alt Hacker NewsIf German is an ethnicity, I don't see why the US, which is older than the German Confederation (let alone the subsequent countries that have existed since then on that same land) has a distinct culture and set of shared values, cannot be.
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Native Americans would be a ethnicity but the US was taken over my European settlers.
Europe the Germanic people have existed way before , a country is not tied to the ethnicity.
There are shared values in the US, but not many. Love of the US, and 'freedom' is about all, for the later we don't agree in what freedom means.
There are many different distinct cultures in the US. Cowboys from north Dakota and Texas are both cowboys but have little cultural connection, and the hill billies Tennessee are very different from each.
The word you’re looking for is ethnogenisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnogenesis. There is no “American” ethnicity, though “white people” might come close to being considered a synthetic ethnicity resulting from the immigration restriction and birth rate boom from 1921-1965.
But even that is too broad. It might be more accurate to get even more granular. For example, you might identify someone like Tim Walz as belonging to a synthetic Scandinavian-Midwestern ethnicity: although he has no actual Scandinavian ancestry, he grew up in Minnesota in what’s a recognizably distinct ethnocultural subgroup.
A far more useful analogy might be that “American” is a college football team.