Identifying with one's ethnicity - good for anything?

If it gives you a sense of community, or continuity, or a sense of where you come from, and where you belong in an increasinbly alienated and fragmented world, then CLASSIC.

If you use it as a means of dividing yourself from others, or putting down others as not being as good as your ethnicity/race/culture then DUD.

To add to what Kate said.

If it prevents the homogenisation of culture(s) classic.

If its used to trample cultural diversity DUD.

I think I'm required by law to say classic, aren't I?

Embracing your ethnicity as part of the larger equation that makes up the individual that is you = CLASSIC. Simple-minded sloganeering and reducing others to ethnic stereotypes = DUD.

i'm not sure if anyone could come up with one good reason to be proud of identifying with my white ancestors invasion of australia and subsequent treatment of difference

Depends whether by ethnicity you're referring to shared culture or to racial origins.

You can attain all the fine things Kate describes by identifying with your (accident-of-birth) culture's customs & attitudes, which you're likely to feel more comfortable with given that they, in part, molded your preferences. But to identify race (or nationhood) as the defining factor - the underpinning of that culture - is arbitrarily limiting and almost inevitably divisive. (MY culture MY achievements YOUR culture YOUR crimes etc etc). That is, once you've linked the actual facts of behaviour-in-common to an arbitrary identifier like skin colour or to an abstract generalisation such as nationality then it becomes very easy to selectively focus on laudable or condemnable cultural/political/historical actions and use them to reflect well (or not) upon a whole group of people who have nothing to do with whatever achievements or atrocities are under examination and who are exactly as capable of good or evil as any other individual person.

Also: to attempt to preserve cultural diversity for any other reason than that it reflects the wishes of those within the cultures (e.g. anti-homogenization, which usually means anti-US 'cultural encroachment') seems to me to deny equality of potential to whoever chooses to embrace whatever is the dominant culture (which may be dominant for very good reasons and which in the case of the US is a culture of proliferating (choice-driven) sub-cultures anyhow, which makes for diversity of a far healthier kind, I think). [Of course as far as political/social realities are concerned - as opposed to the cultural realm - I'm not making any claims for America as a paragon of virtue.]

Scholarships. You'd be amazed how quickly I turn into a yellow-blooded-chink when there's money on the line.

My bro gets big mum Brownie points for hanging with the North London Jewish crowd whereas I get berated for refusing to respond to personal ads my mum reads to me from the Jewish Chronicle. However when I went out with a Brum (where my dad is from) my parents refused to like him. Perhaps North London Jewish and Brum are not proper ethnic groups in which case I don't have one.

Yeah, but it wasn't that they didn't like him because he was a Brum (and anyway - living in Surrey for most of his life qualifies him less that your father for this appelation).

He was very impressed when my dad told him some relative of his had been on the board of Villa. My parents didn't like him because he was not rich enough and they have no faith in my ability to financially support myself.

My Ethnicity is Irish, although they seem to have had the good sense to come here in 1840. I never like d when my Dad and grandma would whip out the shilealeagh and put on the Perry Cuomo sings Irish Hits. I don't really like Irish culture. I guess I must be American by now anyways. I mean, even the Irish were once Celts living elsewhere.

Sort of unfortunately dud-ish, really. It's near-impossible to identify strongly within a certain ethnicity without then going on to sort of champion that ethnicity, putting its interests and concerns above others -- something which, utterly natural and usually harmless as it may be, is somewhat indefensible, no?

Only appears classic, at this point, because everyone does it: if Ethnic Group A bands together to champion its culture and collective worldview, Nearby Ethnic Group B is going to benefit from doing the same.

But perhaps this is easy for me to say, as there is no country on Earth where I am not considered a foreigner.

so you're like superman or the silver surfer or something, right?

re: homogenisation of culture, what does ethnicity have to do with that? in this INTERNET AGE culture has been preserved in almost every way, and usually not by the actually people of the ethnicity the culture originated from. and that's a good thing, i hate when people get mad at members of a race/ethnic group for not representing their group 'correctly'. i mean, fuck off. you know on tv street gangs always have to be made up of more than one race? like that's realistic, they're thieves and murderers and all that but gosh they sure do love their brothers of other races. that censor rule is so helpful too, because some normal person might be watching walker: texas ranger think, hey, that gang is all hispanic youths, i suppose this means all people of hispanic origin are in gangs! it all makes sense now, i can't see how i missed it before. FUCK TV.

Not that I disagree with you, Ethan, but unfortunately, it sort of does work that way. Example: most Americans think the majority of welfare recipients are black, despite the fact that blacks are statistically less likely to receive government benefits than whites. Why the misperception? Because black poverty tends to be concentrated into major cities, where it's easy to film for news stories or dramatize in movies. White poverty, on the other hand, exists on the margins of every town, everywhere, so it's not as easy to notice.

But you're right about the ridiculous expectation that people conform to their ethnic heritage, as if it's genetically hardwired that they must adopt the culture associated with their ancestry. This is something that has plagued me since grade school, in that people tend to assign me an ethnicity based on my actions. If I get pulled over, or if I'm walking by an old woman on a dark street after midnight, you bet I'm black. But as soon as I speak standard English, or display any sort of intelligence whatsoever, I'm no longer considered black: I'm suddenly an immigrant.

Not like Silver Surfer, not quite. But in the U.S. I'm obviously foreign, and the last time I was in Ethiopia, where my family's from, little kids pointed and called me a foreigner. I suppose if I stayed over the for 10-15 years and learned the language well, that'd be as close to non-foreign as I could get.

that actually is a lot like the silver surfer.

I guess that explains why I look like a puddle of mercury.