When a good wake & bake meets my BA in Anthropology.

I live in an area in America that was settled very heavily by immigrants, and is still being settled very heavily because the area is very religious, so we have a prominent refugee resettlement ministry in the area. This is how I can live in a C-tier northern Midwestern city and have access to grocery stores catering to just about any culture. I, myself, was generally raised in the white, blue-collar enclave of all of this, which meant I grew up in the thick of the European American Diaspora. Let me explain...

A big argument surrounding "good" immigrants and "bad" immigrants is that the "good" immigrants "assimilate" to the American Way of Life - they learn English, give up any cultural customs that might be seen as "un-American," etc...

Then, tell me why I grew up knowing functional Polish words and phrases? I'm not even Polish, and I've never been to Poland, I picked it up at overnights with Polish-American friends. And they weren't even FOBs, it was their great-grandparents who immigrated. Doesn't matter, I can toast in Polish at a wedding with the rest of them. The city's Polish Heritage Society hosts two annual festivals celebrating Polish culture and the contributions of Polish-Americans to both American and Polish history. One is the biggest bar hop you have ever seen, so don't tell me it's all harmless because it's European.

Here's where this becomes truly interesting to me - I recently got into an online discussion with a few people from Poland regarding the "What I Eat In A Day" video posted by an American woman calling herself "That Polish Mama."

For the record, internet handles like that are common among Polish-Americans. Polish-Americans are taught to take a lot of pride in their Polish heritage, including normalized outward displays. My next-door neighbors don't fly an American flag and do fly a Polish flag. I have my own "Pulaski T-shirt" for blending in purposes, the "Polish Halls" (think like an American Legion or Elks Lodge, but you have to have verified Polish heritage to join. They open to the public for Pulaski Days) sell them as fundraisers and compete for the most clever design, always in red.

Anyway, this was clearly the first introduction to Polish-American culture these Polish nationals had ever encountered, and they were flabbergasted.

Like I said, we are not talking about FOBs here. These are second to fourth generation Americans, they are fully assimilated to the American Way of Life. We Americans understand this. We have the internet, we know Polish nationals, we know it's a totally different culture over there. But the Polish nationals don't seem to have a wide awareness of Polish-American culture.

Irish-American culture is very similar, and the Irish nationals did seem to catch on a few years back, and they were BIG MAD about how their American cousins were portraying Irish culture.

My dudes, you are witnessing what happens when a culture breaks off from the main branch, integrates with another culture (in both of these cases, American Capitalism), and takes on its own evolutionary path. They're not representing Irish culture. They're representing Irish-American culture. And if it feels like an offensive caricature, you can blame the influence of American Capitalism for that.

They REALLY hate the American tourists claiming Irishness through ancestry, not culture. But those ancestral claims are the tip of the iceberg of Irish-American culture. Irish-American culture is no more than 300 years old, and didn't really ramp up until 174 years ago. And it's evolving on foreign soil, disconnected from Ireland itself. Some of it got fully disconnected and evolved into its own unique thing, namely in the Appalachian area. Some of it kept up tenuous connections by correspondence with family, and more recent immigrants bringing more current cultural developments from Ireland. Otherwise, the connection to Ireland is frozen in the 1850's, been kept alive within families and local communities, and has independently evolved from there. They know they're American. They're saying that they're a cousin from the diaspora. They're just using very American terminology to do it.

Going back to the case of "That Polish Mama," her WIEIAD was the Standard American Diet, and her physique reflected that. The Polish nationals wondered how she could even eat like that in Poland (as in, the foods aren't even generally available, nor are they regularly eaten), and why she hadn't been bullied into an ED yet. It then blew their mind that she would call herself "Polish" as an American national.

I kinda want to fly them over for Pulaski Days sometime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfEkDqP34xo

It's... not nearly this sedate. And there's a lot more accordion.

Also, that aforementioned Anthropology degree happened 17 years ago, as of six days ago. And boy does that song take me back to said college days, damn.