this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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I am from the Midwest and one of my grandfather's spoke only German until he went to school like the rest of his town. So there is influence. However, like mentioned below most of this German heritage got removed and self-censored around WWI and WWII. So these German influences were removed, hidden and "assimilated" into more mainstream American culture. There are traces around here in surnames, our beer culture as well as our love of sausages but lots of loss into the more dominant American "white" culture.
You will see that lots of European cultural idiosyncrasy, cultures, food traditions etc. were dropped and conformed to be part of the dominant American white culture. There are some traces but a majority dropped their own culture to pick up conformality in the larger United States. Which is frankly sad. When talking about this is gets obvious that the definition of who is considered "white" and what cultures are included and excluded is not some static definition but depends on the times. You can see if from the various waves of discriminations against different newer groups for food, language, religion etc.
I think a lot of Millennials and younger are working on bring back these regional cultural identities based on what their grandparents held on to and / or hide. There are culture centers for European origins in my city there is a German, Swedish, Slovakian cultural centers as well as those of non-Europeans such as Hmong. I know I have been trying to get more in touch with my northern Germanic roots in a healthy non-problematic way.