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Those are fighting words in Europe. We are very serious about our ethnicism. Akin to saying that someone from Philly might as well be from LA, it’s all just a

by Swizec 6y ago

Those are fighting words in Europe. We are very serious about our ethnicism. Akin to saying that someone from Philly might as well be from LA, it’s all just a city. Or that the Warriors might as well be the New York Yankees, it’s just sports. PS; this is why Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white until pretty late into the 1900’s in USA – not anglo-saxon

the_lonely_road 6y ago
I guess that explains the downvotes. Over hear in America it’s not fighting words, it’s just my family tree.
ipaddr 6y ago
That is nationalism. Northern French genes look like anglo-saxon or viking while southern France genes looks Ibarian or Italian. The generic pool in europe doesn't map to one country one set of genes usually. Some do better than others. At what point does someone become French considering it has been a melting pot for a long time?
- Swizec 6y ago
  In my experience the typical perception is that you’re X when your parents and grandparents are all X, hopefully also great grandparents. There is a lot more melting recently. Europe historically has been pretty big on cultural identity because everyone had/has a grudge with their neighbors for trying to assimilate them at the edges. Slavs for example (I’m from Slovenia) can trace or Slavic lineage all the way back to the 600’s and the fact we haven’t been assimilated into German or Italian despite being part of their countries for centuries is a point of pride. There is still a recognized small German minority in Slovenia from back in the 1300’s when they tried to deal with the slavic problem by encouraging people to go settle in our area, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire but we of course wanted to keep it Slavic. To be fair, as late as the 1940’s the germans were trying to germanize the slavs. Some of these grudges are very fresh and ongoing. Look at how the Catalonians are fighting against being called Spanish
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    > There is a lot more melting recently. No, there really isn’t. It may look like there is because of the post WW2 ethnic cleansing leading to more or less monoethnic monolinguistic nation states but the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were always indifferent to what the peasants “were“, like the peasants themselves, mostly. People cared a lot more about religion than ethnicity almost everywhere in Europe until after the French Revolution. The tiny urban, bourgeois or well traveled population were the exception. Everybody else mostly just rolled with it. Most French people didn’t speak a Romance dialect modeled after the Parisian one until well after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
    - Swizec 6y ago
      I meant more like since schengen and easy travel within the EU. If we keep this up, in a few centuries we might get to a point similar as USA where your identity doesn’t depend on which country your grandma comes from. The bigger question is whether we want to.
      - type0 6y ago
        > If we keep this up, in a few centuries we might get to a point similar as USA where your identity doesn’t depend on which country your grandma comes from. As a fellow European I don't think it's going to happen. Not in a hundred years. We speak different languages that alone prevents it from happening. We might get to the point where people will define themselves with dual nationalities, like Polish-German, but this we see even today.
        pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        >We speak different languages that alone prevents it from happening.// I recall some people from Netherlands getting upset that English was becoming quite prolific to the point that University courses are sometimes held in English. I think this happens to some extent in other countries in EU too? Germany, Spain, and France seem highly unlikely to adopt English without a fight - not sure about other countries. But I wouldn't rule out some movement towards greater dominance of major languages.
sendbitcoins 6y ago
>Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white methinks, the Protestant elite wanted to keep out the Catholics
barry-cotter 6y ago
> this is why Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white until pretty late into the 1900’s in USA This is not true. They were the worst sort of white, the worst sort of people, Catholics, but the US legal system went to great lengths to categorize people by racial category and all of the ethnic groups you named were always considered white.
- cthalupa 6y ago
  Half true. Historians have written on this quite a bit, but this article gives a solid overview: https://theundefeated.com/features/white-immigrants-werent-always-considered-white-and-acceptable/ https://theundefeated.com/features/white-immigrants-werent-a... At points in time, some states have had laws on the books that 100% differentiated between "white" people and other European immigrants.
- lazyant 6y ago
  Depends on the place and time? they were going to lynch a black man for marrying a white woman but they got off since she was from Sicily and thus considered "not white", somewhere in the 1800s [citation needed]

by Swizec 6y ago

the_lonely_road 6y ago

I guess that explains the downvotes. Over hear in America it’s not fighting words, it’s just my family tree.

ipaddr 6y ago

That is nationalism. Northern French genes look like anglo-saxon or viking while southern France genes looks Ibarian or Italian. The generic pool in europe doesn't map to one country one set of genes usually. Some do better than others. At what point does someone become French considering it has been a melting pot for a long time?

Swizec 6y ago
In my experience the typical perception is that you’re X when your parents and grandparents are all X, hopefully also great grandparents. There is a lot more melting recently. Europe historically has been pretty big on cultural identity because everyone had/has a grudge with their neighbors for trying to assimilate them at the edges. Slavs for example (I’m from Slovenia) can trace or Slavic lineage all the way back to the 600’s and the fact we haven’t been assimilated into German or Italian despite being part of their countries for centuries is a point of pride. There is still a recognized small German minority in Slovenia from back in the 1300’s when they tried to deal with the slavic problem by encouraging people to go settle in our area, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire but we of course wanted to keep it Slavic. To be fair, as late as the 1940’s the germans were trying to germanize the slavs. Some of these grudges are very fresh and ongoing. Look at how the Catalonians are fighting against being called Spanish
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  > There is a lot more melting recently. No, there really isn’t. It may look like there is because of the post WW2 ethnic cleansing leading to more or less monoethnic monolinguistic nation states but the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were always indifferent to what the peasants “were“, like the peasants themselves, mostly. People cared a lot more about religion than ethnicity almost everywhere in Europe until after the French Revolution. The tiny urban, bourgeois or well traveled population were the exception. Everybody else mostly just rolled with it. Most French people didn’t speak a Romance dialect modeled after the Parisian one until well after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    I meant more like since schengen and easy travel within the EU. If we keep this up, in a few centuries we might get to a point similar as USA where your identity doesn’t depend on which country your grandma comes from. The bigger question is whether we want to.
    - type0 6y ago
      > If we keep this up, in a few centuries we might get to a point similar as USA where your identity doesn’t depend on which country your grandma comes from. As a fellow European I don't think it's going to happen. Not in a hundred years. We speak different languages that alone prevents it from happening. We might get to the point where people will define themselves with dual nationalities, like Polish-German, but this we see even today.
      - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        >We speak different languages that alone prevents it from happening.// I recall some people from Netherlands getting upset that English was becoming quite prolific to the point that University courses are sometimes held in English. I think this happens to some extent in other countries in EU too? Germany, Spain, and France seem highly unlikely to adopt English without a fight - not sure about other countries. But I wouldn't rule out some movement towards greater dominance of major languages.

sendbitcoins 6y ago

>Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white methinks, the Protestant elite wanted to keep out the Catholics

barry-cotter 6y ago

> this is why Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white until pretty late into the 1900’s in USA This is not true. They were the worst sort of white, the worst sort of people, Catholics, but the US legal system went to great lengths to categorize people by racial category and all of the ethnic groups you named were always considered white.

cthalupa 6y ago
Half true. Historians have written on this quite a bit, but this article gives a solid overview: https://theundefeated.com/features/white-immigrants-werent-always-considered-white-and-acceptable/ https://theundefeated.com/features/white-immigrants-werent-a... At points in time, some states have had laws on the books that 100% differentiated between "white" people and other European immigrants.
lazyant 6y ago
Depends on the place and time? they were going to lynch a black man for marrying a white woman but they got off since she was from Sicily and thus considered "not white", somewhere in the 1800s [citation needed]