What's My Line?

What's your ethnicity?
An easy enough question for many. For a great long time I answered this query with a fierce and proud, "Mostly Irish." Which turned out to be a thick slab of blareny. This was the story that my father had put together over the years, based on some anecdotal bits of history, and the fact that there is a County Cavan located in north Ireland. The story had the added attraction of how our name used to be Cavanaugh, but the powers that be at Ellis Island callously dropped the "augh" in their haste to make neat, five letter names that would fit in the blanks.
And so, for decades I approached each Saint Patrick's Day as a rite and adopted the swilling of beer dyed green as part of my heritage. My loving wife even went so far as to boil up corned beef and cabbage for the occasion.
Then, in preparation for my older brother's fiftieth birthday, my mother decided to trace our family tree. Which didn't lead back to County Cavan. It became clear that there was a lot of fuss around the time someone should have been keeping good records, but with all that pillaging and sacking of villages and such, there wasn't a nice, neat path to our ancestral home. Just to be sure, I discouraged my wife from making haggis.
I don't really know my ethnicity for certain beyond the plains of Kansas, which is where both of my parents' families chose to move just a little to the west and land up in Colorado. I know that "Kansan" doesn't qualify as an ethnicity, but I did recently learn that there was a tribe of Native Americans called the Kansa, People of the South Wind. That's not me.
So I'm wondering now, what Kellyanne Conway was expecting when she asked reporter Andrew Feinberg, "What's your ethnicity?" Was she hoping to have a freewheeling exchange about this great big melting pot of ours and how we should all be proud of our heritage as well as our adopted nation? Or maybe she was tapping into a different historical vein, in which one's ethnicity could be used to send them back or maybe just to work camps? Or put to death by the millions? It was pretty clear that she wasn't just shilling for ancestry.com. 
Meanwhile, down the street, Republican Representative Mike Kelly from Pennsylvania announced, “They talk about people of color. I’m a person of color. “I’m white. I’m an Anglo-Saxon. People say things all the time, but I don’t get offended.” Which made me think of that unfortunate box of Crayons from my youth that had a "flesh" colored hunk of wax in it. After 1962, flesh was peach and that was that.
My how we've evolved. At least when it comes to coloring.