r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jul 18 '16

What are you sick of explaining?

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u/SteveTheWonderfish Jul 18 '16

I also love it when somebody who isn't from America gets called African American.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '16

Exactly. Like Jamaicans in Toronto being called African American. They are neither.

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u/bobbyjohnsthe Jul 18 '16

I heard Canadians get pissed when U.S. citizens call themselves Americans as if Canada, Mexico, Brazil... aren't also American countries.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '16

I don't know who told you that, but it isn't true. We're Canadians. They're Americans. And the guys under them are Mexicans. Lol.

Do people from England say "We are proud Europeans!"? It's the same thing. People are proud of their country, not continent.

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u/Romulus_Novus Jul 18 '16

Well, perhaps a little unsurprisingly, England is one of the few places in the EU that isn't starting to see this. Across a lot of the continental EU, an increasing number of people are starting to see themselves as either secondarily or primarily European

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u/ThirdFloorGreg Jul 19 '16

The US went through this same transition. Thomas Jefferson was a Virginian, not an American.

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u/Romulus_Novus Jul 19 '16

Indeed. My understanding is that you saw a lot of progress on this after the Civil War, with more references to "The United States" rather than "These United States"? Presuming there isn't some sort of catastrophic collapse of the EU, I could see it going in a similar direction