Why do i see so many americans obsessed with the concept of "this is a thing that [Ethnicity] does"

Most self-aware European

Edit: Well shit

Yeah really… because cultural divides and prejudice are a uniquely American thing! /s

Yes, text book case of how transparent projection is to us when we do it.

lol!

And they do it even if there’s not much difference between people. When I lived in Scranton I’d get asked what ethnic group I was a part of - Irish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, Welsh, etc.

To someone who didn’t grow up there I didn’t know what they were asking, but there was still in the early 00s different parts of town for different communities.

This all stopped when a significant Hispanic population moved in, and they stopped being Poles or Estonians and became “American” and the newcomers weren’t.

That tension continues in the USA between recognizing and celebrating cultural differences, and becoming a melting pot of many cultures becoming one.

This is the crux. It's a uniquely American take on how you deal with a country that has seen dozens of waves of immigration (starting with the illegal immigration of colonization) from many different places over a fairly short timeframe. American culture is kind of like a fork, with a unified base that has integrated but very distinct tines (bear with me... combining the "melting pot" and "salad bowl" tropes is HARD!). At their best, memes and jokes like that can be an invitation to genuine dialogue. At their worst... well... not that. A lot depends on who is putting them out and with what agenda in mind.

Statistically, most European countries seem to be estimated at somewhere between 80%-90% "white," likely to mean "of exclusively European extraction beyond any sort of family memory," and I wager the vast majority of those people are from the core borders or frontiers that might well have shifted in the last few centuries. America hasn't had that sort of percentage for over 40 years, and even then the white population was more "assorted crackers." Even back into that era, most areas will have had at least two and likely three to five statistically significant populations that would have been visually and culturally distinct (not that this in ANY way implies that these groups were treated equally by the power structures... OMG far, far, FAR from it). These people don't have to give up their distinctiveness to remain American, and when considered in good faith, particularly by those who mostly live in the base of the fork, the sorts of things you're describing can be more celebratory than divisive.

I'm not going to suggest Americans are particularly good at multiculturalism (another understatement), but we've been at it a long time and specific practices and trends have grown up around it. The balancing act of racial and ethnic awareness without descending into judgment is probably one of the more complicated aspects of navigating American culture, regardless of whether you were born to it or looking on from the outside. So much so, in fact, that certain small-minded people think we should just snap the tines off the fork and pretend the nub was always a spoon.

It's a culture that heavily pushes self identity. Then you combine that with poor schooling and a sheltered upbringing.

If you're of limited education, means, and exposure, when it comes time to start outfitting that identity it becomes very easy to place yourself in a box. And that box becomes the lens you see the world through.

Similar small town experience here.

I grew up learning that racism is bad, and that everyone's the same and I truly believed in that idea. I thought I was very not racist, but when I had a job that moved me to a few big cities for a few years, I realized that I had a different kind of racism.

It's easy for all these small town white people to "never do anything racist" because they rarely encounter different people. When they do, they feel like they can pat themselves on the back, because they didn't shout slurs at those people. But, I guarantee that when any one of them travels to the city and sees a group of black people standing outside of a gas station, they'll keep driving until they find a "less shady neighborhood".

These people don't "feel" racist, and they don't want to be racist, but they consistently reinforce racist laws because they have no understanding of how different cultures are affected by them.

This is relative. The US is more open about it's racism and it being bad. Most countries are super racist, it's just different targets depending on the region.

And yet until a few weks ago America was trying to fix these problems whereas a ton of other nations just pretend they have no racial problems and yet they throw bananas on the pitch when Africans are playing or suddenly rival the Ku Klux Klan for hate when someone brings up the Roma peoples.