Forensic anthropologists can distinguish a Korean or Nigerian from a German based on skeletal remains, but not e.g. a German from a French.sarahgoodson wrote:Also, forensic anthropologists can classify a person's race with an accuracy close to 100% using only skeletal remains if they take into consideration several characteristics at the same time. If race did not exist biologically then this would not be the case.
So what you wrote is statistically true, but only to a certain extent.
Actually, "American" (not to be confused with Native American or Amerindian) was declared by 13,298,761 people in 1980 census, 12,395,999 in 1990 census, 20,188,305 people in 2000, and so on. And they declared American as their one and only ethnicity/ancestry.sarahgoodson wrote:There is no such thing as an American ethnicity which is based on ancestry (unlike German American or Irish American)
This means that in 1980 ethnic Americans were less than 6% of the U.S. population, and in 2000 they were already over 7%.
So people actually DO self-identify as "ethnic Americans", even though they are currently less than 1/10 of U.S. population.
As for Irish-Americans and German-Americans - the majority of them are now ethnically mixed, and were already in 1980.
For example in the U.S. census of 1980 in total 40,165,702 Americans self-identified as Irish, but only 10,337,353 of them (or 26%) reported Irish Alone, while 29,828,349 reported two or more ethnicities/ancestries, with Irish among them. So they were not purely Irish. The same refers to German-Americans, who numbered 49,224,146 in 1980, but just 17,943,485 (36%) declared German to be their only heritage.
English ancestry was reported by 49,598,035 Americans but just 23,748,772 (49%) self-identified as unmixed English Alone.
Scottish ancestry was declared by 10,048,816 Americans but only 1,172,904 (12%) self-identified as unmixed Scottish Alone.
And such ethnic mixing did not start in America, but was taking place already before their ancestors emigrated from Europe. Most of Americans actually think that the melting pot has started only once they got to the New World, which is both naive and false to believe.