#but keep in mind too that invalidating living diasporic cultures to make your point does in fact count as shitty behavior

[eucatastrophicblues]

I also want to add that these posts aren’t solely about people who took a DNA test five minutes ago and have suddenly decided that they’re going to solely identify as whatever their European ancestors were. I understand gently teasing for that kind of behavior, because it is a little ridiculous.

But “Irish-American” and “Italian-American” (two of the cultures I see cited in these kinds of posts a lot) are themselves vibrant diasporic communities with their own specifically immigrant traditions that are tied to having left Europe and come to the US, and in the latter case many Italian-Americans do simply say “I’m Italian” to mean “I come from an Italian-American family and we have our own cuisine and traditions and cultural practices”. There are street festivals for Catholic saints who have similar festivals in Italy, and there are similar Irish-American practices that originated here on this side of the Atlantic, too. A lot of these communities are full of people who know they’re immigrants with thin ties to their former homelands, and know that they’re only Irish or Italian compared to the rest of the US population, and so shaming their extant traditions always felt a little cruel to me. Plus, plenty of people do go on to reconnect in earnest and research their ancestors and learn about where their families came from - is leaving somewhere because of a humanitarian crisis or for the sake of economic opportunity, and navigating a hostile country where you’re forced to assimilate to survive, really an experience we want to gatekeep?

anyway blood quantum is a colonizer’s game and we really do all suffer when we play it. diaspora communities will develop their own traditions, and those traditions will look different than back home, and the question of whether or not they belong is one that even they themselves don’t always have the answers to.

It's very well and good to talk about how usamericans will act like they're whatever nationality despite having 1 relative that was that thing 25 generations ago but does referring to it in percentage terms make anyone else's skin crawl. hmm where have I heard the concept of saying that someone must have whatever percent [thing] blood to be considered [thing] before