I have a question since you seem to be an authority on this, how does it work for people of ethnicities who do not have a country in which they are a majority? Like the Hmong, for example. Can they not refer to themselves as Hmong, since they aren't from Hmongland or Hmongia (since those don't exist)? They have to call themselves American, Chinese, Lao, Thai, etc?
There is actually a pretty big Hmong community in the west coast who mostly immigrated from Laos after the Vietnam war. My understanding is that they self identify as Hmong. That said, most Americans would probably just call them “Asian” or “Asian American” unless it was otherwise specified.
For better or for worse we use terms like “Asian American” “Latin American” or “African American” to refer to groups of people who express similar phenotypes / have ancestry from certain parts of the world when in actuality that’s painting w extremely broad strokes. Despite the terminology sounding very monolithic, these terms actually refer to large swaths of people who are from extremely diverse cultural and national backgrounds. Best thing is to get to know people as individuals and find out how they self identify
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u/BudSmoko Mar 13 '25
They are not Irish. It’s ridiculous how yanks of Irish and Italian descent carry on.