Posted on 08/11/2002 4:59:17 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
August 11, 2002
Newest ethnic group: American-American If you asked Dave Robbio about his ethnic background when he was growing up, he'd say he was Italian.
But if you asked his wife, Anita, the same question, the answer got more complicated.
"I have some Native American, some Swedish, some French Canadian, some Irish and some German in me," she says, relaxing on the front porch of the family's Cape May Court House home.
But when the 2000 Census asked about the family's ethnicity two years ago, the Robbios cut out all the hyphens and the fractions and gave a simple answer.
"American," Anita says, as a red, white and blue flag flaps in front of her. "Because I guess I feel that's what I am. Beyond writing a short autobiography, you just have to check a box."
The 2000 Census found more Americans filling in "American" than ever before.
The number is still relatively small: Just 3.1 percent of New Jerseyans - or about 264,000 people - identified their background as "American" or "United States." That was still an almost 55 percent increase from 1990, as about 93,000 more residents of New Jersey left out their families' pasts in favor of listing their present ethnic origin as just American.
People in Atlantic, Cape May and Ocean counties were more likely to claim "American" as their ancestry than those in the state as a whole. In Ocean County alone, 85 percent more people identified themselves that way than in the 1990 Census.
Cumberland County was the only one of the state's 21 counties with a decline in the number of people calling their heritage simply American, with 13.8 percent fewer residents doing that in 2000 than in 1990.
There's very little research as to why more people are listing their ancestry as American, says James Hughes, a dean at Rutgers University's public policy school and a demographics expert.
What likely is happening is that the longer some families have been in this country, and the more ethnic groups mix, people just figure they're American, he says.
"They don't care about where some great-great grandparent came from back in the 19th century," Hughes says.
The same sort of thing happened in Europe where, after centuries, groups of people came together to finally consider themselves French or German or some other modern nationality, he says.
Americans traditionally have celebrated their ancestry by doing things like touting their Irish heritage on St. Patrick's Day or their Italian roots on Columbus Day.
Given that more people are listing their ancestry as American now, Hughes says drawing any kind of conclusion from those cultural holidays about people and their ancestral links might not be a good idea.
"There are some people who are really into (their ancestry). For the great mass of citizenry, it's not a major part of their day-to-day existence," Hughes says.
Hughes also suggests one more reason why more people are listing their ancestry as American: It may have been easier for people of mixed ethnic backgrounds to give that answer than to try to come up with a better one.
"Forms are a pain to fill out," Hughes said. "People will whiz through as quickly as possible to find an answer that gets them to the next question."
Whatever the reasons, Middle Township was a local leader in this growing trend of Americans calling themselves nothing but that. About 1,600 people there - or 10 percent of the township's population - identified their heritage that way.
In the four-county area, the answers range from just 1 percent listing their ethnic origin as "American" in Hammonton and Cape May Point to 15 percent in the Cumberland County town of Shiloh.
The figures are estimates based on the long-form questionnaire, which went to one in six households.
Back on the Robbios' front porch in Middle Township, Anita says that calling her family "American" was part convenience and part logic.
"It doesn't really fall under any other category," she says - especially when she considers her three children's Italian-Native American-Swedish-French- Canadian-Irish-German-American heritage.
A few blocks away at the Coffee Court restaurant, Karen Padmore says her family's bloodlines are much easier to trace. Her grandparents were Swedish immigrants and her husband is from England. But if she had to identify the family's ethnicity now, she'd tend to call them all Americans.
"My grandmother fought real hard to lose her accent," Padmore says. "That was important to her. She wanted to make sure she sounded American, and acted American."
Padmores's husband, Steve, may have grown up in England, but he became an American citizen just a few weeks ago - having started the process right after last Sept. 11.
The 2000 Census forms were all filled out before terrorists attacks hit the United States that day, but Karen Padmore's experience in the restaurant after Sept. 11 tells her this just-American trend could keep growing in the decades ahead, because lots of the Coffee Court talk then was about terrorists being jealous of Americans, and America.
Then again, even people who have decided that they're nothing but Americans now still appreciate that historically, this is a nation of immigrants. They say we don't all need to forget the past to be real Americans today.
"We were up in Atlantic City," just-plain-American Anita Robbio says, "and I saw this bumper sticker. It said, 'Proud to be an American. Proud to be a Sikh.' And I thought, that is pretty cool."
HOOWAH!
For those of you from RioLinda, Sikh is a religion, not an ethnic group.
Of course, I do not regard any other Americans as less American, just because my family helped to found the U.S.A.
Why that would be downright.... UNAMERICAN !!
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I didn't check anything but I'll use "American" or if I need a hyphen, "American-American" from now on.
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