From here [link] you can get a PDF report that says, among other things, that nearly 1 in 6 people reported German ancestry on the 2000 US Census.
In 2000, 42.8 million people (15 percent of the population) considered themselves to be of German (or part-German) ancestry, the most frequent response to the census question (Figure 2).4 Other ancestries with over 15 million people in 2000 included Irish (30.5 million, or 11 percent), African American (24.9 million, or 9 percent), English (24.5 million, or 9 percent), American (20.2 million, or 7 percent), Mexican (18.4 million, or 7 percent), and Italian (15.6 million, or 6 percent).
If 1 in 6 people report themselves to be .015625 German, and 1 in 10 report themselves half Irish, does a tree falling make any sound? And in what accent?
I never heard Polish jokes, growing up. They were always Italian jokes.
You never heard Irish jokes in New England, Cindy? Maybe that's more of a Boston thing.
I'm just glad I hit three of the top four.
I want to know how long you'd consider yourself ethnic. I call myself mongrel white American, because one German here or there three generations back does not an ethnicity make. (The English and Scottish people eight generations back, I think they've expired.)
Here's the thing about ethnicity in the US, though -- my German ancestors came over much more recently than my French ones, but I have much more French-derived culture than German. If I'm any eth, it's French.
If I'm any eth, it's French.
It's American. Will you white people stop drawing lines? You have perfectly good non-white people to differentiate yourselves from.
Thanks for the source, Connie.
Lewiston hasn't been a paper town for a long while, although there used to be quite a few on the Androscoggin River. (Starting at Berlin, NH, which still smells like farts.)
Pretty much every town that is on the 'scoggin smelled like farts for years, especially on a rainy day (Brunswick being one of the towns near the end of the river, and with a paper mill on in in the next town over). I was not surprised to find out that at the height of it's use, it was one of the 10 most polluted rivers in the world. They've done a pretty good job of cleaning it up (pink foam is a thing of the semi-distant past, for instance), but you still couldn't pay me to put any part of my body in it.
If I have to think of myself as an ethnicity, my true first answer is "Pennsylvanian." If I'm pressed for ancestry, I say "English-German, with some Irish and Dutch". But ethnicity was never a part of my worldview growing up.
