The "American" is bull. Those folks should be "unknown." Actual American ancestry
Well, technically they are of American ancestry if their parents were born here.
Ok, then I suspect the most "American" district in the US is a heck of a lot higher than 35%.
Isn't 'American' ancestry codename for 'white racist redneck'?
To an extent. Though you can leave the 'racist' bit out as it's not really a defining characteristic.
When the ancestry question was introduced, it replaced an earlier question for parents' countries of birth, which had been used for making calculations about "native stock" and "foreign stock" Americans - because there were more and more recognizably "ethnic" whites with two American-born parents. Hence why people of long-standing American stock were tempted to write in "American" or "US". And for some reason, that was more common among rural and southern folk, with urban and northern people of similar backgrounds more likely to put "Scottish" or "English" as the Census designers apparently intended. The first time that happened, the Census basically treated the "Americans" as wrong responses, but later they just accepted it. They're also subsuming a considerable (but much smaller) number of responses for individual states and cities under here.
