LabourJersey
Sr. Member
Posts: 3,219
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« on: September 28, 2021, 10:21:28 AM » |
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Haven't voted in the poll but was curious to read people's thoughts on this.
NClib has the valuable point that ancestry and ethnicity are not necessarily the same, particularly since most Americans have ancestors from more than one ethnic group.
To use the example of Joe Biden again--he has both English and Irish ancestry, but he is "ethnically" Irish since he was raised in an area with lots of Irish American influence and most importantly raised a Catholic with the Irish American trappings that it brings. An ethnicity is a cultural signifier as well as an ancestral one.
And then you have Scots-Irish, which is a distinct ethnic group even through the ancestral composition of that group of Americans is varied, containing ancestral connections to England, Scotland, and parts of Ireland. The main thing that unified this group was their Protestantism and their settlement on the frontier.
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