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Comment by rwcarlsen | Hacker News Reader

Yeah - And I should invest specifically in Mexico because my grandma happened to be born there. African Americans - are Americans. They often have their own American subcultures, but the U.S.A is their home. Sure they have history connecting them to somewhere. But they can invest wherever the heck they want. No need to limit our generosity to our many generations removed ancestral roots.

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Black Americans typically have deeper roots in the United States than white Americans: https://news.gallup.com/poll/4621/majority-americans-identif...

> Black Americans are more likely than either whites or Hispanics to be the third generation Americans. Seventy-five percent of black Americans indicate they are at least the third generation born in the United States, compared to 58% of whites and 13% of Hispanics.

Those numbers are very hard to believe. I bet most if not 100% Hispanics have American ancestry going back before pre-Colombian times while literally 0% of White and Black have such roots.

The meaning of "American ancestry" used above is "United States ancestry", not "North-or-South-American continent ancestry". Hispanic Americans certainly have plenty of deep American ancestry in the latter sense, but for relatively few of them this American ancestry is from United States.

Black Americans whose families go back far enough have substantial Native American ancestry, actually, having been treated similarly as an underclass during the early years of English/Dutch colonization of North America. It's harder to find connections because of anti-miscegenation and one-drop rule laws and customs, and the relative nascence of reliable genetic testing (which themselves may be misleading due to their reliance on statistical proximity to controls).

Irish Potato Famine, cause of mass migration to North America, happened in 1846, i. e. near the end of slavery. The Italian wave of immigration came even later IIRC.

(And "Hispanic" literally means "from Spain". Very few Spaniards crossed The Atlantic before Columbus.)

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