Is it possible to be 100% one ethnicity?

Question

My friend says she is 100% Irish, but I'm not sure. Is it really possible for ANYONE to have just one ethnicity? Like not even 3% something else?

But don't most people from Mexico come from Native American and Spanish backgrounds?

Answer 1

your friend is full of bs. there is no way in today's world that you can be 100 percent anything. but you can be a majority of something. like 90 percent irish

Answer 2

The whole human race mostly are mutts.

Some Irish have wisecracked that the Irish are 80% proof.

The Celts like other members of the human race were tribal nomads at one time. A tradition that the Celts of Ireland and Scotland wound up in Spain, then spent 100 years in Egypt before going direct north to Ireland. There were a people already in Ireland at the time. Ireland was called Scotia at one time. Then some of the Scotti left Ireland went to Caledonia now called Scotland where they intermarried with still another type of people.

The Vikings later came and they built cities like Dublin.

Then the Norman who had invaded and established control over England invaded Ireland. The Normans had Anglicized French names. (French was the court language in England for a few centuries.) They were forbidden to speak the Irish language and to adopt Irish customs but most ignored it. The old saying goes they became more Irish than the Irish themselves. They intermarried and assimilated with the native Irish.

Then in the time of Elizabeth I, Scots were planted in the north of Ireland and therefore 6 of the 9 Ulster counties are part of Northern Ireland. The other 3 are part of the Republic of Ireland. Due to religious differences the Scottish planters and the native Irish did not assimilate like the earlier invasion by the Anglo Normans.

Answer 3

This is a tricky question. There really aren't many ethnically pure people on the planet. The Icelanders may be the purest ethnic group on Earth. If you were Icelandic, you might be able to say you are 100% pure, but if you went back to medieval Denmark, you may yet find that you have some Frankish blood from the 8th Century. This is true of any of us. No matter how pure we think we may be there is a generation where some other lineage was introduced into our genealogy.

In order to be 100% Irish, I'd say she would have to be able to trace her Irish line back to the generation of the Viking invasions. At that point, many in Ireland may have intermixed with the Norse people. But if her heritage following that was otherwise pure, I'd say she is relatively pure Irish.

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Answer 4

Americans have some bizarre notions about the nature and 'purity' of European so called races. Do you have maps of Europe with little images of national stereotypes all locked into their national borders? It's not like that here! For starters, some of the stereotypes are terribly inaccurate or even completely untrue. I've read on here that Europeans are carved up into Germanics, Celts, Slavs, etc. It's all nonsense. The truth is that if any races have ever existed in Europe, they've all been mixed up way back in prehistory. Then there was the Roman Empire, that stretched several centuries, facilitating the movement of peoples all around the Empire. Sure, there are 'trends' - more pale skinned blondes in the North and more darker skinned in the south. Slight traits concentrate in areas, but not exclusively. They certainly do not restrict to 'National' borders. As for 'racial purity' and disease immunity - we pretty much discarded that completely nonsense after we had to destroy a guy called Adolf Hitler. Where on Earth did you get the idea that having less variation ion genes somehow gives you better immunity or health? That sounds like it's come straight out of a Nazi fantasy.

Answer 5

This may be inaccurate or under-reasoned in some way, but here goes...

Theoretically, if someone could trace their lineage all the way back to the first people, and those first people were the same ethnicity as oneself, then one could conclude that one was 100% that ethnicity.

However, there's problems with that...

For example, your friend claiming to be 100% Irish would then have to prove that the first people were Irish. No evidence that I know of supports this claim. Actually, the first Irish people were likely descended from Africa.

Then you run into problems around the definition of ethnicity. How far back must one go when determining one's ethnicity? I think you must go back to the beginning, but that's probably open to debate.

So to sum up an answer, it is very unlikely that your friend is 100% Irish, since the first people were not, to my knowledge, Irish. But if that assumption is challenged, there goes my argument.

Anyhow, I'd like to see the family tree that goes back even a few hundred years, not to mention thousands...

Also, I wonder about her definition of ethnicity. Does she really mean 'nationality' or 'race' or 'culture'? It gets confusing, since people use these terms interchangeably, even though they define different things, some of which are arbitrary.

May God bless you.

Answer 6

Hardly possible.
It would only be possible if she could trace her family back to Adam and Eve which the Bible states as fact.
Even iy you were to have 1,000.000,000 % of another nationality, you are not a 100% anything.
Tell your friend to be satisfied with what she is
According to the Bible, humans were all one race up till the building of the tower of Babel. If you believe the Bible as a true word of God, you know this to be true.
However, in the past few thousand years, races of humans have mixed so that we have the Races that we have today...such as German, French, Italian, Irish &etc. So, based on this fact, it is impossible to claim 100% anything.
The only thing we can say for certain is that we are 100% human.
Even with this fact, there some people that I have doubts about..

Answer 7

Possible, but not likely. I look a pure white man, I mean blue eyes, blond hair, white skin, can't dance,(lol). I do however have some Native American in my family. So unless I told you or anyone they would never know the difference. I would say there are some people who are full blooded Europeans, and some people that are full blooded Africans, and so on. It is just a smaller amount and is getting smaller with each generation. If by ethnicity you mean Caucasian, African, Asian, then yes. If you are saying that all of her ancestors were Irish and she has no English or French blood in her, then no, that is not possible. I mean Mexicans are a mixed race they are mixed with Spanish and the native peoples of that land when the explorers came over. Most of your Asian ethnicity's are a mixture of Japanese and Chinese. So yes you can be of one race, but not of one nationality, that is not possible.

Answer 8

I would find it very hard to believe anybody is 100% something. I learned from doing my genealogy that I am not just Native American and English. I have so much mixed in me that I can't really be classified as anything but a mutt. I have Native American, but not enough for most to consider me as Native American. I have Irish, but again, not enough to be Irish. I have Egyptian in me, but not enough. Italian, but not enough. French, but not enough. And it goes on for so many other countries that my ancestors were from, that mixed together to create me, but I am not enough of any one thing to be classified by that nationality / race / culture. I tend to think, that for Americans anyway, that is probably true for most, but they don't realize that if they have not done their genealogy.

Answer 9

It depends.

I'm 100% Californian, for instance, since my mother and father were both born here. If we go back a bit I'm also part Scot, Irish, English, Huguenot, German Swiss, Dutch, Gaul, Frank, Anglo, Saxon, Norman, Viking, Roman, Celt, Pict . . .

The company that did my DNA test sent me a neat little map. It seems we humans came out of Africa and headed north, 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, undoubtedly tired, hungry and yearning to be free; that, or to find hunting grounds where the local 800-pound felines didn't know how good humans tasted, and how dull their claws were.

Most people in Iceland can trace back to the early middle ages, when a bunch of Vikings went there and vowed to defend their homes to the death against anyone else who wanted to row across 1200 miles of cold, stormy ocean to conquer a small piece of stony soil with only 2 hours of daylight in the winter.

Those Icelanders are pretty pure, either because their forefathers had a fearsome reputation, or no one else was foolish enough to go there; sort of like a man vowing to defend his sister's honor against all comers, when she weighs 480 pounds, eats garlic to keep off the vampires and watches TV 18 hours a day. Who'd bother to assault that citadel of chastity?

(Some Italians are blond because their Viking ancestors said "The heck with it - let's go find a place that's WARM").

Some Australians coupled with aborigines. The descendants of the rest can go back 20,000 - 30,000 years or so to those people who came out of Africa and turned right at the Caucasus Mountains instead of left.

There ARE groups in the world who can trace their ancestry back a long way, with just one ethnic group in it. How far and how pure depends on how you define ethnic group. In the end, we're all human.

Answer 10

It isn't likely of the Irish. I may be in less developed countries where tribal cultures are the rule. However, I am of strong Irish ancestry as well. It's a mixtures of Irish German ancestry on my mother's side and French, Irish, Scottish ancestry on my father's side.

Answer 11

I depends on how you look at it. Very few countries if any don't have an influence from any other country (genealogically speaking) But if you can trace your family back in one country why not call yourself that ethnicity. I call myself 100% American.