Ethnicity and other things

[teaberryblue]

I had a really fascinating conversation with hymnicide last night. We talked about a variety of things, like alternative education, what it means to have career goals as a teenager, ethnic identification, and definition of 'whiteness'-- how some people are considered white in one geographic area and not considered white in another, or how some white-skinned ethnic groups are considered 'more white' than other white-skinned ethnic groups. We talked about how, growing up where we did, about half the people we know are Jewish, and most of the Christians we know are Catholic, not Protestant. We talked about some of the things arasan discussed in her post yesterday: about the real failure in the US to create pedestrian-friendly cities, as opposed to European cities that make it very easy to walk everywhere and to everything. We talked about the lack of a need for a car where we grew up in comparison to many places in the US. It was interesting.

Nora and I both grew up about ten-fifteen minutes away from each other, although she's more than ten years younger than I am. We had an interesting conversation about how college admissions have changed and how expectations of kids in high school have changed. Even how the reputations and demographics of certain top universities have changed: I don't want to name the school publicly, but she is looking at a school that I had a really hard time with when I went to visit. When I went there as a 16 year old bisexual kid looking at colleges, I was scared by new I heard about gay kids getting bullied on campus. She says that the same school now is reputed for being very open and liberal. Man, things change a lot.

Anyway, we started talking about whether being 'white' in New York is different from being 'white' in other parts of the country. For example, in some places, Jews and Italians are both definitely considered white, while in other places, they are definitely not. Growing up, I had a lot of friends whom I considered white who were not treated as white in other situations: Israelis, Iranians, Armenians, and so on. So I decided to make a poll about ethnicity. I would like to say that I had trouble wording some of these questions, so if you find the terminology limiting or in any way offensive, I apologize in advance, and please feel free to correct me or offer your own suggestions in the comments. I had a hard time deciding when to use 'white' as a label and when to use 'majority' as a label. Same goes for anything I might have overlooked.



[Poll #1172765]

Comments

[kikithepirate.livejournal.com]

That makes sense, and it is something that Americans are all very likely to ignore, due to our country's pride in being a "melting pot" - people like to hold on to the nationalities of their ancestors. Which is all well and good, but the reality of a melting pot is that nationalities tend to blur together. For instance, I don't consider myself to be a hyphenated American - I'm just an American. On my dad's maternal side, my ancestors came over around 1550 from England - they were Quakers escaping British persecution. But my great-grandmother married a first generation Italian immigrant, and their daughter married my grandfather, Noel La Due - guess where that side of the family is from. Then on my mom's side is a bunch of German and English. So truly, I don't claim to be any nationality or "ethnicity" other than American. I'm proud to be a product of the melting pot.

But living in Singapore was an interesting experience because it's one of the few other nations that is not comprised of an indigenous race or ethnic group. "Singaporean" is a nationality, and that's it. I think we tend to think of Asians per their country - Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Thais, etc. People always ask me what they speak in Singapore. They're usually surprised to learn that people speak English, because it too is a "melting pot" of different ethnic and racial groups: Chinese, Indian, and Malay. People forget that someone who identifies themself as "Malaysian" because their family has lived in Malaysia for 5 generations may in fact be racially Chinese. Over there, the ideas of nationality became a lot clearer to me. On the flip side of that, they often see all "white" people as the same: my Singaporean friends couldn't tell the difference between a European or an American, not even with the varying accents.

[zia-narratora.livejournal.com]

I always find that interesting, that so many Americans have difficulty telling the nationality of people from Asia, but that they assume it is easy for Asians to tell white people apart. I think that on some kind of cognitive level, we're so confounded by the big differences that it is harder to see the smaller ones.

And I generally tell people I'm Italian, because that is definitely how I was raised. And I actually do feel more comfortable around Italian Italians in Italian than I do around a lot of Americans-- I've gone to parties with Italians I've never met, which is something I am very leery of doing in the US. As I get older, I also become more interested in the Jewish part of my background, whereas I would never have identified as Jewish in high school, because everyone else was 'more' Jewish than I was.