Americans always seem to think that there is some kind of pan-ethinc bond between people in completely different counties, as if we weren’t all killing each other until that whole “world wars” thing.
For a lot of us, Russia and Ukraine were literally parts of the same country when we were growing up, and we used the terms Russia and the USSR pretty much interchangeably. I wasn’t aware until pretty recently that places like Baikonur, Minsk, and Chernobyl are not in Russia. Actual misdeeds committed by Russia in the Soviet era were described in vague terms and were very hard to separate from exaggerated fear mongering about communism, so I ended up knowing very little about that era. Even big things like the Holomodor were just not part of the public consciousness.
So yeah, we were very ignorant of the situation, and in many of our minds Ukraine may as well have been southwestern Russia. But those of us who aren’t idiots do at least know that the possibility of going to war with a neighboring country is inherent in the existence of separate countries, and we know from our own civil war that people of the same or similar ethnicities will absolutely go to war with each other.
For people in America who aren’t racialized it’s hard to maintain a separate cultural identity after a few generations. You wind up with a few trinkets of the culture your family came from if you don’t wind up so thoroughly blended it’s impossible to care. Like my grandpa was an immigrant and while that culture is important to me I make no mistake that if I went back to his home country I’d just be some stupid American who barely even speaks the language. What did I get from his culture? Some comfort foods, a handful of holiday traditions, and the branch of Christianity I was raised in.
And the cultures that try to have their cake and eat it too like Irish-American and Italian-American are looked at as weirdos by the countries they came from.
That’s because of how hard your family assimilated, like many from Western Europe. All those cultures, being predominantly Catholic and Protestant easily blended. There isn’t this kind of problem in the Greek American community.
Americans always seem to think that there is some kind of pan-ethinc bond between people in completely different counties, as if we weren’t all killing each other until that whole “world wars” thing.
For a lot of us, Russia and Ukraine were literally parts of the same country when we were growing up, and we used the terms Russia and the USSR pretty much interchangeably. I wasn’t aware until pretty recently that places like Baikonur, Minsk, and Chernobyl are not in Russia. Actual misdeeds committed by Russia in the Soviet era were described in vague terms and were very hard to separate from exaggerated fear mongering about communism, so I ended up knowing very little about that era. Even big things like the Holomodor were just not part of the public consciousness.
So yeah, we were very ignorant of the situation, and in many of our minds Ukraine may as well have been southwestern Russia. But those of us who aren’t idiots do at least know that the possibility of going to war with a neighboring country is inherent in the existence of separate countries, and we know from our own civil war that people of the same or similar ethnicities will absolutely go to war with each other.
*Holodomor as in “голод” - “hunger” and “мор” - “plague” or “mass dying”.
Sorry for the correction
I’d rather be corrected than be wrong.
That’s what happens when you sacrifice your cultural identity for “white American”.
For people in America who aren’t racialized it’s hard to maintain a separate cultural identity after a few generations. You wind up with a few trinkets of the culture your family came from if you don’t wind up so thoroughly blended it’s impossible to care. Like my grandpa was an immigrant and while that culture is important to me I make no mistake that if I went back to his home country I’d just be some stupid American who barely even speaks the language. What did I get from his culture? Some comfort foods, a handful of holiday traditions, and the branch of Christianity I was raised in.
And the cultures that try to have their cake and eat it too like Irish-American and Italian-American are looked at as weirdos by the countries they came from.
That’s because of how hard your family assimilated, like many from Western Europe. All those cultures, being predominantly Catholic and Protestant easily blended. There isn’t this kind of problem in the Greek American community.