As America evolves, the ethnic/racial/nationality choices become moot

[SoCalDem]

For instance:

A census taken in 1910 would have obviously contained a LOT of people whose parents had been born elsewhere (and many younger folks who came here as infants)

By 1960, a great many of those elders had passed on, and most of the grandparent/parent/child combinations had ALL been born here.

A grandpa whose father had been born in Germany, and whose daughter had been born in the US & married a man whose family had all started out in Sweden, would all have just been plain ole Americans.

But a family who had actually lived for 300-400 years, IN what is now America, but then was Mexico, are supposed to identify with their Mexican heritage.

Only people who actually immigrated here recently, really have close ties to their home country, and once they become nationalized citizens, perhaps they choose to BE American, and not a hyphenate of the native land of their long-dead ancestors.

In the current census, I checked "Cuban" (in addition to white), since my father was born in Havana, BUT his father was born in Seville Spain, and his mother was born & raised in Chamonix, France...was he half French/half Spanish who happened to be born in Cuba?..Does that make me more French/Spanish, and less Cuban?

If the object of the census is to paint a picture of our ancestry, perhaps a better way would be for people to answer ancestry questions about relatives they know of, and to refrain from identifying themselves.

Each successive generation becomes more muddled, and the self-identification process becomes more difficult.

People many years from now would probably appreciate some concrete knowledge of the actual place that ancestors came from, instead of a "self-determination" based on a few checked boxes.

Most people can easily locate both sets of their own grandparents, and possibly a generation back from that, but it stops there for most people. If ethnicity identification is the goal of any census, it would seem to me that by now, MOST of us are purely American ...except for the newly-arrived immigrants, and within 3 or 4 more census opportunities, even they will have lost any contemporaneous contact with their "ethnicity".

If ethnicity is so all-important, and stays with us, layer upon layer, aren't we all African-something?

[Jawja]

1. On mine, I wrote in

"European American" in addition to "white."

If we have African-Americans and Hispanic Americans, then we also have European Americans.