With that in mind, tying cultural heritage to "where did my close ancestors come from" seems like a more sensible approach than genetic percentages, since that actually connects to a social context.

Having said that, cherry picking one out of thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents over the thirty-one others sounds pretty absurd. But I'm not from North America so I probably miss some social context to understand the logic behind that.

It's a combinational effect of many minor causes stacking upon one another. People wanting to feel special. The feeling modern society is destroying the world and the sense Native American culture is the opposite of that. The mild but persistent impression that white heritage isn't something to celebrate or positively self-identify with.

But I do celebrate my Finnish heritage, as well as my Irish and English ancestry.

White supremacy as the label being used by "progressives" has nothing to do with the ideology other than in sharing a name. The label is just one of the many applied to those who dare to divert from the narrative, often used in situations where the "progressive" has talked herself into a corner from where there is no getting out other than by creating a path of labels to escape on.

I think it is better to only use the term "white supremacy" when describing the former. Don't use it as a label for something you find distasteful, only use it as a term for a specific ideology. The same goes for words like "fascism", "racism", all the "-phobias" and more. Take back the language from those [1] who have used it to drive their own narrative.

[1] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-derridean/

Heritage is actually a very common word used in modern klan and klan adjacent groups as they are very concerned with the racial purity of their lineage as well as the fact that they yearn for "the good 'ol days" of the antebellum south.

For hundreds of years, the idea of "whiteness" in America was used primarily to identify a group that for the most part had nothing exclusively in common except as that of oppressors.

Precisely. The breadth of Native American genetic and cultural diversity was every bit as large as that of Europeans, and compressing it into a single category has the same problems as compressing all the cultures constituting "white" into a single category. If your connection to your tiny fraction of native ancestry is so insubstantial you can't be more specific than "someone from north or south america", you're unfortunately just not a member of that culture.

Many white Americans are unsatisfied with not having a specific ancestral identity and hence play these games with distant ancestors.

The complaint two comments up about the "mild but persistent impression that white heritage isn't something to celebrate or positively self-identify with" is an even stronger one.

EDIT: downvote all you want, it doesn't take away the contradiction of insisting on hanging on to an identity of "whiteness" while denying the history behind it.

In the modern day, it has lost much of its explicitly racist connotations (except, obviously, when explicitly used in the original context by racists,) but just tends to mean "a person who looks white (until proven otherwise)" or "of European descent," the former of which isn't really related to culture, and the latter being so vague as to be useless as a cultural referent.

Isn't black exactly the same thing? A completely madeup racial category invented by white slavers to conveniently deny a group their humanity? And isn't it further possible that, after these racial groups were invented, actually real cultural identities began forming around them to the point where the invented categories had reified into something kinda real?

The "kinda" in that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's a "real" social construct. It's not "real" in the sense of representing "real" human nature, or a "real" order of how things ought to be, which is how that social construct is wielded in practice.

Thinking differently -

5 generations is also (assuming childbirth at 25 and not carefully auditing for off-by-ones):

1 generation of 1:1 mix, 4 generations ago (b. 1897)

1 generation of 1:2 mix, 3 generations ago (b. 1922)

1 generation of 1:3 mix, 2 generations ago (b. 1947)

1 generation of 1:4 mix, 1 generations ago (b. 1972)

1 generation of 1:5 mix, now. (b. 1997)

In other words - 50% of your parenting influence descends from 4 generations of mixed marriages, and the entire mixed lineage begins approx ~100 years ago where it certainly would be a huge factor in daily life. It's quite possible that you may have even met the original couple or their immediate children, and very likely that you met or had extended contact with the 25% generation who in turn almost certainly was extremely impacted by the preceding 2 generations.

Pretty sure there is some cultural trace either overtly or in the form of inherited scars.

The reason many mixed don't know much about their fraction is because their ancestors were put in indian schools and married off to anglo settlers or any number of other far worse 'ethnic cleansing' atrocities. Whatever in-depth discussion remained was likely suppressed or downplayed to facilitate assimilation, leaving only hints and impressions behind in the people. At this point there is no way for them to know anything more about their past even if they wanted to.

pretending it's nothing only makes it worse and grows the divide to the past - which itself is a shift away from native views of history and connectedness to ancestors

Of course Native American isn’t a single ethnicity either, but you might be able to trace that back to say Inuit and actually have a specific culture to identify with. Where being say 1/16th black tells you little to nothing about the culture of that part of your ancestry.

That said, I don't like when people ask me where I grew up because I immediately feel judged for something I had no say in.