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I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. It's hard to be PC about this topic and I the best way to describe my point is by using an example*:
Let’s say my mom emigrated to the US/Canada in her teens from India with her parents. She subsequently married a man who emigrated in his teens from India as well. Both receive American citizenship. They have son who are born in the US. In the house only English is spoken (parents speak different dialects so English is the common language) and North American traditions and customs are widely adopted. Let’s say they’re not particularly religious. Can this son consider himself truly American/Canadian? His skin tone won’t be white so will he always be ‘Indian’ and be lumped together with those who just immigrated?
What if he goes on to marry a woman in the same boat as him and have children. Now these children will be born in the US/Canada, parents born in the US/Canada (and only speak English), grandparents, and great grandparents living in the US/Canada and have no ties whatsoever to India. Will they be truly considered North American? If they marry others in the same boat and have their own kids?… and so on?
What I mean by ‘considered’ North American is… I often read here on CD about neighborhoods being predominantly Indian or Asian or whatever it may be. I also have witnessed that when, for example, a family of Asians move into a predominately ‘White’ neighborhood, concern is raised that it will change the neighborhoods reputation (as much as you try to deny it, this mentality exists). At what point does skin color or ethnicity stop mattering? If you’re 2nd generation? 3rd? As long as you have an American accent? Once they start having mixed marriages and the children become more North American looking?
*This is by no means my actual history – just for argument sake.
FWIW- This is for discussion only. I’m truly curious, not trying to argue or be accusatory.
***I added Black in the title as I believe Black people are among the few visible minorities that do not fall victim to the "what's your background" type questions in my experience.
I think a good guide to this would be Kristine Yamaguichi who is a full blood 4th generation Japanese American, a statistically rarity due to the high interracial marriage rates among Japanese Americans.
I think she said she used to get a lot of questions about being from Japan, China etc. even though nobody in her recent family memory has ever lived there.
Yamaguchi’s heritage can be traced back to the Wakayama and Saga prefectures in Japan. Kristi’s paternal grandfather, Tatsuichi Yamaguchi, immigrated to Hawaii in 1899, making his way to the United States a few years later. Over a span of five decades, he persevered time and time again, living through the changing restrictions on immigrants from Japan. He finally was able to naturalize just four years before his death. During World War II, most Japanese-Americans served in the segregated, all Japanese-American, 442nd Regimental Combat Team. But Kristi’s maternal grandfather, George Akira Doi, served in the 100th Infantry Division, an otherwise all-white unit. He saw combat in Europe and was decorated as “unquestionably the company’s best soldier,” even as his wife and family spent the war years incarcerated in concentration camps.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. It's hard to be PC about this topic and I the best way to describe my point is by using an example*:
Let’s say my mom emigrated to the US/Canada in her teens from India with her parents. She subsequently married a man who emigrated in his teens from India as well. Both receive American citizenship. They have son who are born in the US. In the house only English is spoken (parents speak different dialects so English is the common language) and North American traditions and customs are widely adopted. Let’s say they’re not particularly religious. Can this son consider himself truly American/Canadian? His skin tone won’t be white so will he always be ‘Indian’ and be lumped together with those who just immigrated?
What if he goes on to marry a woman in the same boat as him and have children. Now these children will be born in the US/Canada, parents born in the US/Canada (and only speak English), grandparents, and great grandparents living in the US/Canada and have no ties whatsoever to India. Will they be truly considered North American? If they marry others in the same boat and have their own kids?… and so on?
What I mean by ‘considered’ North American is… I often read here on CD about neighborhoods being predominantly Indian or Asian or whatever it may be. I also have witnessed that when, for example, a family of Asians move into a predominately ‘White’ neighborhood, concern is raised that it will change the neighborhoods reputation (as much as you try to deny it, this mentality exists). At what point does skin color or ethnicity stop mattering? If you’re 2nd generation? 3rd? As long as you have an American accent? Once they start having mixed marriages and the children become more North American looking?
*This is by no means my actual history – just for argument sake.
FWIW- This is for discussion only. I’m truly curious, not trying to argue or be accusatory.
***I added Black in the title as I believe Black people are among the few visible minorities that do not fall victim to the "what's your background" type questions in my experience.
Oh what I think will stop this is if we have an immigration time out. By continuially importing massive amounts of people folks will always assume Indians in particular are foreigners. It's even worse for the Caribbean Indians. I've met Indians from Trinidad and Guyana who would bristle at being called Indian.
I dated a Chinese-American girl a few years ago who was going to law school at UCLA. She had been born and raised in San Francisco, which is basically the most "Chinese" city in America. We would get in discussions/debates about the fact that she was Chinese-American; she did, indeed, view herself as being not wholly "American," and thanked her Chinese heritage as one of the reasons that she had been successful in school and would be successful in life: that the culture made her more studious, more intelligent, more reverent of elders and authority figures. She couldn't wait to visit China for the first time with her family.
She came back angrily lamenting what an uncouth, dirty, unjust, unequal, and generally awful place it was, and defined herself as an "American" thereafter. She also became acutely aware of the fact that she was American over there, because people would point out how bad her Chinese was, tell her that she wasn't really Chinese, that she was, in fact, American - and that this was often thought of as disgraceful.
She did a lot of soul searching, and realized that nearly all of the people she ever met would immediately assume that she was, in fact, American when they first met her - they spoke to her in the same tone they'd speak to anyone else, assumed English was her first language, and that she really hadn't ever been mistreated due to her ethnic appearance. I think that generally, this is the case - you can be Indian, Asian, Middle Eastern, whatever... if you were born in the US and you dress like most other Americans, drive the same kind of car and live in the same neighborhood as everyone else, went to the same schools, listen to the same music and watch the same TV and movies... yes, you are inextricably American.
A good litmus test as well, to me, is to ask: if you were to take that person and put them down in their ancestral homeland right this minute, would they be able to orient themselves socially? Would they know where to go, who and what to ask, how to act? If not, they're American (or Canadian, French, English, etc etc).
I read an interesting article about couple of months ago to the same effect. Chinese-Americans go to China and the native Chinese treat them like outcast based on their inability to speak the language fluently or cultural differences.
The reality is if you have been in this country for all your life you are going to have cultural differences with people that live in other parts of the world even if you share the same ancestry.
Can you prove that? Having over 99 out of 100 people dying sounds far fetched. Even the Nazis left more Jews alive and the Nazis were TRYING to catch and kill them all.
A more interesting question is can prove the information presented is factually incorrect?
I dated a Chinese-American girl a few years ago who was going to law school at UCLA. She had been born and raised in San Francisco, which is basically the most "Chinese" city in America. We would get in discussions/debates about the fact that she was Chinese-American; she did, indeed, view herself as being not wholly "American," and thanked her Chinese heritage as one of the reasons that she had been successful in school and would be successful in life: that the culture made her more studious, more intelligent, more reverent of elders and authority figures. She couldn't wait to visit China for the first time with her family.
She came back angrily lamenting what an uncouth, dirty, unjust, unequal, and generally awful place it was, and defined herself as an "American" thereafter. She also became acutely aware of the fact that she was American over there, because people would point out how bad her Chinese was, tell her that she wasn't really Chinese, that she was, in fact, American - and that this was often thought of as disgraceful.
She did a lot of soul searching, and realized that nearly all of the people she ever met would immediately assume that she was, in fact, American when they first met her - they spoke to her in the same tone they'd speak to anyone else, assumed English was her first language, and that she really hadn't ever been mistreated due to her ethnic appearance. I think that generally, this is the case - you can be Indian, Asian, Middle Eastern, whatever... if you were born in the US and you dress like most other Americans, drive the same kind of car and live in the same neighborhood as everyone else, went to the same schools, listen to the same music and watch the same TV and movies... yes, you are inextricably American.
A good litmus test as well, to me, is to ask: if you were to take that person and put them down in their ancestral homeland right this minute, would they be able to orient themselves socially? Would they know where to go, who and what to ask, how to act? If not, they're American (or Canadian, French, English, etc etc).
Wow, what an insightful post. Thanks so much for that.
There was a book in somewhat the same vein a few years ago by a black WAPO reporter named Keith Richburg. He went to Africa and found it not at all what he expected.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Richburg
But while I know that Afrocentrism has become fashionable for many black Americans searching for identity, I know it cannot work for me. I am a stranger here. I am an American, a black American. And I feel no connection to this strange and violent place. Africa chewed me up and spit me back out again."
They're Asian. No humans are native to the Americas.
Actually, any human born in the Americas is native to the Americas.
But I assume you actually mean that no race or ethnic group is native to the Americas, which is correct.
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