"If you look at early American history, Americans were not classified according to race. Instead, we were Germans, French, English, Dutch, Swedes, etc."We don't even have to look back that far. Just 35 years ago, Americans were still identifying themselves by the homeland of their ancestors. Today, they call themselves white because their ancestors intermarried with so many other people of European descent that they cannot trace their ancestry back to a single country. The term white has always been a subjective one, and "white" was never a culture. This country has always been a melting pot.
Today, they call themselves white because their ancestors intermarried with so many other people of European descent that they cannot trace their ancestry back to a single country. The term white has always been a subjective one, and "white" was never a culture. This country has always been a melting pot.To me, we should drop that term. Tom Brady and Michael Jordan are both Americans.
I know that the Democratic Party would rather to have classify us according to race so they can keep Blacks on the plantation so they'll continue to vote for them no matter what.
Just my two cents.
Up through the 1950s, white Americans tended to marry along religious lines. Cultural isolation, such as with Amish, Mennonites, and Hasidic Jews, existed and geographic isolation, like German and Scandinavian farming communities in the Midwest, slowed assimilation. Additionally, the Mormons, mostly descended from English American Protestants, self-segregated. However, after a second generation came along speaking English, intermarriage took place within the religious groups. East European Jews had a jump start as they spoke a common language, Yiddish, whether they were from Romania, Lithuania, Hungary, or Ukraine. English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, Welsh, French, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian Protestants intermarried after the second generation learned English. Similarly, Irish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Flemish, Hungarian, Polish, Croatian, and Czech Catholics intermarried. This was observed by sociologist Will Herberg in his 1955 book, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology.
So even by 1960, you had millions of people who were part Scots-Irish and part German or part Irish and part Italian. After 1960, for a number of reasons, such as increased secularization, the effects of Vatican II, the decline in the former anti-Catholicism among Protestants, and the increase in Jews identifying as Jewish only culturally, cross-religious marriages increased.