Idk lol some of our ancestors are just from a place and sometimes that place is Ireland. Want my white-ass to lie to you instead?
I’m Hatian now.
It’s just a very foreign thing for us eurooeans. If we’re born in Italy, but some grandparent was born in Germany, we don’t consider ourself to be german in any way. We’d consider ourself italian and nothing else. It just seems so incredibly odd to even consider oneself to be german if you didn’t spend time growing up in Germany.
I think the reason it’s so prevalent here in the US is because the vast majority of the population ended up here at least in part due to immigration. So identifying as ethnically originating from elsewhere is a part of that self identity.
The disparity however, is knowing that while traveling through Europe, this style of self identification falls flat because simply being ethnically from a place doesn’t mean you can claim to be born and raised from there. And that meaning is what’s different between the US and Europe.
I wonder if some of it doesn’t come from the people who came to America through forced immigration (I.e. the slave trade).
I think it makes sense for people brought unwillingly to America to hold on to that ethnic heritage and culture work hard to instill it in their children, even if they were born in America.
I guess that makes sense. We have our “heritage” pushed on us from a very young age, or at least we did when I was a child. In the 4th grade we did an entire reenactment of immigrating through Ellis Island, NY in which we had to research our countries of origin, then draw from a hat to see if we died on the journey, got small pox, or any other number of things all before being “accepted into the wonderful cultural melting-pot that is the United States”.
Then we grew up and learned that all immigrants are evil and must all be deported. /s?
Regardless, my family immigrated from Ireland after having lived in County Cork for a very long time. This whole post just seems like shitting on people just to shit on people.
Sad thing to be, nonsensical thing to want to be
Well, thanks for calling me sad for a thing I’m mostly indifferent about and have no choice in, OP.
What a fucking weird and racist post. “not even the Irish want to be Irish”
It really is. As an American with some Irish, (if its a white from eastern europe it turned up on our dna test thingy) Im not sure if I or actual Irish people should be more offended.
The Irish have had a very
shittytroubled past, is probably what they’re getting atNah, don’t agree. They established a hierarchy of “good nationalities” to be and put others like Irish and Lithuanian below them.
It’s fun to make fun of Americans who are proud of their Irish ancestry. I dunno why. But it is.
Source: american cheese American with Irish composing a decent chunk
Funny story, my lineage is Irish and Lithuanian. So take that, I guess.
Admitting you have problems is the first step.
Guatemala is awesome. The countryside is beautiful and the people are descended from one of humanity’s major civilizations, the Mayans.
I realize OP is only half-serious, but they still come off as really ignorant.
As someone who is doing a massive research project on the Maya peoples right now, that civilization was technologically way ahead of the game! They had toilets with a sewage system, clean aqueducts and water purification measures, and ball sports a thousand years before the colonizers that fucked em up. A THOUSAND YEARS.
Not to mention the 200 000 people cities when in Europe a 50k city was considered big
I think some people just like to be in touch with their ancestry which isn’t suddenly cringe when you’re white. But I think for some other people it’s genuinely part of their victim complex. Irish people were among the most oppressed white minorities back in the day.
My dad’s side of the family was supposedly Irish. Bunch of reprobates and thieves. I would admit to being related to none of them even if they could prove it with papers lol
Nothing against Irish people. Just thought I’d share.
My great grandparents came to the US and claimed to be Irish. We strongly suspect this was a lie and they were German but arrived during a time where Germans were… unpopular.
like… were a nation of immigrants. it’s part of your identity in the US.
I use it to explain my massive capacity for alcohol
“I’m scotch/Irish on one side and German on the other, 3 generations both sides and they bred in the community until my parents!” as I’m on my third boot and finally starting to slur my speech lol
I usually joke “The Polish in me knows how to drink, the Irish in me doesn’t know how to stop.”
I have a friend who came over from Moscow and is an immigrant to the U.S. herself. A few years ago she started telling me she has Irish heritage and she knows it because she felt it in her bones and can see it in her dreams. Now she goes twice a year to ‘reconnect with her roots.’ She was so confident that she did a 23andme and it showed that she was 99% of her heritage with a 1% broadly european. That 1% is what she is now claiming is her Irish portion.
I don’t know. I really don’t even know.
Mine said I was 0.2% Mongolian so now I endearingly tell stories of my Grandpa Khan.
You need to be listening to The Hu now all day every day to reconnect with your roots. And also just because they are awesone
if 1% irish heritage makes you irish then i should be able to claim citizenship in most of europe
Fucking no one tell this person about the EU and free movement.
It’s the same nonsense as invoking “the luck of the Irish”. Said by people who have absolutely no idea about Irish history.
Darn those extra lucky Irish.
In Fact it’s well known that they fought overwhelming on the north side of the US civil war because they knew which side was gonna win from their luck, and it had nothing to do with recognizing slavery as another form of the serfdom they just escaped from.
Citizenship question: my grandfather’s parents were born in Ireland. My grandfather, who didn’t know he had been adopted until much later in life (by a Jewish woman), became an Irish citizen in his 50s and had dual citizenship until his death.
As a desperate American… can I get Irish citizenship through my grandfather, a naturalized Irish citizen who was not born in Ireland?? I can (understandably) not find an answer to this on the Irish citizenship website.
Sincerely, an American who spent 12 hours protesting at a No Kings rally yesterday
I’ve got Irish heritage. My dentist asked me about it because I have a red beard (brown hair). She explained that people with red hair are less responsive to Novocain. I always knew I wasn’t bullshitting that the dentist hurt me as a teen. Finally, proof!
I suppose you can’t blame your earlier dentists, though. How were they supposed to know? And if they automatically treated redheads differently, would that be racism?
It’s not racist to treat patients differently when you’re talking about how likely they are to react to drugs. Children/teens tend to become bewildered and/or violent when waking up from anesthesia. It’s not ageist to prepare for a worse case scenario by calling all hands on deck to hold them down to prevent injury.
We as Americans lack a certain amount of culture, we look to our pasts and see what it is our families have come from. So many Irish came here, for so many reasons, the cultural heritage barely came with it, leaving a big gaping hole in what we tend to identify ourselves with.
I like to use the analogy of the Native American Indian who was displaced and massacred, captured and forced to go to Indoctrination camps as children. Where they applied the “kill the indian, save the child” methodology, abhorrent to think of, its not far off from cultural genocide.
So, we look back and find our parents and grandparents nationalities, where they have come from, we adopt what little we know of what it means to be Irish. All thats left here is Irish bars and St Patricks Day, Boston and Chicago. Americans will happily tell you about their heritage but its not a long story to tell. We are the children of immigrants striving to find a way to make a home and anyone else to connect with for community.
I agree with 99% of you comment but
We as Americans lack a certain amount of culture
Is just plain false.
American TV, film, music, fashion, food, technology food and to a lesser extent sports are so influential on the world stage they aren’t even thought of as American half the time.
Like it or not, half the world’s wearing blue jeans drinking coca cola watching Hollywood movies or posting about it on shitter while rock or rap plays in the background.
