Like I said, we’re quite mixed here. Take Hispanic as an example. You could be Hispanic and Latino, or one or the other and consider yourself white, or black or an indigenous American. This stuff is more about cultural identity, and crucially your cultural experiences and expectations, than it is about genetics. Plenty of families are actually wrong about where they’re from, for a variety of reasons. But that doesn’t matter all that much. In Florida, for instance, Spanish families generally have more in common with Cubans and Italians than they would with recent immigrants from Spain because of when the most significant waves of immigration happened that have historically shaped our communities.

I’d also like to point out that all of this doesn’t seem from colonialism either. Lots of people leave their home countries for lots of reasons and end up here. There is a vocal minority of people who don’t like that and think their kids aren’t American enough, but to the rest of us they’re American as hell. So you can be American and whatever, and doesn’t make you any less American. It can’t be universal, because most other places don’t have this kind of population. But it’s relevant here because there are so many American experiences that if you want to know where you share cultural touchstones, or experience and acknowledge other cultures, it gives you a place to start from.