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.

Yeah, that's kind of what I meant when I said I'm as American as it gets: One of my grandfathers immigrated from Germany, the other from Ireland. The German married a Choctaw, and the Irish guy married a DAR scion....so of course culturally I grew up strongly Hispanic.

Here, I'm either identified as Irish or Australian.

but she says things like "close the light"

This is how Mal's learning, open and close the light.

Lola, I was writing a blog for a while called "Life in Hellas" about living here, but as it turned out my ability to immerse myself in Greece has been greatly hampered by having a baby. I arrived here at the tail end of the Olympics, so the euro was just getting established - you'd still see prices listed in drachmas, and the older folks were as lost with the coin of the realm as I was. More, actually. I can't compare, but everyone I talk to, Americans and Brits and Greeks, seems to think things have gotten worse. Consumer prices are twice that of any other EU capital, but average income is only 65%.

Some things are getting better, but slowly. In 5 or 10 years things might be on track.

I don't remember what ethnicity was subbed in around Boston. (My guess would have been Portuguese, the Irish having a long history of professional ethnic pride.)

You never heard Irish jokes in New England, Cindy? Maybe that's more of a Boston thing.

I never heard Polish jokes. I heard plenty of Irish jokes (but they often had to do with drinking, religion, or repression). What a lot of the country knows as Polish jokes (often, these are based on the premise that the ethnic group is stupid) were told as Italian jokes, here (which roughly equate to Newfie jokes in Maritime Canada).

I grew up about 7 miles from Boston. The T and the commuter rail had stops in my hometown, so there wasn't a big separation between Boston and my town.

It's American. Will you white people stop drawing lines? You have perfectly good non-white people to differentiate yourselves from.

I dunno, I've always thought of myself as "French". From Maine, and French. Probably because my last name is so blatantly French that it's constantly mispronunskiated.

That link I put up is very interesting. It looks like the Italians edge out the Germans in sheer numbers on immigration. I think the Germans tended to spread out more, though, getting farms out in the countryside, so their influence is more widespread.

It's funny...I think I'm fascinated by all the ethnic and regional shit that my grandparents moved out to the middle of the desert to get away from.

I didn't see Japanese anywhere. Did I miss them? Or are we statistically insignificant?

Not that I identified myself as Japanese in the last census. I think I went with "other."

I don't know if all the people here, when asked "What are you?" and say "American" are optimistic or just ignorant. Of course, my experience shows some overlap, and then again, I'm only two generations removed from Ellis Island and the Trail Of Tears(neither side being "easy breeders," you might say, and being late,) so that might color that perspective.

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.)

I wouldn't place myself firmly in any particular ethnicity, but I do still identify with the idea of being Italian-American, even though you have to go back to my great-grandparents before you hit someone who was born in Italy. (My grandmother did grow up speaking Italian at home, though, and as my mother's mother she kind of won the ethnicity game.)

My mother grew up in Northampton, MA, with Italian and French-Canadian parents (she actually attended a French-language Catholic elementary school, and that was in the 1950s), and has very clear memories of being considered Unacceptably Ethnic because of her ancestry--getting the hairy eyeball in stores, that kind of thing.

My name is incredibly ethnic for these parts. Probably not in Chicago.