Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3686-3690 (26th February to 2nd March 2018)
Penquin47:
--- Quote from: jesslc on 05 Mar 2018, 21:36 ---
--- Quote from: Gyrre on 05 Mar 2018, 21:22 ---
--- Quote from: cesium133 on 04 Mar 2018, 09:37 ---I find it interesting whenever I see that map that the South seems to have decided that 'American' ancestry means 'White.'
--- End quote ---
If I recall correctly, most of those regions are of largely English descent.
--- End quote ---
If so, why aren't they marked with the colour that's listed for English ancestry (light purple)?
I am also very puzzled by what "American" ancestry is meant to mean...?? (Since it apparently doesn't mean American Indian or English or any of the other ancestries that have a distinct colour). Although I note the image does say US Census bureau so (if that's anything like our census) it's possible that all it means is that the majority people in those areas report that their ancestry is American. But that still leaves some hanging questions like why?
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1. My most recent immigrant ancestors came to this country almost 150 years ago. The oldest ones I know of came in the 1600s.
2. I know that most of them came from England, Ireland, and Germany, but I personally have no ties to those regions. Why should I call myself Irish or English or German instead of American?
3. A lot of people, like me, have mixed ancestry.
4. I know my ancestry because I'm interested in genealogy. A lot of people don't actually know where their great-great-great-grandparents lived. What are they supposed to put, if not "American"?
Morituri:
I was thinking yesterday that "race" doesn't mean what most people think it means, anyway.
Because even the "Isolated" populations weren't totally isolated. Australia got Polynesians in off the pacific in dugout canoes, as did South America, and vice versa, so genetic isolation was never quite total. And in a thousand years? In fifty generations a lot happens.
And if you go back four thousand years - pyramids are being built along the Nile, and I'd bet that most of the people alive then who have ANY descendants alive today, are the direct ancestors of EVERYBODY alive today. Everybody is everybody's cousin.
If we really, really had the knowledge to know which branch to look in at every generation, and you were living in America, you could sit down with your neighbor from across the street who immigrated from Tibet last year, and your neighbor from the house next to yours who immigrated from Kenya the year before that, and your friend from church whose grandparents were australian aborigines, and your fishing buddy who's allowed to fish on federal land because he's got a Choctaw tribe member ID, and the five of you could write down names, linking each generation to the last, until you could all come to at least one of the same names. You wouldn't have to fill more than one sheet of notebook paper with names to go back four thousand years. And you could do it again and again, coming down to the name of virtually anyone who was alive four thousand years ago, providing they left any progeny behind at all. Just two hundred generations.
And this is what "race" is. Everybody is connected. Some of the connections are stronger, through more lines of ancestry, and some of them more tenuous, through only a few threads. But everybody is everybody's cousin. There is no such thing as a "pure race" and never has been.
Perfectly Reasonable:
American mongrel here.
My mother's family goes back to the founding of Rhode Island (and Providence Plantations). I have ancestors who were in the Revolution (on both sides). I know this because my mother's mother was a genealogy enthusiast.
My father's parents were from Lithuania. I am entirely ignorant of that background. Possibly because one of my father's brothers made it his mission to make the family as 'American' as possible. So I'd never think of identifying as 'Lithuanian-American'.
Cornelius:
Well, there's the concepts of Y-chromosomal Adam and mitochondiral Eve.
I've got my genealogy documented back to the late 1500s, and a good guess - but not documented - where we came from before that. Seems that we've like our place for the last 4 centuries, really.
pwhodges:
--- Quote from: Cornelius on 07 Mar 2018, 04:24 ---I've got my genealogy documented back to the late 1500s,
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Both lines of every generation? Without that, any conclusion about belonging to a particular place is likely to be hard to justify. When the genealogy in incomplete, the places where most records can be found are obviously going to come up top!
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