So when you have “white pride” you’re expressing pride in the structure of oppression we’ve created. No one cares if at some point you want to have Norwegian-descended pride day or whatever.
Like that is why you can’t have “white pride” but you can have like “Scottish-American pride” because that’s actually about your heritage and culture and not about a shitty label that encompasses a huge number of ethnicities that we use to oppress people who don’t fit under it.
Also for the majority of black Americans, they don’t get specifics on their black ancestry because our ancestors fucking kidnapped theirs and forcibly erased most of the language and culture they brought with them (though the amount that was saved, by black people, is amazing and wonderful and something to take immense pride in) so they don’t get to say “Mozambican-American” the way you say “Irish-American” because they had their fucking history stolen.
So being pissed at them for taking pride in the only heritage we left them with makes you an absolute fucking tool.
AKA why I blocked the “Ok no THIS is white culture” shitpost but reblog Vikings stuff all the time
good points in this: ethnicity »> race, 99 and 44/100 per cent of the time. race is a bad zeroth-order approximation of ethnicity. ethnic cohesion, even ethnic pride, is pretty okay (I would say more than pretty okay but whatever). black americans descended from slaves get shafted on ethnicity and so have to fall back on race.
bad points in this: the fuck are you supposed to do if you’re white + adopted or from a really poor family or whatever and you don’t actually know your ethnic background? to a lesser extent, what if you’re an ethnic mongrel — German/Irish/French/English/Norwegian or something? denying ethnic identity to those people seems pretty unfair.
1. If you’re adopted go with your family’s heritage, it’s your cultural heritage in any case. The heritage you were raised with, the culture you grew up in is worth celebrating.
2. If you’re from a family where you don’t know your actual ethnic background, check out your surname and if possible your mother’s maiden name. I hear they have this thing called google these days, check it out, I hear it’s pretty good. You can also look for clues like religious practices to figure out where your family is from.
3. For people of mixed descent, celebrate all the various parts of your heritage. I’m Swedish/Scottish/English/German and I enjoy the cultural heritage I’ve gotten from all of these. There is also regional cultural pride, you don’t need to know where your family is from originally to be proud of where your family is from now, the regional culture is a part of your heritage too.
I’m German, born in Germany, been living in Germany all my life, and I always find it kind of weird when some Americans insist they’re German. Or Irish, or Italian, or whatever. Your ancestors were Europeans, but you aren’t, your bloody Americans. Even if your grandfather fled the Nazis in 1933, even if you speak German and lived in Germany for a year or two, you’re still American. Your culture, your way of life, the way you think about the world around you, is quite different from us old Europeans whose ancestors didn’t leave for the New World.
I have never been to the US, I only know America from the media, but as far as i can see, what passes as “Italian”, “Irish”, “German”, or some other European “cultural heritage”, usually is a watered down and disneyfied version of traditions that are already going extinct over here.
Maybe it’s time all of you came to terms with being Americans. Just Americans. A bunch of mutts from all over the world. Some of you are light-skinned, some of you are dark-skinned, most of you are somewhere in the middle. Your culture is still young, and right now, it looks like it is eating itself. Europeans came to America because they dreamed of a better life, and for 150 years, in between 1820 and 1970, it actually worked for most white people. That’s when the myths were born – American Exceptionalism, the American Dream, the American Way of Life.
But underneath that myth, it seems that no “real” American identity ever emerged. You’ve got your weird hyperpatriotic rituals, like US flags every where, the fucking pledge, you’ve got those myths like the Frontier or the ones mentioned above, but underneath all of that, people are trying to cling to some echo of an ethnic identity that belongs on a different fucking continent. Why? You’re free to reinvent yourselves!
GODS FUCKING THANK YOU.
Like what’s been passed down has definitely evolved (as with any diaspora) and mutated from the source culture but let me tell you, a person’s cultural origins actually have a lot of impact in the states, I’m a WASP essentially, my culture is radically different from the Irish/Italian descended folks who grew up in the same area I did, taboos, food, etiquette. Our family histories really really impact the culture, for example the midwest is heavily German descended and is significantly culturally different from the Irish/Italian/English Northeast, and so on. Our heritages don’t mean we’re identical to the cultures that we came from, but we’re a bunch of separate, insular, and unique cultures living on top of one another, and heritage has a huge amount of influence on that.
Also keep in mind that the country is effing huge, and weird and really diverse and has many many unique cultures within it. Also, do not trust American media… it is wildly different from the reality of the US. I think the keep the TV and film writers like veal calves.
For example, you know the Hatfields and Mccoys? That’s highland Scotts, doing exactly what highland Scotts culture traditionally did, but in the rural US instead of rural Scotland. Anglo-Americans? They’ve got the English drinking culture. Italian and Irish Americans have formed an interesting sort of synthesis of their cultures because for a long time they both experienced the same sort of discrimination and so italian-irish-american culture has its own unique set of traditions, habits of speech and so on and so forth.
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 