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.”
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 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.
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.
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).
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:
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.
Removed by mod
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.