Ethnicity in the United States of America.

I posted an earlier topic asking just what an ethnicity actually is and partly the reason I think about these things is because I come from an American perspective. In America ethnicity is really weird. Most white Americans for example though they look the same from an outside perspective don't consider themselves an ethnic group and really don't have an ethnic identity or ethnic cohesion with one another. I once asked on another forum if white Americans were an ethnic group to test this and almost every single white American that responded said that no they aren't, there are Irish Americans, Polish Americans, WASPs (white Anglo Saxon Protestants), Italian Americans, you name the hyphen they are an ethnic group. They were defining ethnicity by ancestry divorced from culture. Basically in America most Americans identify their ethnicity by descent from a certain ethnic group. I have a book called the Harvard Encyclopedia of American ethnic groups which as it states is a Harvard Encyclopedia dealing with ethnic groups in America and it has tons of sections on Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Polish Americans, the whole list of hyphenations with some American specific ethnic groups like Southerners (which I am), Yankees (by which they mean New England WASPS), Appalachian mountaineers, Amish, Cajuns, Creoles etc. This is wholly different I think than a country like Germany where they obviously know that they are ethnically German because they are of common descent, culture, religion, language, historical memories, and other things in common where in America we've been separated from the colonial era on into regional cultures with vastly different values as shown on the map below with MANY different lines of descent.




This is why our far right groups are racial nationalists (white nationalists) because Americans don't think of themselves as a common ethnic group even though a foreigner probably would think of them as an ethnic group. This is just explaining the weird situation in America when it comes to ethnicity. To make a topic out of this I'll ask foreigners, does it look to you like white Americans are an ethnic group and that Americans are just weirdly confused about things? Also a good drinking game is to take a shot every time the words "ethnic group" is said in this post .