Cultures, Identities, Something Dash Something Americans, Immigrants

Arriving to US, one of the biggest shocks was expecting to find Americans in US, but finding bunch of Italians, Polish, Irish and Germans. It seemed people were obsessed with their ethnic compositions, "I am 20% Irish, 3% Polish, 30% Italian, and .." would say one, while I was trying to compute how those percentages could come about arithmetically, another would jump and say 50%/%50% German-Irish bitch!

I believe this movement came from a want to handle the diversity triggered by Third Wave changes, but went haywire. Combined with some other movements, this could be how US arrived to being non-American Americans, to being Polish, Irish, Italians.. I must heard from so many that they were Italians at some point that when I met someone in NY and the guy said "I am Italian", even tho I could tell he was off the boat I paused for a second. Sensing my hesitation the friend helpfully continued, leaning forward for better emphasis, "from Italy". The subtext was clear: not from New Jersey. He probably was shocked as I was seeing so many of his "countrymen" in US who were clearly not like him.

So maybe US wanted to move away from sights of extreme assimilation, then developed "national subgroups", Scottish, Polaks, .. who become kind-of "ambassadors" of their respective "countries" which do not exist, whose real counterpart they clearly do not belong, but act as if they are.

Because the other strange thing is, US assimilates extremely well. F. Zakaria, an Indian immigrant, says of his children he struggles to have them hold on to a few things of the old country, they are by now completely American. Clotaire Rapaille, the creator of the Culture Code tells a story of his son, who, when they were out couch shopping together and CR wanted to buy the couch on display, would "freak out" and say "awwww dad, do you know how many asses sat on that couch?". Rapaille, ever the cultural analyzer, finds this an extremely American, and as an off-the-boat French something he would never say.

Maybe because assimilation is successful, faux Ambassadorship is also needed to take the sting off the assimilation.

People need to get real tho: according to Rapaille's theory, culture codes form until age 7, so whichever country a person was in during this time, they are from that country. If person was in US, it doesn't matter his parents were Polak, he looks streotypical Polak - he is not a f-king Polak. I used to see tigga in US telling me they tigga. You are not tigga. Be part of where you belong. We don't want you here.

Today

The faux ambassadorship culture created strange dynamics, ppl who belong to these "countries" are expected to perform, expected to be like ppl of their respective lands when these poor sods are clearly not. So they cling on weird streotypes which even the real versions of their faux identities do not hold on to anymore.

There is no denying people might have been attacked, or discriminated against due to ethnic outward differences. But in those cases it's their job to remind others they are citizens, not cower behind a faux identity, some shoddy copy. Also was the attack just plain dumb? "In high-school they called me bunch of names with my ethnicity". They call everyone names in high school (many Americans are traumatized in high-school). Whatever is different, they'll pick on it. Someone I know whose name, say rhimes with Beggio, was named Beg, Beggerboy, Bag-over-your-moms-head, Beck, Dick (??) and it goes progressively worse after that. Beg was ethnically German-Scottish. Everyone gets it.

Additions

1)

What happens to older, pilgrim level Americans in this mix? They have no "real" ethnicity to fall back on, it is so far back they don't remember, they can't all of a sudden to claim to be ethnically British, they hem and haw and end up with a version of discoverer, which kind of harks back to the migrant which arrived to the shores of America I guess, and busily start "discovering" the new "cultural subcountries" around them, which also fans the flame of this weird game show. "Why don't you be more Irish so I can discover you!".

Of course black people need to be more "distinctly black" now, changing, reforming the language along the way, bad becomes good, good becomes bad, doing the biznitch, with the shiznit. Lots of prose, lots of great art - but underneath it all, the message, the delivery remains American. Ssshh, keep quiet on that.

2)

If culture is shared, is imprinted even, and the root of US culture is Protestanism, that means even the Catholics of US would act Protestan whether they like it or not. This is in fact true. The faux ambassadorship, acting out streotypes aside, ppl act and think like Protestans. Huntington talked about this in Who Are We?.

3)

We now arrive at the mystery that is the Governator - the ultimate foreigner... So foreign in fact that after you watch his movie, you think the actor probably goes back home to a mountain top to be with his other foreign friends, other barbarians, or Terminators, or whatever. Ahnuld kept this act going for decades now (noone holds on to an accent unless they want to), and it has been hilarious. He is of course Germanic in culture being outside US before age 7.

4)

Some people's internal make-up is so strongly in certain direction that no matter the culture they were born into, they may not belong to that culture. These edge cases do happen. In this case Rapaille's answer is simple: buy a plane ticket, and leave.

5)

The cultural subnations are fake. It takes a lot of make-belief, acting, subterfuge to bring them to life, on real world and on screen.

Many do do that, with great effort, but then they invariably fall into the firing line of comedians. A comedian likes nothing more than to pick apart phoniness, the artificial, the fake, so they go at it with abandon. Let's not forget a comedian is the guardian of normal, the guy outside the village looking in, watching all the rituals, sheep fucking that goes on in there. The faux ambassadors get it from them the most, and rightfully so.

6)

In Raw E. Murphy has tells a story where he gets out from Rocky 3 and sees "Italians", all proud, acting tough, hollering at blacks. So many things are wrong here. The black people are not the ambassadors of some "Black Nation" whose man was beaten on screen. Stallone is not Italian. This is very interesting actually, Stallone isn't even streotypical Italian. Do we ever see him sitting around with others at a dinner table with others on cinema, backslapping, telling jokes "then I said.. then I said.." while others say "get the f--k outa heeereeee"? No, we see him in space, or jumping over hills, or in jungle, hunting, etc. Stallone acts as nomadic, Protestan American. Even when he receives blessings from a priest, it is done remotely, while he is running in Rocky.

7)

Fake subnations and their ambassadors helped create a lot of comedy, and in the positive, even maybe a "safe-space" for people (which I argue needs to be abandoned). The act can go too far though to the point where now "a black kid with a book is called acting white" as Bama said correctly, for once. I'd rather not have the comedy than a single black kid having to hear those words.

8)

Another aspect of this whole thing is, if there is an unconformtable topic talking about it, through comedy, making light of it as much as possible, so it is not talked about uncomfortably in other parts of society. This too would be very American. But the act can start having a life of its own, impinge on other parts of culture. Watch out.

9)

"Does religion matter for subcultures? No. Rituals do not create culture. Culture has to do with codes, embedded in emotional brain which are transmitted through osmosis, and they effect decisions. Putting a funky hat on, playing with some beads, mumbling some nonsense is not culture.

Look at this person. She is right, where you are born matters. She is French. People who tell her otherwise need to shut the flack up, and she should remind them of that.

Parents - stop telling children abt their "home country". They ain't iyou, they'll never be you. You made that decision for them when you moved your punk ass to where you are now from your (very likely) shithole country. They won't belong to your original homeland just for the virtue of being your children.

10)

Which brings us to Jews. I heard Netanyahu say once [parap] "Jews came back to their homeland and we are proud to maintain our culture. We were never assimilated".

You were, actually. With the exception of maybe those Hassidic guys, or ones who truly isolated themselves, the rest were assimilated.. So what "came back" to the "homeland" were not Jews but Germans, Americans, etc. How the f--k would u beat Arabs otherwise? German, European know-how, organization ability, culture beat them, not your funky hats. And now there are Jews from Moscow, St. Petersburg and guess what? They are Russians.

The trick Jewish people did best was, like the French lady's example above, the parents, and parent's parents managed to keep the "homeland" idea alive. Then, sold on this idea, some went "back" when time was appropriate. But, in a way, they were fooled.

Now together in the new country, as any group can reach some kind of merger, the new arrivals are creating a new culture (people born into it would become automatically part of that culture). Not necessarily ancient Jewish per se, but a combo of all nationalities who arrived there, Russians, Polaks, Germans, etc. enmeshed with the realities of the region. In a way they are much like United States. No wonder Israelis like US so much.

Related: The Culture Code