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Getting in touch with your roots
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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I have Italian ancestry and I've always found these guys to be cringe, but I also get why they do it . Many people in the United States yearn for meaning and interpersonal connection in their lives. "Being an Italian" provides a prepackaged, very commercialized possibility of community with little effort required - you're just born to it, so instant acceptance, right?
The reality is often less Soprano's chic and more "nonno and nonnina were illiterate farmhands who moved to the US for a better life. Nonno died from mystery cancer and all of nonnina's bones dissolved after birthing her 15th child at 24. Now chew nonnina's birthday cake for her".
On the one hand, as a country of immigrants, there are tons of places where communities settled and brought their culture with them and so have a strong feeling of connection to their ancestry despite their culture today being completely different. The French Quarter of New Orleans comes to mind. On the other hand, we also kinda traded tradition for consumerism. We lack a real sense of history and culture of our own, making it easy to connect more with our hereditary culture than our country's.
You can also add to this the ease modern technology has brought in communicating with people across the globe. Americans are probably more likely than just about any other country to have distant family connections in other countries that they are in contact with. If you're French, you probably come from a generational line of French people who lived not far from you (relatively speaking). By comparison, as a kid, me and my parents went on vacation once to spend a week with some distant relatives of ours in Scotland because we have connections to a specific family castle there.
I'm as basic-white-belgian as they come and even I have a little bit of Italian and Eastern European (IIRC) somewhere in there. "Pure" (ew) lineages are actually quite rare in Europe, only the most remote places were spared the millennia of warfare (and the grim reality that soldiers, uh, move genes around) and the urban flights of the industrial revolutions. The average European's background isn't as diverse as the average American's, but a lot more than one might naively assume.
What is striking about North America though is the anglo-saxon cultural homogeneity, especially considering the diverse backgrounds. Besides Quebec there's virtually no language barrier anywhere, and an almost entirely homogenous culture. You could probably raise a kid in 6 states and 3 provinces without any major issue. All North Americans eat Mac and Cheese and they all watch the Superbowl and all American children stand up for the Pledge. Meanwhile the only cultural references I am likely to have in common with the average Pole is American TV/movies/music and depending on their English skill having a conversation at all may be a major challenge.
What I meant by generational line wasn't genetics, but location and culture. Many European countries wouldn't make the top 10 list for the biggest states in the US. If you look at a map of the US, Maine is about the same size as Portugal. The distance from Rome to Brussels, for example, is about 100 miles less than Boston to Altanta. So if you live in southern France, and your parents moved there from northern France, that's like moving from one end of a state to the other. An American visiting family across the country would be like if you went to visit relatives in Latvia or something (in terms of distance). Americans have such a different sense of scale when it comes to distance. And then you add in the amount of immigration that the US has (or at least had historically), and you get very diverse groups that, while they are American, may be first-generation Americans whose grandparents still live across the world in different countries. I myself am 100% American, but like 50% French and 45% Portugese due to my grandparents being immigrants on both sides.
The culture here is weird as well, because it's both homogeneous and not at the same time, and I think that massive scale of distance plays a part in that. Because you could listen to somebody from Boston, NYC, London, and somebody with a southern drawl, and you'd swear that they're all from different countries despite everybody speaking English because of the difference in dialect/accent. Oddly enough, I took French in school from a Belgian immigrant, so if I still spoke it, I'd have a bit of a Belgian accent (enough that people picked up on it in Montreal and Paris when I was a kid, at least), and I'd say the difference between Boston English and New York English is about the same as Belgian French to Parisian French, while a Boston accent to a Southern drawl is more like Quebecois French to European French. The distance from Brussels to Paris is less than from Boston to NYC. And the same goes for culture. We all eat Mac and Cheese, but Cajun food is specific to a "small" area of the southern US because the spices and ingredients simply don't grow in other parts of the US. And then you add in stuff like immigrant owned restaurants, and it gets even more varied. And as you go across the country, you can see stuff like massive architectural differences in the way houses are built. New England houses largely look like houses from the UK (with the occasional Slavic style house popping up here and there in my experience), while the south and the west have very different styles. And the reason that New England wouldn't look out of place in Europe is because the culture there is very much influenced by those European roots. When people immigrated here, they brought their culture with them, and many settled into little enclaves of fellow immigrants from their country. Everybody speaks English, but you know when you're in an Italian neighborhood in NYC or an Irish neighborhood in Boston. Many places are starting to put both Spanish and English on things like road signs (especially in the south near Mexico), but I've seen cities where roads are marked in both English and Chinese due to the large amount of Chinese immigrants to those cities.
The US is such a weird situation as a country that I don't think there's anything you can compare it to. It's like that 10 year period in Japanese history where they went from feudal fiefdoms to a countrywide rail network, electricity, and an army armed with gatling guns supplied by the US. There's no real frame of reference to draw parallels to.
I think you're overplaying the distance part a little bit. America was "discovered" in the Age of Exploration right on time for distance to be an increasingly less important factor. Hence why America could sustain a federal state made up of an almost entire homogeneously WASP population, and Europe could not (and the idea of a "federal Europe" is still a pipe dream at this point). There's more of a cultural divide by every metric between two cities 100 km away on either side of a linguistic border in Europe than there is between Boston and Los Angeles.
You're over-exagerating. Heavily accented Texans have little to no trouble being understood by a Bostonner, but a heavily accented older Québécois is nigh impossible to understand for the unattuned French ear. It's like the Hot Fuzz "sea mine" scene.
I appreciate that the US obviously doesn't have a fully homogeneous culture (especially in cities with immigrant backgrounds), but it's nothing Europe where Brits can tell which village someone comes from just from their accent. If I were to drive to Riga (which is actually barely as long of a drive as Boston to New Orleans) I would have to go through five sovereign states, each with their own language and variety of minority languages, their own idiosyncratic laws and justice systems (to the point that unlike the US the EU never make laws, it makes directives for EU states to implement individually), a completely different set of TV shows and radio shows and literature canon and more local food specialties than would be possible to keep track of. I'm sorry but going from Boston to New Orleans is nowhere near as much of a cultural shock. The only thing comparable to going from Belgium to Latvia is going from the US to Latvia.
Anyway it's not a competition. Taking pride in our ancestors' achievements is a dangerous road to go down, and anyway if we look at modern achievements then the entire developed world has unfortunately coalesced towards a very globalized (often american-centric) set of values and esthetic sensibilities. You can take a random new condo built in Phoenix, Amsterdam, Shanghai, and Bratislava and not be able to tell which is from where, and the people living in them are probably all watching an American TV show anyway.
It's funny because in my great great grandfather's journals he hopes his kids would be Americans and not his former nationality, or at least that's what I have been told it said as I cannot read his primary language.
Maybe not western european in particular but you sound 100% Bombadilian to me. I'll bet your boots are yellow.
We need to do a better job of teaching people to approach community groups with respect and as themselves. I'm a severe introvert so it took me way too long to figure that out but it's really that simple. There are no shortcuts, be nice to people, ask respectful questions, befriend them, and suddenly you're invited to the party/dinner.
This is 100% true. Usually the line between cultural appropriation and sharing/taking part in the culture is based on how respectful the person approaches the subject.