Asklemmy

54425 readers

202 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 7 years ago

MODERATORS

Why so many white Americans claim to be native? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 day ago by choihanna@lemmy.zip to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

50 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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".

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] choihanna@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

Your family could embrace some Celtic heritage then 😂

It's always funny to me when someone mentions to me that they're not white because they're actually that random 5% that showed up in their DNA test.

Maybe us Southern Europeans are just used to have random percentages of DNA that we don't consider our identity.

Through my Bulgarian side of the family I'm 13% Central Asian.

So yeah I'm not going to claim some Turkic ancestry from the 7th century expansion.

To me this just means that Americans are barely mixed despite being a country of immigrants, even if legal segregation doesn't happen anymore Americans of different races don't date outside their racial group.

If Americans were actually melting pot they wouldn't pay that much attention to small percentages of random ethnicities.