Comment by libraryatnight
3 days ago
I work in the US with white dudes who literally think their heritage is "Viking" and make it a big part of their identity - I appreciate your point but I also understand why someone might pick that title.
3 days ago
I work in the US with white dudes who literally think their heritage is "Viking" and make it a big part of their identity - I appreciate your point but I also understand why someone might pick that title.
People believe in all kinds of fanciful nonsense to try to feel "special". In the US in particular, people will draw on some distant real or imagined ancestry to try to establish some kind of feeling of ethnic identity. Part of the reason may be the feeling of vacuousness of American identity from an ethnic point of view, as well as the dissolving religious identity which historically functioned as a substitute for ethnic identity in the US. (Various ideologies and subcultures are also expressions of this.) People will not only claim to belong to ethnicity X, 5+ generations after their ancestors immigrated and 3+ of which didn't speak the language and didn't maintain any contact with the country of origin; they will also claim they're "1/16th" of some ethnicity, as if "genes" or "blood" were like chemical elements. Naturally, these "identities" are rooted in stereotypes rather any kind of living culture.
It's a kind of cosplay-lite for the masses.
I'm so glad someone brought this up. It irks me when I hear Americans detail every minor fraction of their genetic makeup: 1/4 Italian, 1/8 German, 1/16... etc. But they don't speak any of these languages, they've never even visited these countries. It's such a matter of pride for a lot of Americans, but it's just a costume.
A quote I found here on HN, that I really liked: "Americans will say they are Italian because their great grandma ate spaghetti once, but God forbid someone is American because he was born there" - mvieira38 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930642)
Does it really bother you that people care about their heritage? US culture is a culture that assimilates, people remember where they come from. It's almost mean-spirited that yall fault them for this. Better than forgetting. I remember where my ancestors came from because they came here from somewhere they were not wanted.
What I would ask you is why does it irk you, why do you care? Is it some hindance to my culture that I want to learn about it and try to "cosplay"? What would you prefer that we act as though we're here sui generis? Is somebody's culture lesser because they're not in that country at that time?
People of Italian ancestry in the US did not forget everything about their past, in many cultures that transition is even more recent; I remember my immigrant grandmother. Comes off as gatekeeping people who would otherwise be your relatives.
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It seems, that people do not know that in USA there exists American ethnicity of relatively small population(for USA) - about 20 million that identifies themselves as Americans, so the quote is not correct.
However large majority of Americans have background of immigrants and they have right to claim their ancestry(though DNA companies are selling them as ancestry lineage their relatedness, which is not the same). You and other people that wants to gatekeep this have no right to decide for them what they want to identify as, just as Europeans nowadays are mixing up national identity and ethnic identity, which are not exact match even in Europe.
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I dont know why it irks you guys. Canada does this too. It's because, unlike Europe, we haven't been here for thousands of years. My grandfather was from Dublin. He came to Canada and didn't want to go back to Ireland, ever, because he hated religion so much. But he still passed on aspects of Irish culture to us, and not because he wore green on St. Patricks day once.
I highly recommend reading Ethnic Options by Mary C. Waters. It's a fascinating work of sociology that defines this exact phenomenon and explains its origins.
This is accurate if their family ancestry is from the Nordic countries, Britain or Ireland, which is a substantial chunk of Northern Europe (although in the latter cases the heritage looked more like male Viking invaders taking non-Norse wives from among the people they conquered for hundreds of years in the Danelaw or similar).
More broadly, the Norse were among the last people in Europe to be converted to Christianity, and their particular pagan traditions lasted long enough to be recorded and preserved in some form by medieval Christian writers, in a way that was not true of other Germanic peoples who were Christianized much earlier. So there's a sense in which our modern understanding of the pre-Christian Norse worldview is a stand-in for what must've been a more widespread set of European pagan traditions that were wiped out by Christianity. An incomplete and limited stand-in, of course, as any serious scholar of that world will tell you; but it makes sense that modern white people who have an interest in what their own ancient, pagan history might've been like - or for that matter people who have a sincere problem with Western Christianity and are seeking some kind of alternative spirituality - might look to the Norse world with interest, even if their share of genetic heritage from that world is minimal.
Many Americans who are Italian and Irish do the same thing.