I agree with you but I think it might be fairly common place in the US? Like people with an Italian relative 100 years ago who have Italian restaurants, speaking in an accent and calling their kids Italian names. I swear I watched one similar on Gordon Ramsey and they didn’t even know how to cook Italian food it was just an Italian ‘experience’ of kinds!
Americans really have a romantic view of Spain for some reason, like basically everyone is wearing red flamenco 24/7 and throwing roses around on top of bulls
Yes, exactly. Cristin Milioti is very funny and brought this to the point, she's of Italian descent (which is very obvious looking at her surname), but she says in interviews her family is "Olive Garden type Italian". I.e. Italian descent and some customs from "the old country", but really US American, they're basically deluding themselves by calling themselves "Italian".
I have nothing against people remembering that one French ancestor from 5 generations ago and saying they are of French descent, I kind of admire that US Americans remember their origin countries so well and the heritage they come from (which isn't the case really for most people, but for many), I'm a little envious of people who can trace back their ancestry very far.
But be realistic like Cristin Milioti.
Big LOL at your description of US Americans' view on Spain!!!
I think many view much of Europe like that (i.e. more romantic and very unrealistic, but I guess we all suffer from delusions like that when it's about foreign places!)
If Hilary had from the start said she's a massive lover of Spain and Spanish culture, no one would've batted an eyelid, like I wrote earlier, be a Francophile, learn the language, incorporate customs, call your son Jean and raise him bilingual, by any means, but when you want to sell yourself as French and adopt a weird French accent when speaking your mother tongue I think it's high time for a psych evaluation and some therapy.
I just don't understand all this business about, gosh, she's actually WHITE! What the hell does she think most people are in Spain?! The business about comparing her spraytanned arm to her child's is ludicrous.
Yes, Spain had an empire so a lot of Central and Southern America speaks Spanish but that doesn't make the Spanish non-white, any more than the British Empire makes the British primarily Asian or Black before immigration from that empire.
It's really just bloody frikkin weird and embarrassing as heck.
(It also highlights US Americans' view on race actually, a slight deviation from Mozzarella white and you're "not white", Europeans don't have such a concept of race at all. We just view everyone in Europe as "white" (i.e. Caucasian), even though some Europeans are very dark. What shocked me was when I read that Italians were classified back in the day as "black" and are only officially "white" since ca. the 1920s (I think!), when a political party realized that Italians would vote for them (and they'd win only with those votes) but couldn't due to the "black" classification, so had Italians recognized as "white". US race relations are weird AF from my Euro point of view
)
Did she really think all of this wouldn't catch up with her eventually??