian history, which is much older than the US.
Brazil was originally settled by stone-age tribes. In 1500, Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral arrived in Brazil with 1,200 adventurers. Cabral claimed Brazil as a colony of Portugal. The first settlement was founded in 1532. Which is a few hundred years sooner than the US and not established with multiple peoples she cultures.
are they claiming nationality or ethnic heritage?
Culture persists in some way for generations, you know. An immigrant's grandchildren probably won't fit in in their home country, but they're still distinct from mainstream American culture.
yes. But where my ancestors does not change. So when I saw I am Irish, I am just making a claim about where they came from.