Quote Originally Posted by Lemurian View Post
I have a friend who is American, with a completely Anglo name, who has a Greek grandmother, but he makes Greek the center and cornerstone of his identity for some reason. He downplays the American all the time, as well as the Ukrainian Jew on the other side, but highlights the one quarter of his background to everyone.

In his case I think it's because his parents got divorced and he never got along with his American dad.

But I've often noticed that many Americans that are half or part some other ethnicity tend to highlight that other ethnicity a lot.
On some level, I feel like if you take a DNA test and 10% of your ancestry is from various European countries and you're essentially just European genetically... In a world that is already pretty damn tribal as it is, are European people just grasping at straws at that point? I would imagine that native Europeans from literally any European country would genetically be more similar to each other than literally any other racial/ethnic group outside of the continent.

Individuals and even particular societies will always have their own general views of stuff like this. Me personally, in that light, I don't see why it really matters as much. I'm guessing it really doesn't matter to most European countries, especially when they're willingly letting in population-changing amounts of people of literally different races, people who have lived isolated for enough time that they're less genetically similar to them than people from Europe to begin with.

As Europeans, or someone from a country in Africa or Asia or wherever... I think that it'd make sense for an entire continent of racially/culturally similar people to operate like this long-term... You can choose to preserve a culture or language that you feel is valuable, and then let the majority of the people in your continent choose to "vote with their languages/cultures" as well. Like, when you live in a country where people create technology or other products to address basic needs. Wouldn't it make sense to allow for variation and then eventually the most useful/efficient product becomes the standard? I feel like that should be the same with language or culture/societal standards.

Why would it be bad to adopt those things? You're already quite similar genetically to the point that it's likely an arbitrary thing in a world that already aggressively claims that race is a non-existent arbitrary thing.. But as Europeans you're maybe just different enough to have developed a different culture/language OR that just happened through pure chance/experimentation and over time? To me it'd make sense that through long-distance/global communication you basically determine as a collective which ways work best and can be spread and willingly adopted throughout the continent/world by following the lead of whoever seems to have the best idea.

Otherwise, for me personally, I see my own "mixed" ancestry as coming from the populations that birthed the Roman Empire and the Vikings.. Can't really complain about either. They were both bad ass people and created amazing stuff. The Nordic countries have been known for being some of the safest most prosperous places to live on Earth for the natives, and only recently have become dangerous places to live where it's publicly reported and followed that people being brought in en-masse are generally bringing crime both organized (child trafficking, just read an article about groups of Muslim Arab men trafficking thousands of little girls from a country, I forget if it was a Nordic country or some other country) and/or spontaneous murder/rape and general disrespect of the host population. I don't even know what to say/think about that stuff, but it is a problem for sure. At least for the people in those countries who are allowing this to occur to them.