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”.
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.