Would you say non-white people born & raised in England are English?

[rack909]

Just thought I should hear people’s perspective on this.

Some say it’s an ethnicity, some say it’s a nationality & others say it’s both of them.

I personally think it’s both a Nationality & ethnic group.

If someone says they are from England, they are denoting their nationality as English even if they don’t say it outright. It’s the same thing.

No

There is no English ethnicity. We've been invaded a million times. There's also no such thing as 100% white, if you go back far enough you'll have a non-white ancestor somewhere or other. Even in the same family you can have siblings who "pass" for white and others who are clearly not white. Are we going to have everyone stand up against a Dulux colour chart?

Even DNA testing tells you nothing. I did one and came back 100% Scottish with an unknown quantity of Barbadian (later found out I'm loosely related to Captain Morgan-as in the rum- so that tracks). I don't know my bio-father (sperm donor) but my Mum's side is Welsh, possibly with a bit of Jewish in there. And to look at me, you'd think I was a very pale Spaniard.

Here is the thing , white or non white has nothing to do with citizenship, but more with heritage. I’m white immigrated here at 18 more than 25 years ago and my children where all born here in the U.K. , while they consider themselves British or Scottish in our case , they have another European heritage and I’m sure to many they are not British . It has nothing to do with skin colour by the way , white immigrant folk have the same issues .

That’s not even legally true . My oldest was born in England and not English , that not how citizenship works

Depends on how they feel. My DD is mixed European (me) and Asian, born and raised in the UK. She doesn't identify herself as British, she calls herself my nationality. It's probably because she doesn't like the UK, the culture and is planning to move out of it when she's 18, same as me.

I'm naturalised British, but no, I don't consider myself British, and never will. So I'm fine with other people thinking of me as non-British. I'm not, and don't want to be. The citizenship was a convenience thing, nothing else.

I'm still bitter I'm forced to live here, due to my unfortunate choices when I was younger. I hate it here with every fibre of my being, and as soon as DD is 18, I'll move out of this dump of a country forever.

The second is “identification” do you ALSO identify with, understand and practice English, norms, customs and traditions. These are the things that have gone on for centuries, and:or been accepted as the standard and give the English an identity.

OK, so we've just ruled out a huge chunk of the autistic population who don't pick up on cultural/social norms and reject illogical rules.

My great grandfather was born in Ireland. Wexford to be exact. This comes back on my Mum's DNA. Including to the point that it picks up Wexford. Indeed she comes back as 50% Irish. She was born in England as was her mother. My Mum technically may qualify for an Irish passport I believe.

However she also comes back with bits of Dutch DNA and Danish DNA Does this mean she's Irish or Dutch as opposed to English? Indeed when we talk about Danish DNA this can actually refer to someone who can trace their ancestry back many many generations in England to a particular area of the country - we are talking hundreds and hundreds of years. And this is distinctly different to other places within England. It doesn't actually say they are remotely Danish - they just share a particular DNA marker that's distinctive.

It's nonsense to suggest she Irish or Danish or Dutch.

She is of Irish ancestry. This doesn't mean she's culturally Irish. It doesn't mean she's ethnically Irish either because she a mix or ethnicities.

But we don't talk about this because we can't see it. She's white.

Equally there will be lots of people who don't have white skin who are of various ancestry - and many will have a mix from a number of regions which we'd lump together into a singular nationality which doesn't understand the ancestry of people from that area of the world. We have this notion based on rather ignorant ideas of ethnicity and culture.

If we go back to my original comparison with Americans who had an ancestors on the Mayflower and can claim some English Ancestry - this doesn't mean they are remotely English. They are distinguishable as having ancestry from a particular place - but they are also identifiable as distinctly different in DNA from someone English - their DNA profile might identify which part of England they had ancestors from but it would also pick up that they settled in a particular part of the US and are uniquely different to people who still live in England.

Likewise it isn't going to be long before distinctive DNA profiles appear in people born in England who are of Caribbean or Pakistani ancestry for example. They won't look like a DNA profile from someone from Pakistan - even if they have remained within within a British Pakistani community genetically. They will be unique to England/Britain. (Yes your head should be starting to hurt at this point)

This is typical and has been going on for as long as we can distinguish in DNA - the genetic isopoint is about a thousand years. For England this happens to fall at the same point as the Norman invasion. This will slowly shift later and later with each new generation. In a thousand years someone who is a 2nd generation now (so born in the UK) will appear as 'English'. If we had done DNA tests on people in England in 1066 we'd see some very different things to what we see now. And yet, we recognise the descendants of the Normans as 'English' and we the descendants of the Vikings as 'English' and profiles of those who could trace their ancestors a thousand years back in England would look very distinctively different.

The idea that we are somehow genetically or culturally threatened in a way that is a crisis is one for fuckwits who don't have the first fucking clue about changing migration patterns, ever changing DNA and ever changing mixing of people's from around the world.

Of course

This is common for next generations too.

British people, whose parents/grandparents are from elsewhere, visit or move to the place their family were from (e.g. Ireland, Spain, Jamaica, Bangladesh, Ghana) and are treated as British/European ‘foreigners’.

Because they are British. And were European (pre-Brexit).

On that basis, there's no such thing as ethnicity full stop according to your theories of invasion! The whole world has bee subject to migration, no nation just spontaeously arose from nowhere!

I think they’re English. I’m Irish (NI) and see people of Irish heritage born in England described as English all the time. Kathy Burke. Steve Coogan. John Lydon. Jimmy Carr. To name but a few.

In saying that, the child of Irish immigrants might get short shrift from their parents if they referred to themselves as English🤣 It’s complicated. And for good historical reasons.

All ethnicity is a social construct. It's subjective and not scientific - it is mostly about perception and identity.

There are ethnic groups which have existed in their current state for millennia with very few outsiders "joining". Huge swathes of the world are quite remote and are not really visited or settled by other people. The UK has never been like that, we've constantly been connected with other parts of the world and people have come and gone.

This doesn't follow.

1. Ethnicity is far more than genes, though that's some part of it. It is a group with some recognised shared ancestry, cultural history, usually a common language, usually an ancestral territory.
2. If you require "100%" anything in order to recognise an ethnicity, then you will find that huge swathes of humanity have no ethnicity. Maybe that's your position, but it seems an odd one. Better to just recognise it's a coherent concept with messy edges.
3. The fact that the English haven't always existed as an ethnicity is no argument at all against the idea that it exists now. Plenty of things are evolved from other things, and yet exist.

I’m not sure…?

Dh and I are both English, whole family is English, but Dd was born in a country in Southern European country and we live there. I don’t consider her the nationality of the country we live in, I consider her English? Is she not?

Why are you asking? It's not even a question these days unless someone is trying to stir things up...

Last time we were invaded to any meaningful level was 1000 years ago. Of course there’s English ethnicity. In the SW you can tell the very long term residents a mile off! The Celtic genes are still
strong here

So you don’t think people should have any connection to their ethnicity or heritage, or culture?

I don't know much about DNA tests but I am curious.

How do you tell French, German or Scandi DNA apart from each other, or English/Welsh/Scottish?

If English isn't an ethnicity, then how can a DNA test tell it apart from being any other european?

My friend is Danish. Married to a English man. Had two kids here. She gets highly offended if you say her kids are English. So on that basis I think it's up to them. My friend does say that things that makes be belive she does not love the UK at all therefore horrified at the thought of being British. So maybe she is a bad example.

My Indian friends see themselves as British and would think it a weird thing to bring up. Buy they are also very strongly Indian too. But it's too separate things. They are English of Indians decent with a rich active culture and religion. If you know what I mean? As English as everyone else plus extra in being Indian heritage. They are not separate, just more as well? Like everyone really. Complex and dimensional and being British isn't full enough explanation. They are like any other British person plus deep roots in their parents culture in daily life.

Anyway, what does English look like today? We are Irish decent. But that culture didn't filter down from parents who lived in Ireland. Only when they meet up

The UK has not experienced any more immigration and invasion then most other parts of the world.

We were never historically a "nation of immigrants". That's an Americanism that we've imported to our culture because people are nervous about English nationalism.

@RedToothBrush it’s so fascinating. I love anthropology.

For anyone who’s never watched it, Dr Alice Robert’s’ ‘The Incredible Human Journey’ (2009) is really interesting.

You can watch it on YouTube. Five episodes covering each continent. She’s a paleo-pathologist but she draws on many other scientists and the DNA stuff is mind-blowing.

All school kids should watch it.

Science has moved on a lot since then. So a second series would be amazing.

In my head i would have thought so - but apparently I insulted my my next door neighbours by calling her British, she has Italian parents and considers herself Italian despite being born and raised here - so now I make no assumptions.

Celts rarely consider themselves "English". I certainly don't.

How far back are we going? I would say I’m white british
my great great grandparent was black
my DNA says I’m 20% Irish, 6% west African (mostly Benin & Togo) and the rest England and wales