I’ve noticed that Asian-Americans have an odd approach to Asians from Asia. Of course it depends on how much of their mother culture they keep from their parents, but the Americanized ones tend to at least feel a difference and don’t often bridge it much. To be fair, it happens in the opposite direction too. 

This is because the Asian Americans are recognized as no longer quite being Asian, both by themselves and by the Asians from Asia. The fact that there’s still a lot of immigration from Asia means that this can still be an area of challenge. 

Some Asian-Americans go out of their way to set that distance. Calling Asians “FOBs” and so on. Sometimes it’s sheer “Well, they’re not American enough and therefore not cool enough” but sometimes they just don’t understand them anymore. 

Is this the same with African-Americans and their distant cousins in Europe and Africa? One huge noticeable difference between Africans living in Europe and those in America is that the European Africans tend to stay much more… African. I suspect that this is because there has been much more recent immigration from Africa to Europe than there has to America, which has kept its own large population from the slavery days, which has taken those 300-400 years to develop its own African-American culture. It has its roots in Africa (some of which has carried on), but it’s also very different in a lot of ways. 

Nevertheless, one thing they’re told a lot about in racial pride, it seems, is solidarity in their mutual race. This makes sense to me in the American context, but is it transcribed on the rest of the world too? Do African-Americans say “Our poor Ethiopian brothers?” 

Asian-Americans, most of the ones I’ve met, don’t mix well with Asians from Asia, especially if they’ve been well Americanized. Is it the same with African-Americans?