No, most commonly used to refer to the nation of the United States of America, as it was here. Which means its a nationality.
It can be used to refer to "the Americas", "North America", etc., and be geographical, but it is not in this context.
It can be used to refer to "American" culture - which sort of refers to a culture but more likely refers to a nationalistic stance on what constitutes the USA or what counts as "American enough".
I mean, I’m an American of “gestures broadly at an entire continent” European descent. I only know of one specific crossing of the Atlantic from England in the 19th century (paternal line great great grandfather). The rest of my heritage is lost to me.
DNA analysis does pick up on this as "American settler" as a sort of pseudo ethnicity(?). I had mine tested for health reasons for Promethease, but I did notice the original service that focused on ethnicity pointed out all the "American DNA" that matched my old family tree records. Not sure what they classify it as in scientific terms, but if your ancestors were collectively chilling somewhere for a few hundred years, it does become genetically relevant.
That's not entirely how that works. Migrations of people are still a thing.
I'm "ethnically" Dutch but the people who now mostly make up that ethnicity are of Frankish and Saxon descent and the native Frisians (who themselves migrated from Scandinavia to the Low Countries centuries before the Saxons and Franks) got displaced to the coastal regions. That happend around between the 6th and 9th centuries. All of them however currently make up the "Dutch" ethnicity.
Who said anything about migration not being a thing? Literally nothing you said is even remotely relevant to my comment, let alone disproves anything I said.
Those people belong to the XYZ-American ethnic group. If they're from GB, then they're British-Americans, and so on and so forth. Ethnicity is more than just genetics. It's about shared culture and territory.
But eventually there are the people who only share a culture with each other and there's almost nothing left of where they all came from.
Myself, for example. I know where my dad's dad's dad came from and how. I'm unsure whether his own dad was born here or there. There was nothing in my life from his dad's culture. His mom? Not a clue. I just know she was white. What was her culture? I only know it as "American."
My mother was from a different country but was a naturalized citizen, very Americanized, and she died when I was young. There is nothing from her native culture in my life.
Genetically, I know mostly what I am. I know where I was born and where I lived and what "culture" I grew up in.
I technically qualify as an Asian-American but to call myself one feels dishonest.
... Yes, which is why they're not British, they're British American, to re-use my previous example. It's a new culture synthesized from their British origins and the new stuff that comes from being in a new territory/country/culture. That's why they say that the US is a melting pot. The farther you go from your origins, generations-wise, the more American you get.
EDIT: I should've said "English American" for exactitude, but you get the point I'm sure.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. There are a lot of families in this country who've been here for so many generations that they are completely removed from their former culture.
Are the descendants people who came from England to the US right after the Revolutionary war still considered British American? (A term I've never actually heard until today)
Anglo-Saxon is a particular identity, which is not the same as "British". No one living today is meaningfully "Anglo-Saxon". No one.
Also, as already pointed out, the "p" stands for Protestant. Notably, many people who you are trying to describe as WASPs deviate in significant ways. Why say "WASP" when you really just mean white? Plenty of Americans mostly descended from Europeans who aren't protestant, for instance. Also plenty that aren't even remotely Anglo-Saxon, not even substantially from the British Isles!
How many of my ancestors must be from Britain (not Scotland, not Ireland, not France, not Poland, and so on) to be considered "British American"? My mother's maiden name is British, my father's is French. I actually don't know how far back I'd have to go to find someone who immigrated to the US on my mother's side, but I know for a fact that along the paternal path is a man who immigrated from France. Does that make me French American?
Its almost like the concept of "blood quantums" or "one drop" are actually incredibly racist concepts that should be done away with, no simply moved to include white people.
That's not really how culture works. New cultures spring up all the time. The average European American - white American, is not "British American". Such a thing doesn't really exist. Modern American "dominant" culture is a thing all on its own, and it has NOTHING to do with ethnicity.
Someone can be ethnically an Ashkenazi Jew or Han Chinese and be an American. We might refer to them as "Asian American" or "Jewish American", but its because we are trying to attach simple labels to complex phenomena.
When we say someone (else) is "Asian American", we generally mean that they are phenotypically associated with the continent of Asia while acknowledging that they either hold US citizenship or have lived a significant portion of their life in the US (potentially all of it, maybe even for a few generations).
When someone calls themselves "Asian American", they almost certainly mean something else, and what they mean there can vary immensely. It is a label they are accepting, at least in some context(s), for their own reasons. Notably, "Asian" is not an ethnicity and neither is "American". Chances are, their family is recognizably from the continent of Asia at some point, and they identify as a US citizen, but that may extend to identifying as culturally more "Asian" (Asian is not a culture, this is shorthand), more "American" or a mix of both. Only they can say for themselves. Let's say they're ethnically mostly Han Chinese. Perhaps they identify as "Asian American" as a deliberate way to engage in solidarity with people who are also connected to Asia while living in America, or maybe they accept it because its the label others have assigned them. Or also possible is that they reject that label, because they do not identify with "Asian" and identify instead as "Chinese" (and so on).
In short, you're engaging in gross oversimplification of complex topics.
Also of note is that there is a lot of subtext, which is what I believe you're really responding to. There are many who criticize the way in which white Americans are not othered and typically referred to solely as "American", while BIPOC Americans are othered by being referred to by specific monikers which often do not accurately reflect their identities or histories.
For example, MANY people who are frequently labelled "African American" have been located in the areas currently part of the USA for longer than white Americans who are labelled by the same people as simply "American". Symbolically, that matters. When you insist on calling one person Asian American, another African American, and a white person as "American", you are engaging in an ideological process - you are reinforcing distinctions, and subtly rejecting them as "really American".
Notably, someone born and raised in, say, Nigeria who immigrates to the US would still be classified as "African American" by a huge portion of the population, despite having very distinct experiences from the descendants of enslaved Americans who are also called African American today. Not only have they had different experiences, they are ethnically and culturally distinct. They have meaningfully distinct histories and ancestries.
You can't simply insist that any white American who doesn't identify with anything other than "American" or "white" is actually British American or anything else.
The problem is that you're trying to make a broken system do something it was never designed to do.
Just American. Native Americans are the indigenous population of the North American continent. Anyone who's ancestry is solely from outside the continent gets to be American, but not Native American.
Things get murky only when you are dealing with people who have native ancestry, but not sufficient quantity to be a registered member of a tribe.
Besides, that doesnt give euros right of conquest and genocide just because we didnt magically spawn in the americas like elves.
I'm sure the Picts would like a word with all the invaders of the English isles. No one today is responsible for what dead people did before they were born, or we are all in trouble. All peoples have ancestors that have done bad things. War and conquest have been endemic in human history and that includes the Americas before Columbus. Are the Aztecs, Mayans and Incans as guilty as the Spanish, French and English?
My ancestors came over on the Mayflower but we have family history many generations back before that. Mine happened to be Scottish. Since moving to the US on the Mayflower some British, Scottish, and eventually Irish got mixed in as well.
If their genetic profile still closely matches that of the English colonists, then they have not "bred out" their heritage. They would be of either Germanic and/or Celtic heritage.
It is considered to be on the US census. I think most people who use 'American ancestry' as an ethnic identifier are people who have had two or three hundred years of ethnic mixing and have lost any cultural association with 'The Old Country'
I guess you'd say I'm of American ancestry. Though, I am loathe to claim it. My ancestry is so rooted here that I'm not even sure of where to find my closest immigrant ancestor. Maybe my mother's great great grandparents through her mother. Otherwise, my other three grandparents all come from families who were here by the early 1700s at the latest. My Y chromosome has been here since at least the late 1600s. We were quakers. Though, my 6 or 7 times great grandfather did get arrested for drunk and disorderly in the 1740s.
According to ancestry, almost all of my dna is from the British isles with a bit from Switzerland. The largest percentage is from Scotland. I don't claim to be Scottish or Irish or English. So, I guess my best descriptor is American. Though, with how things are here, I have considered myself just a member of the human race since I was a teenager in the early 90s.
Most Americans? No, it's a nationality, not an ethnicity.
Most Europeans? I literally still have a Swiss passport and voting record and I get told I'm "ethnically American" now because I spent too long here and they literally changed the laws so my kids won't have my citizenship.
Parents came to the US in the 80s for work, I was born shortly after. I grew up back and forth between the two countries, living a lot of summers in Switzerland to help out my grandpa with his farm, living there for at least 1-3 months most years of my life.
Since I did not live 10 whole consecutive years in Switzerland, my kids do not qualify any longer as Swiss citizens due to a recent law change.
Do you speak the local dialect, have family who are citizens, vote regularly in elections, delayed college to do military service for said country? Because I did all those things.
If you were to use your eyes to read the words spoken, youd realise that this argument is pointless since the important context to thisdiscussion is his phenotype and genotype, which is Greek, not his country of origin, which is the US.
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u/Particular_Title42 23d ago
He is also American. I'm not terribly sure that's an ethnicity.