For people in America who aren’t racialized it’s hard to maintain a separate cultural identity after a few generations. You wind up with a few trinkets of the culture your family came from if you don’t wind up so thoroughly blended it’s impossible to care. Like my grandpa was an immigrant and while that culture is important to me I make no mistake that if I went back to his home country I’d just be some stupid American who barely even speaks the language. What did I get from his culture? Some comfort foods, a handful of holiday traditions, and the branch of Christianity I was raised in.
And the cultures that try to have their cake and eat it too like Irish-American and Italian-American are looked at as weirdos by the countries they came from.
That’s because of how hard your family assimilated, like many from Western Europe. All those cultures, being predominantly Catholic and Protestant easily blended. There isn’t this kind of problem in the Greek American community.
That’s what happens when you sacrifice your cultural identity for “white American”.
For people in America who aren’t racialized it’s hard to maintain a separate cultural identity after a few generations. You wind up with a few trinkets of the culture your family came from if you don’t wind up so thoroughly blended it’s impossible to care. Like my grandpa was an immigrant and while that culture is important to me I make no mistake that if I went back to his home country I’d just be some stupid American who barely even speaks the language. What did I get from his culture? Some comfort foods, a handful of holiday traditions, and the branch of Christianity I was raised in.
And the cultures that try to have their cake and eat it too like Irish-American and Italian-American are looked at as weirdos by the countries they came from.
That’s because of how hard your family assimilated, like many from Western Europe. All those cultures, being predominantly Catholic and Protestant easily blended. There isn’t this kind of problem in the Greek American community.