[rayiner]

> John von Neumann - a gasp immigrant - may have more to do with how America looks like today than anybody alive in the 1800s

Not at all. Bangladesh, where I’m from, has computers too, but its government, institutions, infrastructure, constitution, etc., are still what Bangladeshis and the British created. Society is a product of culture, and culture runs deep and is extremely sticky.

[epups]

I'm not sure I understand your point here. All those things you mentioned are not at all a product of the people of Bangladesh alone, they are a collective effort. You live in a system of government invented in Europe, your infrastructure is more and more owned by China, your predominant religion is not from Bangladesh originally. You talk about countries as if they are some independent silos of people who have lived in the area for millennia, and I find that to be absolutely unjustified.

[rayiner]

Sure, it’s the collective effort of centuries, and the British, Mughals, etc. The British for example built many of our institutions, and we inherited British common law. Our constitution has language in it that you can trace back to the English Magna Carta. Modern Bangladeshi society fairly claims all of that. But who the country isn’t the product of, and hasn’t been shaped by, is some immigrant who has been in the country just 10 years.

The same is true of Germany or America. My wife’s family fought in the American revolution and were among the first pioneers to settle the Oregon coast. The culture of those pioneers—the rugged individualism, etc.—was passed down over the generations and has had a manifest influence on American culture and identity. My ancestors “didn’t build that.” I wasn’t socialized into those values growing up. My ancestors were from somewhere completely different that’s had civilization for a millennium and has completely different values and attitudes. My family came here in 1989 to a country that was fully formed in its modern incarnation by, among other people, my wife’s family. It strikes me as absurd when people assert out of misplaced political correctness that America is my country just as much as it is her country. It reduces culture and nationhood and citizenship to a shallow and impoverished concept.

[skedaddle]

We found newspaper articles that ran at the time my grandparents eloped from Misourri. They have headlines like "Kansas City woman marries Chinese", "she confirms he does speak English", "is pregnant with his son", ... etc. My father of course, when he came around, wasn't seen as an American boy in 1930s Kansas. His experiences there left him feeling like a "twilight child" for the rest of his life, caught in between foreign and native lands and not belonging in either.

Why is that alright? Were the anti-miscegenation laws wrong, but the newspapers not?

If you're from here or reside here and are committed to the future of the country, you are American. The country in its history has mostly not offered that assurance, and the law and culture behind it was badly racist.

I definitely feel American (on the same level as my white cousins I guess if that's how you want to pin it) and my dad did too. He rebuked my oldest brother once very strongly for suggesting he was first generation.

[rayiner]

> caught between foreign and native lands and not belonging in either

That’s just a state of affairs that arises when people immigrate. Nobody gives up the culture of old country completely in a single generation, nor do they fully maintain that culture either. Desire for belonging can’t change who you are, which is a product of your parents and their parents and their parents.

> If you're from here or reside here and are committed to the future of the country, you are American.

That defines “American-ness” as an individual characteristic, but nationality is a group concept. When you go visit America and say Japan you can easily observe aggregate group differences in culture, customs, attitudes, etc. That’s what makes one place america and the other place Japan. And if your ancestors were the ones who cultivated that culture, customs, and attitudes, and you were born and socialized into them, you’re more American or Japanese than someone who wasn’t.

> The country in its history has mostly not offered that assurance, and the law and culture behind it was badly racist.

You’re conflating race with culture and national origin. For example, most Bangladeshis wouldn’t consider me Bangladeshi, because I was raised in the US. Obviously that’s not “racist”—I’m the same race as 95% of that country. It’s because I was raised in a foreign cultural environment that’s alien to Bangladesh. For the same reason, it’s not “racist” for Americans not to consider me American. Because I’m not. As a first generation immigrant there’s huge swaths of my socialization and world view that comes from old country, not from America.

And that’s true of my kids too, who are being socialized very differently than the cousins from my American wife’s side of the family. Maybe generations from now their grandkids will be American, both in the sense that they’ll be assimilated into the dominant culture, but also in the sense that continuing south Asian immigration to America will have changed American culture, the same way that Germans and Italians did. But in the meantime there is no better way to describe them than observing that they have one foot in each world.

[skedaddle]

I disagree thoroughly. This was an extremely important moral for my dad, he imparted these lessons to us from birth (I know that might sound strange but I can't elaborate): we were to expect no more or less from our country than any other American boys of our generation, and it is no more or less our own than it is theirs. I can't put it to you the same way that he did to us, but it is in no way an "absurd", "shallow", merely "politically correct" attitude. This means something to people. In politics because of the serious backdrop of family separation/deportation policy, the "shithole country" nationality, overall 18th-21st history of this continent (not to be discounted), etc. And personally because it's not like rare to have your own family story in America, even if your folks didn't set out to Oregon in a wagon.

... and don't get me wrong that is pretty rad. I have driven to and from St. Louis and the West coast a few times on different routes, and it is insane that anyone ever packed their family and shit from there to there in anything less than a huge truck/family minivan with cruise control air conditioning and radio all set to maximum.

[selimthegrim]

You might be interested in Vivek Bald’s book “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America”

[selimthegrim]

1947-71 doesn't exist according to him.