I think if you are a hyphenated American or an American of color, claiming American culture as your own is problematic.
I can sort of see this, but as an Irish emigrant I have huge problems with nth generation Irish-Americans claiming to be Irish without the first clue of what they are talking about, that doesn't work either.
I never feel comfortable talking about race in a NorAm context, as I spent the first twenty years of my life in a country with essentially no non-Caucasians [ nobody in their right mind would have immigrated to Ireland then, for economic reasons alone ], and with its own set of rigid pigeonholes as to whether one was Catholic or Protestant [ and I still have perfect radar for which one would be perceived as in Ireland, though almost all the US Catholics I know read as Protestants on that ] and as the way things work in Montreal appears to not map onto US perceptions at all. [ In that, for example, when Chinese community leaders talk about "the two cultures", they mean Montreal's Anglophone Chinese and Montreal's Francophone Chinese. And that one is rarely on a full Metro car or a bus of which more than a third of the people are any single distinct ethnicity. And that couples both of whom are from the same ethnic group seem quaintly old-fashioned. ]
I've been here closing on four and a half years, and now seem to have reached the point where once I open my mouth and start talking French I'm not immediately given away as Anglophone, which is nice. The unexamined default is "functionally bilingual". Not that there's much fuss about Anglo/Franco here, but what fuss there is seems to have largely subsumed any other distinction as an issue for making a fuss about.
no subject
I can sort of see this, but as an Irish emigrant I have huge problems with nth generation Irish-Americans claiming to be Irish without the first clue of what they are talking about, that doesn't work either.
I never feel comfortable talking about race in a NorAm context, as I spent the first twenty years of my life in a country with essentially no non-Caucasians [ nobody in their right mind would have immigrated to Ireland then, for economic reasons alone ], and with its own set of rigid pigeonholes as to whether one was Catholic or Protestant [ and I still have perfect radar for which one would be perceived as in Ireland, though almost all the US Catholics I know read as Protestants on that ] and as the way things work in Montreal appears to not map onto US perceptions at all. [ In that, for example, when Chinese community leaders talk about "the two cultures", they mean Montreal's Anglophone Chinese and Montreal's Francophone Chinese. And that one is rarely on a full Metro car or a bus of which more than a third of the people are any single distinct ethnicity. And that couples both of whom are from the same ethnic group seem quaintly old-fashioned. ]
I've been here closing on four and a half years, and now seem to have reached the point where once I open my mouth and start talking French I'm not immediately given away as Anglophone, which is nice. The unexamined default is "functionally bilingual". Not that there's much fuss about Anglo/Franco here, but what fuss there is seems to have largely subsumed any other distinction as an issue for making a fuss about.