Mastodawn

What's the point of specifically Americans identifying with other cultures if people born there will just make fun of them for it?

https://discuss.online/post/36437150

What's the point of specifically Americans identifying with other cultures if people born there will just make fun of them for it? - Discuss Online

Sorry to ask, I don’t want to seem ignorant but I really don’t get it. Like, I saw a post on someone identifying as Norwegian-American and I thought of what another commenter said that most people don’t do the stuff Americans do and how most people will see them as American. But I see many Americans strongly identify with a culture they were raised with. Is it still okay for them to do that? What’s the point?

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MurrayL Mar 4

I think people make fun of it because to a non-American it comes across as deeply insecure. The trope is that the USA has no history of its own and so its people latch onto the smallest scraps of heritage via ancestry as a way to give themselves some cultural context and cachet.

I don’t think it’s invalid - in many cases the ancestry is genuine, even if distant and/or fractional. If it helps them find meaning or feel connected to something then I’ve got no issue with it.

The issues only really arise IMO if someone starts weaponising that ancestry or insisting they now have the authority to speak for a people they have no tangible connection to.

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Pirat

I was always proud to from the USA up until W and the Iraq war. My pride has been flagging ever since.

Having said that, to find out what it means to be US American, one has to know one’s heritage. This, of course, will be different for each individual but my heritage is one of the most common, that being ancestors from the British Isles and Germany. That does not diminish, in my mind, the contributions of other cultures. Those other cultures, particularly African and Spanish, help contribute to making me now different from my British/German heritage, thus American. There are many of my heritage who want to pretend other influences don’t exist. They forget … E Pluribus Unum - Out of Many One.