The one thing that I 100% can’t relate to is - How does one understand when as a kid you are told “your grandparents were slaves.”
They were what?
I can pretend outrage but I have ZERO context for that so it’s just a thought experiment for me.
For millions of others, today, right now, that’s lived experience.
Comparisons and “Yeah, but…” is an attitude that can fuck right off, frankly.
When I lived in Asia as a teenager, certain people of Indian descent were referred to as Black (another common term was “black ant”, due to old time associations with rubber plantations). I was told by friends from India that this was true in India as well.
Also, we’re not still dealing with the more recent experience of the institution of slavery in the zone of Nazi occupation during the 1930s and 40s, where there are people still living who were enslaved. There’s something particularly awful and pernicious about the American institution of slavery no matter how you look at it.
It’s likelier than not that there are at least a few living people whose parents were born into slavery in the United States.
If a man born into slavery shortly before the end of the Civil War fathered a child when he was in his mid-60s, that child would be about 90 today.
The Siddi, ancestors of Bantu speakers, are a minority in India and Pakistan.
Indeed, the last person receiving a Civil-war-era pension from the VA just passed away at age 90 less than a month ago. Her father served as a Confederate soldier before defecting to the North. Her father was born in 1846, so surely there are many, many more children still alive of parents who were born before June 19, 1865.
I am sorry, I did not intend to compare those apples and those oranges. The injustice was framed as “we want apples”, and I was attacking the apples. I’m not trying to defend the “oranges” that people got instead, nor was I trying to compare the two. I will think of a way to edit that post.
Definitely true when you compare the two, but I’d have very much assumed that culture is erased by immigration after two or three generations.
Okay… not possible to write a short answer.
The “standard” way of thinking in Austria is that an immigrant is an immigrant and stays one for life. This is somewhat at odds with the definition of citizenship, which takes at least 6 years to get. The farther left on the political spectrum people are, the more people will try to refer to everyone with an Austrian passport as Austrian. The farther on the right people are, the more likely they are to distinguish between “Austrian citizens” and “true Austrians”, which requires having grown up in the country and speaking without a recognizable accent.
Most of these first-generation immigrants, I believe especially the ones of European descent, do not identify as Austrian themselves. These days, EU citizens usually don’t bother changing citizenship any more, as it has few legal advantages.
The children of European immigrants will identify as Austrian or as “both Austrian and X”. or “half Austrian and half X”. They might still have an “exotic” name. Or an “exotic” and one “typically Austrian” name to choose from. For immigrants from elsewhere in Europe, the “second nationality” is just something they can use to make themselves appear more interesting, and even the right-wingers will get along with them.
And the grandchildren? They’re Austrian. When all goes well, they can’t even deny it anymore if they want to. Sometimes someone will explain the spelling or pronunciation of their last name by saying “my grandfather was Persian” or something to that effect.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple with non-European immigrants. People in the second generation might get really annoyed by being addressed in English by some people. People in the third generation might still get well-intended but annoying comments about their “exotic beauty”. But for most people, the main factor for judging “alienness” is language, not race, so you’ll hear your average “casually racist grandparent” say things like “he looks like a , but when he opens his mouth, you’ll notice that he’s a True Austrian”.
In the past 30 or so years, there has been increased immigration from Africa, Turkey and the Middle East, which means that these groups have to contend with targeted resentment from the right-wingers, and they are numerous enough so that endogamy is thing.
In general, a large part of the political spectrum uses the term “Parallelgesellschaft” (Parallel society - Wikipedia) as something that is to be avoided. For the right-wingers, it is something that those evil immigrants are doing because they are supposedly incompatible with European values, for the left-wingers, it is either something that thankfully doesn’t happen as much as the right-wingers think, or something that is best avoided by properly including everyone in “mainstream” society. Left-wingers do not use the term “second-generation immigrant”, because that’s an oxymoron and calling them “immigrants” would deny their Austrian-ness. Right-wingers will happily call everyone they don’t like a foreigner. The current “politically correct” term is “Mensch mit Migrationshintergrund” - “person with a background of migration” and usually gets only applied where there are problems caused by cultural differences, immigration-related poverty or by racism.
Using some kind of “Hyphenated-Austrian” terminology just because of somebody’s skin-color, as opposed to referring to someone who is genuinely and directly influenced by two different countries (i.e. at most second-generation) would be considered racist by most. Calling a Black person who grew up in Austria and spent all of his life here “Afrikaner” would also be unacceptable. (Which is why Trevor Noah got a shitstorm from France when he celebrated “Africa’s victory in the World Cup”).
Too late for that, @orenwolf was faster.
Anyway, my apologies to everyone for the wrong tone and the shitload of cross-cultural insensitivity.
You’d be assuming wrong.
Consider religion as just one example. A majority of people of faith follow the same religion, or at least some version of the same religion, that their parents or grandparents or even great-great grandparents followed. Protestant immigrants had largely Protestant descendants. Jewish immigrants had largely Jewish descendants.
How many Black Americans today follow, or even have knowledge of, the religious traditions their ancestors practiced prior to enslavement?
Answer; almost none of us.
Most of that history, identity and legacy has been stolen from us, forever.
One doesn’t have to erase their cultural backgrounds. Hopefully what we are collectively changes by that addition. The concept of a culturally pure ethnicity tied to the land that is immutable has some rather obvious drawbacks.
But I’m not sure immigration to Austria is as well regarded as you imply.
The EU Migrant Immigration Policy Country Index includes 40 countries.
Don’t forget to add that, by the time of the Civil War, the bulk of the profits from the institution of American slavery were no longer from agricultural products but that very breeding program. The profit was because sugar and other plantations in the Caribbean & Brazil had average life expectancies of less than six months for enslaved persons, the conditions were so brutal.
So yeah, that’s not at all the same as other historical versions of slavery.
If so, then this is by choice, which is a big difference.
I also think it’s more accurate to say that Europeans in American had their culture evolve rather than it was erased. Most of my Irish American relatives are still Catholic, for example.
And the culture each wave of immigrants brought with them forever changed American culture as well. My children have had the privilege of growing up in a city where Irish Dancing and sushi restaurants and Dia de Los Muertos celebrations and Chinese New Year parades are all recognized as big parts of the local scene.
We’d all be poorer if that culture and history was stolen or washed away, just as our society is poorer for having erased the history of the people forcibly brought here from Africa.
Descendants, not ancestors.
This one comment led me to one of my many ah-ha moments in the last few weeks. We humans like to classify things and I can see how easy it was to do that based on a few visible criteria.
I had a bit of trouble understanding this part below. I’m now visualizing it as an exploding pie chart representing a very early gene pool, with only a few segments leaving Africa.
May I rephrase your early point that the genetic differentiation within Africa mustn’t have stopped either. Modern Africans probably look a lot different than our common ancestors.
I don’t know if a “pie chart” is the best way of visualizing it but what I mean is that if you track the overall human diaspora, there are populations within Africa whose last common ancestors diverged earlier than the last common ancestors between (say) European and East Asian phenotypes.
So in the map below you can see the humans that set off to inhabit West Africa and the humans who set off to settle South Africa split from each other much earlier than other groups often regarded as different “races.”
So from a scientific/genetic point of view it’s nonsensical to classify East Asian and European phenotypes as different “races” but to lump all subsaharan Africans into a single “race.” That’s why race is best thought of as a social construct rather than a biological one.
Indeed. A country and its culture changes through immigration. There is hardly any typically Austrian dish that wasn’t a typically Czech dish first. My favourite dessert is Palatschinken, a kind of pancakes which the Croatians (among others, I guess) call palačinke and that the Germans, completely missing the point, describe as “Pfannkuchen”.
What does get erased though is the cultural difference to one’s immediate surroundings.
I’d much rather have an ethnicity defined by culture and tied to the land than an ethnicity defined by genetics. The worst thing the former can do is to not allow people from elsewhere to come and take part. The latter builds inherently unequal societies, all the time.
I didn’t really intend to imply it was “well-regarded”. It just isn’t very rewarding to complain about our local xenophobes to people who don’t know our local politics.
I was trying to focus on how it is differently regarded compared to America and in fact most of the English-speaking world. The right-wingers see their culture as immutable and superior, others welcome change, but both sides hope that the differences between the immigrants’ descendants and the “natives” will disappear soon. No hyphenation.
That might be a fundamental difference in how the whole topic is approached.
