Comment by temac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by temac | Hacker News Reader

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> The US instead is built on citizenship.

If you put it that way, I read it as "in contrast with e.g. Germany or France". However those countries are also built on citizenship. Oh of course you will have far-right people wanting to stop all immigration (and be racist against people they don't find similar enough, physically, culturally, or because of some arbitrary amount of ancestry origin), etc. but given that the same thing happens in the US, I don't get the substance of the difference.

You aren't a nation until you become one. And I would find it depressing to refuse to become one just because of the variety of random physical traits and/or a kind of fossilization of cultures. Complete assimilation and convergence to a mean may be undesirable, but even more is excessive segregation...

So the question can boil down to when can the "common ancestral origin" stop? Because if e.g. 3 generations is enough (and why not) it could be easy enough to agree on becoming one.

> If you put it that way, I read it as "in contrast with e.g. Germany or France". However those countries are also built on citizenship.

The distinction between these three has been discussed very deeply in political science (in Germany, I have no idea about the US discourse). Usually these three can be imagined as different points on a scale, with the US on the citizenship end, France in between and Germany at the ethnic end.

Of course the German state nowadays doesn't refer to race as the defining element anymore, but there is still a distinct difference in the minds of the average citizen.

I've heard a great anecdote about this in university: If an immigrant in the US raises the US flag on the 4th of July, this would be seen as quite normal behaviour. If an immigrant in Germany would raise the German flag on 3rd of October (the German equivalent to 7/4), that would usually result in raised eyebrows.

This does not imply that the Germans are racist here, just that the unconscious definition of what it means to be a part of a nation is still quite different from the US. It more heavily refers to common values and allegiance to the constitution in the US, and common ancestry in Germany.

> If an immigrant in Germany would raise the German flag on 3rd of October (the German equivalent to 7/4), that would usually result in raised eyebrows.

> This does not imply that the Germans are racist here, just that the unconscious definition of what it means to be a part of a nation is still quite different from the US. It more heavily refers to common values and allegiance to the constitution in the US, and common ancestry in Germany.

That's a bad example, anyone raising the German flag on 3rd of October results in raised eyebrows.

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