Most white Americans have mostly English ancestry. But they don't think of "English" as an ancestry. Instead, they think their 1/4 Irish and 1/12 German is their "ancestry" and the rest that is English is just...nothing. Just like people believe that they don't have accents, only other people do, only things more exotic than English counts as ancestry.
I'm mostly English on my white side. When I tell people that, they're like, "But aren't you also Irish? Or German?" Actually, I am Welsh and Irish about equally, but that's mostly Scotch-Irish (the old term from before the Scottish decided that you can only call them Scottish for Scottish Presbyterians who fled to Ulster and from there to England) and I'm almost as much Huguenot as that, and my tiny bit of German is actually Swedish-German.... But since I'm at least half English on my white side, and most of my family has been here now for 350-400 years, these proportions are a bit silly.
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Most white Americans have mostly English ancestry. But they don't think of "English" as an ancestry. Instead, they think their 1/4 Irish and 1/12 German is their "ancestry" and the rest that is English is just...nothing. Just like people believe that they don't have accents, only other people do, only things more exotic than English counts as ancestry.
I'm mostly English on my white side. When I tell people that, they're like, "But aren't you also Irish? Or German?" Actually, I am Welsh and Irish about equally, but that's mostly Scotch-Irish (the old term from before the Scottish decided that you can only call them Scottish for Scottish Presbyterians who fled to Ulster and from there to England) and I'm almost as much Huguenot as that, and my tiny bit of German is actually Swedish-German.... But since I'm at least half English on my white side, and most of my family has been here now for 350-400 years, these proportions are a bit silly.