your comment in the serbian americans talk page i was checking that talk page to see if anyone had maybe listed new data to a question i had posed a few months ago and i saw your comment there i thought it was interesting i've never before seen someone else write about an american ethnicity the same way i have thought about it i know that the southeast has the greatest number of people declaring their ethnicity as american but i think this ethnic label would apply to the majority of racially white americans and not just those in the southeast the americans outside of the south that descended from pre c immigrants from the uk ireland and germany seem to have substantially meshed together into a white ethnic group not just racially but ethnically as well the only cultural differences between ethnic whites of the north where c immigrants mostly settled and those of the south is that the south still experiences religion and social conservatism as very influential forces on daily life where for the more recent ethnic whites this is not the case e g in the north so the distinctive cultural aspects of the south have not been adopted by the ethnic whites of the north even with several centuries having passed i do not want to make false generalizations however this is my sense of the average situation in those regions based on my travels and time spent living here the areas where distinct ethnic identity has been conserved is in the major cities the city centred ethnic groups in the us have preserved a substantial part of their culture in absence of preserving their language for the most part a few well known examples would be the irish and italian americans of the northeast so long as their numbers are high enough to have a large enough community cultural traditions endure what i am getting at is that so long as a ukrainian american stays in a major city s he has no reason to be forced into completely adopting a new ethnicity s he won't have to abandon the culture of his her community if s he were to move to an area in the southeast then it would be a completely different story i'd like to give you a further illustration the poles of chicago most arrived somewhere between the s and s or so many have had families there for well over a century there has been very limited migration out of chicagoland for this period and the polish community there has remained extremely strong so there is not much past observation that would suggest that cities are only an entry point from which ethnic communities later break down as they go their own ways i've written all of this to demonstrate how the ethnic americans and people who ethnically not racially but ethnically identify as white are distinct ethnically from the more recent post european ethnic communities in the major cities i find it all very interesting the only problem that sometimes arises is when individuals do not make the distinction between an ameican us citizen and an ethnic american and in so doing sometimes end up labeling certain individuals as being un american these people that do not make the distinction show frustration when a person does not abandon his her culture and adopt their own this is of course on an individual by individual basis and i would not generalize this in any way to any region or sub region i've seen ethnic hostilities projected towards myself or family friends from people of all sorts of backgrounds i've seen it demonstrated by southerners new yorkers and even jews in south florida by the way most of the time my ethnicity and that of family friends would have been indeterminable by those people i'm saying this because i don't want to suggest that any particular regional group of americans is more racist discriminant than another region i've spent a lot of time in south florida and the racist attitudes that come from some of the people there have been really surprising at times especially when you take into account that many of those racists that i have come across would themselves been the target of racism less than years ago its all unfortunate and these types of racist discriminatory and nationalistic attitudes are probably present in most countries the good part about our differences is that ethnic americans and newer americans have no trouble in cooperating with one another when it comes to maximizing profit this is not the case in say many areas of the former yugoslavia or in the areas where ex yugoslavs have settled throughout the western world sorry for the lack of brevity your comment was interesting and i wanted to expand on it also i want you to know that none of the above is meant to be offensive towards any group or the us or the us as a whole usually when i do