For some reason when I’m talking to an American from the North East and the fact that I’m mixed comes up they always say they aren’t white they’re actually native because his grandpa once mentioned something about a Cherokee ancestor.
It’s always Cherokee, no other tribe but that one. And it’s always the whitest looking person ever, straight up 6ft tall blue eyed and blond guy.
I get it, I’m mostly white too, Spanish and Slavic. But even tho I’m not mostly native American I still look native enough that people think I’m Asian.
But when your ancestry has been so diluted over the generations… You’re not native. It’s not just that you don’t look native, it’s also that you don’t even participate in the culture.
Dude you’re just a farm boy from Philadelphia you’re probably more Amish than Cherokee, if that supposed ancestor is even real at all and not just some random claim by some of your ancestors to have a “right over these lands”.
So generally you got three things happening that give the illusion it happens way more than it really does. Choctaw/Chinese/White mix btw. Yes that order is weird.
Anyway:
White Americans want an identity, and the one they’re born with is broken. The US education system really, really fails to define ‘White’ in any way that makes sense, because as an identity it doesn’t make sense unless you’re racist. Most white Americans actually do understand this, and either embrace it while secretly denying it, or do anything possible to deny they were the ‘bad whites’ and that just happens to be their skin colour and then overcorrect and cling onto any identity they can find in their family history which brings us to:
They probably are mixed somewhere around 1850-1920. Statistically they are. Lots of what are now white people mixed with brown skinned people during this time. During this time period Natives that were ‘integrated’ into society had their identity stolen and they were rebranded as either ‘mulatto,’ ‘the old word for black,’ or ‘Mexican/Latin (if they were in a real fancy area.)’ During this time in American history many “white” ethnicities were not considered white, most famously Irish and Italians were lumped in with the ‘slur for black people,’ which included pretty much all natives at that time that weren’t backstabbing their brothers and sisters by sucking up to the whites (not naming tribes but some tribes did end up better than others for some mysterious reason). So guess what happens when a bunch of disparate communities get together? They mix. The mixing was also encouraged by every single christian group in order to help ‘mellow out’ the native influence (i.e. actual cultural genocide to the survivors of the big genocide). It was also encouraged by a minority of natives themselves, i.e. if you mix with a white person you get their money/protection/you won’t be as subject to violence. This was ultimately wrong as an idea and was never a majority view… but it happened.
also rape and forced marriage if they are white but not italian or irish. Statistically that’s a thing, especially if they’re more than 1/128 and over 30.
That also brings us to:
For white people that don’t care that much and don’t want to go through that trouble but want to belong to the native group for clout, just saying they’re related gives them that feel good ‘I’m a real american, I’m special and not just white, I can’t be the bad white because my alleged ancestor suffered.’
To really narrow down the problem, the white identity sucks for obvious reasons unless you want to go full racist. The American identity sucks if you’re white skinned, because of the whole genocide thing, also it’s too new, too cosmopolitan, and not real to most other people. And most white americans have no cultural basis from their immigrant past because either they had to integrate to survive, it’s shameful, or they come from the whites that hated the countries they were from (i.e. the English whites.)
This leads to any attempt to latch onto something they’re missing at their core, mainly due to the natural alienation that comes for everyone under capitalism, but especially in a cosmopolitan nation built to integrate everyone under a constructed identity.
I dunno American Identity sometimes seems more real outside the US.
There’s the fact that we constantly tell americans who don’t speak a word of german or french that they are neither, they are american to us, no matter where their great-great-grandparents were from.
And then there is the time when an aquaintance of mine one day seemed very happy and I asked him why he was so chipper. He said he’d figured out that over here, he wasn’t “african american”, he was just seen as “the american” and that had never happened at home. Yes he clearly was recognized as black, but it never once came up as a qualifier on his identity.
The idea of “whiteness” being good is a super new concept in the grand scheme of things. People like to say things like “Irish and Italians werent considered white”, which is not accurate because they’ve always been considered white.
“White” just wasn’t enough to be part of the “in group” and people nowadays dont have any other terminology to describe what the in group was other than just white. If you go back to the early 1800’s, the in group was Protestant anglo-americans. That doesnt mean people from other European countries werent white, it just means they werent part of the in group.
“White” being the defining factor of the racist top hierarchy is super new, like 1966 new. The leader of the American Nazi party realized that they could gain more power by folding in white people from outside of their traditional in group (germanic or nordic), so inspired by the black power movement, he coined the term “white power”.
Even now, just being white isnt enough to be part of the top category to racists. Maybe an Italian is considered part of the in group, but not middle easterners (who are legally white in the USA).
Since “white” as an identity of people is relatively new (and only really makes sense in a racist framework), a lot of European/Middle Eastern Americans tend not to identify as “white” but instead by whatever jumble of identities their grandparents might have had. If your grandparents tell you they had a Cherokee grandparent, how are you supposed to know any different.
I wish they’d channel that energy into developing class consciousness instead, but then they’ve been heavily disincentivized to do so between propaganda and the desire for wealth of their own.
Temporarily embarrassed billionaires
If there were an equivalent to reddit gold on Lemmy, I’d give it to you. This is such a great overview and explains what I wish I had words for a decade ago when I had a conversation with a leftist friend of mine who was in her 60s, and she posed a question along the lines of, “Why can’t I have white pride?”
It was completely with good intention and not with an ounce of white supremacy. I realized it came from a place of wanting an identity or culture, to feel like she came from something. She saw others get to have a community around their ancestry and longed for something like it.
White supremacists have ruined any chance there could have been to find healthy pride in a white identity, and American history is completely mired in that. So many white people feel this loss or lack, and try to fill it with anything they can cling to. 1/32 Native, half Irish, 1/4 German; whatever, just to feel like there’s some history that ties you to who you are.
But you already said this more eloquently than I!
Halito!
This is the best explanation I’ve seen on this online, completely agree. The loss, or even grief, that many have for a culture they never knew is very real and drives some unfortunate behavior.
Wow you should talk about this for a living. That was perfect.