The painful 'Murican obsession with identifying as a member of a culture they have a tenuous link to, in an attempt to be interesting, is genuinely cringeworthy
Your great grandfather was Scottish, French, Irish, Italian etc.
It’s obviously cringe, but I don’t think it’s some trivial thing, it’s a trauma of Colonialism. Americans don’t truly have a claim to the land they pillaged to live on. Whiteness absorbed European ethics like the borg, stripped them of a language and culture, and all they have left is getting run over by a Ford F250 in a Walmart parking lot.
So a lot of white Americans have this near libidinal need to tie themselves to a culture they consider to be more real or substantive. I don’t think that’s a trivial desire, but insisting that you’re Italian, despite not knowing anything about the place, or claiming your great great great grandma was a Cherokee princess, or some shit… That ain’t it
FWIW, I don’t think it’s a practice exclusive to whiteness, since marginalized groups will establish a nucleus of cultural identity as well. Whiteness will supplant that cultural identity in all but name, eliminating the need for traditional ethnic enclaves, but there are still plenty of legitimate (mostly non-white) subcultures in North America with shared practices and traditions that are not wholly American either.
The painful 'Murican obsession with identifying as a member of a culture they have a tenuous link to, in an attempt to be interesting, is genuinely cringeworthy
Your great grandfather was Scottish, French, Irish, Italian etc.
Not you
It’s obviously cringe, but I don’t think it’s some trivial thing, it’s a trauma of Colonialism. Americans don’t truly have a claim to the land they pillaged to live on. Whiteness absorbed European ethics like the borg, stripped them of a language and culture, and all they have left is getting run over by a Ford F250 in a Walmart parking lot.
So a lot of white Americans have this near libidinal need to tie themselves to a culture they consider to be more real or substantive. I don’t think that’s a trivial desire, but insisting that you’re Italian, despite not knowing anything about the place, or claiming your great great great grandma was a Cherokee princess, or some shit… That ain’t it
FWIW, I don’t think it’s a practice exclusive to whiteness, since marginalized groups will establish a nucleus of cultural identity as well. Whiteness will supplant that cultural identity in all but name, eliminating the need for traditional ethnic enclaves, but there are still plenty of legitimate (mostly non-white) subcultures in North America with shared practices and traditions that are not wholly American either.