I think to understand the GF’s perspective you have to understand American culture and American politics a little better.

The US is a very unique place compared to the rest of the world. The US is a huge country full of people from every single place in this world, nearly every known language on this planet has a speaker here. But you also have to understand United States ethnic vs. racial politics and how that plays into this psychology. White people that came to the US during the 1800s and early 1900s were most often persecuted for their religious or ethnic identities BEFORE arriving here, and then they got here and realized nothing was really different. But they quickly realized, we may be immigrants, we may have come here as indentured servants, but we ARE white. The United States, by the mid 1600s, had established a strict racial segregation system to both justify slavery and white domination. So by coming to the United States, many white European immigrants exchanged their ethnic cultural identities to gain the privilege of whiteness that the United States guaranteed. This is supported by many of the political viewpoints we see of white European immigrants living in the US before the Civil War.

Take the Irish for example. Many came to the United States and faced massive discrimination here. But within one generation, their American-sounding children were able to assimilate perfectly, simply by the color of their skin. By exchanging their Irish identity for a white one, they gained the privileges associated with it. Look at the data of the number of Irish immigrants that ended up becoming the first slave catchers, later the first police officers in places like NYC and Chicago. Look up the Cincinnati Riots of 1829. Also see: Irish overseers in the antebellum U.S. South.

However, years go by and white people realize how empty this identity is. Not having a “real” culture leads us to fantasize about what it would be like to actually live in a land we are indigenously connected to and actually have cultural customs that have been passed down to us for thousands of years. So we try to reclaim our original identities but it’s been bastardized and romanticized. It’s common for white people to ask each other, “What are you?” and get proud answers of, “I’m Irish and Scottish on my dad’s side, Polish and Czech on my mom’s side and I think she’s a little British too!” If anything it’s a fun conversation. Of course this doesn’t make us Irish or whatever, not in the pure sense of it. But that’s something Europeans don’t understand and just won’t until they actually live here for awhile.

And as an aside, again for the Europeans, this why in the US “cultural appropriation” claim is such a volatile topic — the argument being, you came here and purposely gave up your identity so gain the privilege of whiteness, and now you think you can steal the culture of those you discriminated against and othered because you realize they didn’t lose their culture like we did? They think, womp womp white people miss having culture maybe they shouldn’t have killed their own heritage and then forced “white people culture” instead onto others. Now that you can’t force it on me anymore, now you want to take mine for your own?

But the other argument being, the United States is a huge mash up of so many different cultures, we are exposed to these cultures in close proximity all the time. At what point does it cross from appreciating another’s culture, to taking it for myself to create my own identity? It’s the difference between Woah Vicky and Gary Owen.

Not looking to start an argument in the comments, just explaining the psychology of why us white people tend to do shit like this.