See the response from marcus_holmes about "Irishness" in this thread. It's essentially the position of ethnic nationalist parties like Restore Britain. But in a different context he'd be ranting about civic nationalist parties like Reform UK or One Nation...
Basically, if an American is claiming to be whatever, you can use a purity standard close to the Nuremberg laws to exclude them. But an Indian or African who arrived 5 years ago is a true blood Aussie mate, because saying anything else would be doing a racism.
No no no, no-one is gatekeeping ethnicity. If you have Irish heritage, you have Irish heritage. That's a fact.
We're gatekeeping cultural identity and nationality, because these cosplaying Americans seem to think that their ethnicity confers culture and nationality by weird blood magic or something, and that's not how it works.
> if we ask them if an African who has been there for 5 years is English or German.
Someone who is not ethnically German, but has immigrated to Germany and speaks the language, is way more German than a cosplaying American whose parents and grandparents were all Americans, doesn't speak German, knows nothing about German culture, has never lived in Germany, but who has one ancestor who came from Germany.
If you're a first-generation immigrant, you get to choose what you identify as. If you speak the language of your new country and if you've become a citizen, sure, you can call yourself that. I don't think a lot of people will object to that.
Because, and this is the fuel for this clash, we care the most about culture and nationality, instead of heritage and ethnicity.
> Basically, if an American is claiming to be whatever
Because they're not, their culture is American, their nationality is American, they're American.
> But an Indian or African who arrived 5 years ago is a true blood Aussie mate, because saying anything else would be doing a racism.
No they're not, no it's not, and my what a lovely strawman you made up there.
Edit: Funny I replied the answer to "Obviously none of them spoke the language, and he'd ask why not? Great question."
Why did you just move on? You should be happy to have your 'great question' belittling my family answered. It's because of death, and survival, and scraping by to survive, lots of pieces got lost. That was your ownage. That our families were broken people just surviving and sometimes language was one the the pieces we lost. Pieces we are excited to maybe explore when we visit europe, (until we run into people like you). I have an old family bible with Gaelic that my family wrote in it. But that isn't a connection, right?
The problem we all see is that you're saying that you are Irish. If you weren't born in Ireland, your parents weren't born in Ireland, you don't speak Irish, you don't pay taxes in Ireland, you can't vote in Irish elections, you wouldn't join the Irish military, you don't understand Irish culture, or know anything about Irish history, then in what way are you Irish?
You're not. But you have redefined "Irish" to mean something else. And that's what pisses people off. There are actual Irish people out there. Invent your own identity.
And Americans are claiming ethnic ancestry - not national ancestry. And many Irish migrated out of Ireland, when it was not a country - and paying taxes is irrelevant in this gatekeeping of identities.
Speak for yourself, because
> If their great-great-grandfather was Scottish, they then assume everyone before him was 100% super duper Scottish
That is, indeed, the correct assumption to make. I would recommend having a look at the work done on population genetics at Oxford University’s People of the British Isles project[1]. Even their homepage should relieve you of some misconceptions:
> The People of the British Isles (PoBI) project was initiated by Sir Walter Bodmer in 2004, in an effort to create the first ever detailed genetic map of a country. The United Kingdom’s history bristles with immigrations, wars and invasions, so the PoBI researchers faced a tremendous task in investigating how past events impacted the genetic makeup of modern British people.
> Results included a map (image below) showing a remarkable concordance between genetic and geographical clustering of our samples across the United Kingdom.