Is our race “American”?
Mar 10, 2010 Print This Post
Is our race “American”?
My “nationality” is (in order) Finnish, English, Irish, French, German, and Scottish (I have been told I can date relatives on one side back to the Mayflower).
My wife’s “nationality” is Korean (her parents are from South Korea).
What does that make our kids? It seems like this comes up from time to time as we fill out various sets of paperwork. For years, we were forced to pick just one race which kinda ticked me off. Now with the new census form, you can pick one or more boxes.
Hopefully this isn’t an offensive question, but does this really matter a whole lot?
A few weeks ago, I heard Dave Gibbons speak on the idea of Third Culture (you can find the message here). He made an interesting observation that older generations tend to care a lot about multi-culturalism. The younger generations don’t, at least not in the same way. They celebrate different cultures quite a bit (which may be a result of multi-culturalism) but someone’s ethnic makeup is not a big deal anymore.
I wonder why it is that we, as a country, think it’s important to track this particular thing. Hopefully this doesn’t sound trite, but I wonder when (if ever) the day will come that we can get past it.
Here’s an interesting quote from Teddy Roosevelt (via Michelle Malkin):
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all… The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic… There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.
Not trying to make some big point here, it’s just something I’ve been chewing on and I felt like writing it out.
Tags: race
March 10th, 2010 at 8:16 am
Dude, as your brother in Christ, I need to tell you: you shouldn’t date your relatives. At ALL. Wrong on so many levels.
March 10th, 2010 at 10:23 am
Awesome. I didn’t even catch that.
March 10th, 2010 at 12:09 pm
When I got a bank loan there was a paper they wanted me to fill out about race.
I look white.
I put down Native American and Black. When the office rolled her eyes, I told her I did ancestry studies and could prove both of those situations to be true.
I will bet it is more the case than not, IF your family has been here more than 150 years. You can say the same.
“Any man who judges by the group is a pea wit” Gettysburg Movie.
When we no longer see any difference we will be on the right track.
March 10th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Well said, and nice Roosevelt quote. The whole topic, in my opinion, has been done to death to the point where I’m sick of hearing about it.
March 10th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
The very very brief explanation is that it matters to researchers. I do a lot of editing for a social geography prof who does research on African Americans in Detroit, evaluating disparities based on race and making policy recommendations. So the race question, while pretty unimportant to the average Joe, is very important to our governance.