I kind of agree and disagree here, anthropology it's not the easiest argument.
The first immigrants are usually the ethnicity of where they came, like the first wave of italian in american were sicilians, neapolitans etc...; but their children will grow in an american context with american people, the italian-american ethnicity it's an american sub-group and it's very disconnected to the italians ethnicity; west africans immigrant's descendents if they remain in the Usa will became an american ethnicity. If I remember correctly they call themself "black american" and not "afro-american" and there is some tension between the two groups (but this is another -interesting- story
We don't really use hyphen (italian-american in italian is italoamericano) and we usually merge words to indicate the italian ancestry (ex: an argentinian with italian ancestry is a italian-argentinian / italoargentino) while to indicate italians with foreign ancestry we usually don't say or if it's important to the discussion we say directly the ancestry (ex: Balotelli is italian, but if we're talking about immigration we could call him italian with african parents/african ancestry). Italy it's the original melting pot of the western world, even since the roman republic the ancestry of someone did mean very little
Here you can identify an immigrant or a local just by accent, the italian dialects are pretty wild and hard to replicate even by other italians; it would take many years to have a "natural" accent of a place if you're not local; Balotelli for exemple has a very heavy bergamasco accent. Now that I think about it, I believe that in Italy the dialect and accent of a person is the strongest cultural indicator.
That said, to anyone that wants to argue about ethnicity you can do it against the literal definition:
a social group that shares a common and distinctive culture, religion, language, or the like
Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words
The world's leading online dictionary: English definitions, synonyms, word origins, example sentences, word games, and more. A trusted authority for 25+ years!www.dictionary.com
The main thing I guess I was trying to express is that ethnicity is semi-arbitrary and often the "official version" for any country is laid out by the largest most powerful group (usually indigenous to the place, but not always) and really is just about making slices of "otheredness" that work for them.
I mean, in the part of the USA where I live the west African and Caribbean black citizens tend to live near each other because they're both "not black American accented while being black". My former campaign manager for state legislature for example was Haitian and most of her neighbors were from west Africa, excepting a few Asian-American neighbors who just lived there cause it was really close to the hospital they worked at.
I'm not really arguing about ethnicity so much as laying out how it works in practice. Yes, of course people can self-identify. But, society assigns you an "ethnicity" which works for their basic assumptions. For example I'm "White, perhaps with a French ancestor" since my last name is Reynard. But, I have no known French ancestry and best bet is that the name skipped the channel in 1066 with William the Conqueror. Also, despite being entirely white-passing, I'm roughly 25% Ojibwe and even know what tribe and location. I don't identify native mainly because I've had limited cultural exposure. But, I could be just as arbitrarily considered "a natve mischling" or some other such thing in an American which embraces racial politics highly from the right.
If you pressed me for my ethnicity I'd say America barely has such things because if its ethnicity like "where did your ancestors come from?" the list is often too long.....and if its not, American doesn't sound much like an ethnicity in America.
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