Question

Why do we call ourselves "Asian-Americans" or "African-Americans", but I've never heard a single person described as a "European-American"?

"Irish-American," "British-American," and "German-American" all sound far more stilted than "Chinese-American" or "Korean-American," not even touching on the Black/"African-American" vs. African (Ghanaian/Ethiopian/Somalian/Nigerian/etc.) divide. (Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, and Italian-Americans get something of a pass on this one; largely because, for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, they were also generally part of an oppressed, immigrant, working lower class)

This is largely a rhetorical question: I do understand the historical context for this distinction in usage (Caucasian Western Europeans showed up first! [well, no, they didn't]); but I would at least suggest, in the modern milieu of cultures and ethnicities that Today's America supposedly has become, that we begin to more finely distinguish between cultural heritages, and thereby both begin to assault the fallacy of a monolithic American Culture, as well as beginning to affirm the actual myriad of influences behind the widely divergent American Cultures that do exist.

This is your Fourth of July/American Independence Day blog, brought to you (a) late and (b) not from America. Feel free to leave comment or critique, but note that I've had Maino's Hi Hater on blast all day.