> America is a real physical landmass. Two actually.
America refers to the United States of America in virtually all context in the everyday English speaking world.
> "American" is to be understood as those ethnicities from that physical and very much existing landmass. Whether they called it America or not, which they of course didn't. The same thing for discussing Australian native ethnicities for example.
Let’s put it another way…
The people who live here now are the natives over the long arc of history. You’re only focusing on a small sliver of time in a very constrained historical environment.
If you say the native Americans as they are called are the only “real” natives so to speak you have to apply that standard everywhere. And if you think that the disruption of native lands in the past was bad, you’d also have to believe that continuing to bring more people to America is also bad, ergo immigration to the Americas is immoral.
> And just like a foreigner cannot belong to any ethnicity or nation just because she has citizenship today, neither could they in Roman times.
This is untrue in the western world, specifically the Anglo-American world. It’s difficult for most of the world to understand our societies and I think this is a good example of how things get confused. I can’t, as a white American, become “Chinese”. But a Chinese man or woman can certainly become an American and belong to our nation. There is no question about that.
America refers to the United States of America in virtually all context in the everyday English speaking world.
> "American" is to be understood as those ethnicities from that physical and very much existing landmass. Whether they called it America or not, which they of course didn't. The same thing for discussing Australian native ethnicities for example.
Let’s put it another way…
The people who live here now are the natives over the long arc of history. You’re only focusing on a small sliver of time in a very constrained historical environment.
If you say the native Americans as they are called are the only “real” natives so to speak you have to apply that standard everywhere. And if you think that the disruption of native lands in the past was bad, you’d also have to believe that continuing to bring more people to America is also bad, ergo immigration to the Americas is immoral.
> And just like a foreigner cannot belong to any ethnicity or nation just because she has citizenship today, neither could they in Roman times.
This is untrue in the western world, specifically the Anglo-American world. It’s difficult for most of the world to understand our societies and I think this is a good example of how things get confused. I can’t, as a white American, become “Chinese”. But a Chinese man or woman can certainly become an American and belong to our nation. There is no question about that.