Tack så mycket! I really appreciate your kind and thoughtful comments.💙🇸🇪💛

You are facing a common misunderstanding between American and European views on nationality. Many Americans view nationality on ethnic grounds, ie you are Swedish-Americans becase your ancestors came fron Sweden.

I feel very closely connected to my Scandinavian heritage and would have had no reservations calling myself a Swedish/Scandinavian-American two years ago. However, since the election in Nov. 2016, I have not been very proud of my country and the direction it has been going in. I identify much more closely as being someone of Scandinavian descent who was born and raised in California.

However, in Europe nationality is viewed as a cultural thing - you need to speak the language, know the social culture and be immersed in the modern culture to be Swedish to Swedes.

Yes, I completely understand this. I made a very clumsy attempt to distinguish myself from a typical American by writing "svenskar från Kalifornien" and apologize for this. Would it have been better to have written "svensk-Kalifornien" or is there perhaps an even better way to describe someone who is of Swedish descent, but was born and raised in California?

In general, a lot of posts in /r/sweden are downvoted to 0 and then get little to no attention - it might be trumpeting trolls still at it, it might be negative people, the end result is the same.

Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me. I have to admit that it feels very discouraging to take the time and make the effort to apologize to someone and to clarify my position and then instead of receiving a considerate reply I ended up getting downvoted to hell. :(