News flash: ethnic identity is cultural, not genetic. If you’re a Euro-American and don’t carry on any traditions from your immigrant ancestors, you’re just white now.
Genetically, I’m probably only like 1/8th Italian, but my family is still very much run by my Italian matriarch of a great grandmother. I speak a little outdated Sicilian (dialect from prior to the Italian unification), I have a whole cook book of family recipes and I know how to deviate from those recipes to make them right. I know the stories of my family’s immigration and how my grandparents and great grandparents met and the challenges they faced with their parents not wanting them to marry (Protestants and Catholics, Italians and Swedes, etc). I’m Italian-American, for better or for worse.
I know, I know :anti-italian-action:
But here’s the deal. I describe this to so many other white people and it’s just so foreign to them. The idea that my “nuclear” family includes my aunts and uncles and cousins. All the family time we engage in. Having family stories. Apparently a lot of white people don’t even know stories about their parents’ lives, which is really weird to me. I can tell you stories about my great great great grandmother when she was living in a convent in Sicily. I know the name of the town and a description of a few of the buildings, or at least how they were like 100 years ago. I’m definitely white. But I also feel white culture in a way that other white people don’t seem to because I have something else too. I’ve always been confused when people say white people have no culture, first because I knew my family had a culture and second because I knew that broader whiteness was different and had its own characteristics.
It’s hard to explain to people whose families are fully atomized and also to actual Italians. I have very little in common with people today who grew up in Italy. The language I know isn’t modern Italian. The food I know was developed based on what was available in America and was a mix of regional cuisines. I think it also exemplifies how even people who are tied to their immigrant roots are still tied to a settler culture. My experience is shaped much more by being the descendent of immigrants than by being from Italy specifically. And I definitely have inherited a lot of the material benefit of that as well. Not a ton, but it’s enough to see the difference.
honestly there should be a blonde race and a brunette race, it would just make far more sense and be far less eurocentric
the way things are under mayoism, an Italian guy (who often looks indistinguishable from half the population of the Middle East, and is literally 80%+ Middle Eastern going by neolithic ancestry) is considered “white” simply because he is of a population geographically in Europe, and then by proxy all those Middle Eastern people that he resembles are also considered “white” which is fucking stupid because now you can have two different races born to the same Lebanese couple simply because one sibling inherited some of the darker skin genes. (Even further ironic because Middle Easterners have basically zero neolithic European ancestry, which is in stark contrast to the reverse situation)
eurocentrism is when natural skin color variation is racialized but eye and hair color variation are not (because the latter two occur frequently in europeans but the former doesn’t)
worse are the useful idiots who don’t understand this simple concept and larp as europeans because they have like 2 different SNPs even though they’re 100% Punjabi or Lebanese or etc.
This is very essentialist, but so are the people who find your (valid) cultural ideas of ethnicity to be “so foreign”, and I’m just saying that they’re not even being consistently essentialist.
I’ve kind of had success with this, only once though. A chud I know was complaining about black history month, because he says it’s unfair there’s no white history month. I reminded him there’s a ton of Euro centric holidays and events all year, like St Patrick’s Day. My city has a Greek heritage festival every year. There are German beer festivals too. Not to mention Thanksgiving, but which on its very face celebrates white people colonizing America.
He had never considered any of that explicitly white
no one cared who i was until i became hwite
Find out who you were before you were white. Find out who you were before you stood erect. Go live among a tribe of bonobos and discover your true self.
MAKE EYETALIANS POC AGAIN!
But no seriously if white people stopped identifying as white that would be a marked improvement in society, but of course :cracker: have no problem simultaneously identifying with this or that Euro ethnic groups, shit you have some white nationalists who consider themselves “part Cherokee”
The problem lays deeper somewhere in the material base of society and it takes more than just twitter threads to change that
Part of the problem is that the ethnic groups white people choose to identify with are often not even real groups in the US. Being “Irish-American” means next to nothing. There’s little to no shared experience or history there, which means it is an ethnicity without a price to pick up or put down. White people in the US grow up with the shared experience of whiteness. Just because there’s no rational basis for the existence of a white racial or ethnic identity being formed doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lived experience of being shielded by whiteness. You can’t just decide to stop being white, because you have lived a life of whiteness. You can just decide to pick up or put down “German-American” or “Ang*o-American”, however, because nothing actually binds them to you.
There is one group, one ethnic identity that has a real concrete connection to the American experience, a group that can transcend the all-consuming bounds of whiteness among Euro descended Americans, and that identity is…
spoiler
G**MERS :only-good-gamer: :freeze-gamer: :gamer-gulag:
The problem lays deeper somewhere in the material base of society and it takes more than just twitter threads to change that
the people with money are white, so they make good nice cool things about whites, so everybody who can do so wants to be considered white. it’s pretty simple
