Digging around leads to fascinating discoveries. On both sides of my family we've only been in the US for three or four generations as well, and I grew up knowing about the mix of Portugeuse, French, and Canadian floating through me, but only in recent years have I found out about threads of Irish and native american, and that last one is fuzzy. Plus, on my mom's side, the family was so desperate to join the accepted classes that a lot of the background is either not discussed or forgotten. Nothing in my heritage is conclusivley non-caucasian, and it is almost exclusively western european, so I end up getting a lot of the same societal assumptions made about me that you referenced as well. People are surprised to find out that I'm the first generation to go to college, that I come from a poor background, a non-officer military childhood, etc.
I wonder how many generations it takes before people are just thought of as 'American', with no need to disambiguate that. I wonder if the modern ability to track and record information will keep that from ever happening. I wonder at what point we need to redefine the term 'Native American', and how to even go about doing that without discarding the existing meaningfulness.
Obviously, the dogma of jewish heritage is different from the cultural, social, and secular laws on the subject... and leads me to think about all sorts of related questions, probably also with no good answers....
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
zaluzianskya and ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
skylark_photos
no subject
Date: 2012-07-18 03:14 pm (UTC)I wonder how many generations it takes before people are just thought of as 'American', with no need to disambiguate that. I wonder if the modern ability to track and record information will keep that from ever happening. I wonder at what point we need to redefine the term 'Native American', and how to even go about doing that without discarding the existing meaningfulness.
Obviously, the dogma of jewish heritage is different from the cultural, social, and secular laws on the subject... and leads me to think about all sorts of related questions, probably also with no good answers....