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, I was born in England and I’m English.

I’m not Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish. The cultures are distinct although we do have significant overlaps.

I love visiting the rest of the UK but it’s not home in the way England is. They’d probably say the same!

A Northern Irish person can choose to take Irish citizenship.
Many Scottish and Welsh people identify as Scottish and Welsh only although we cannot express that with the passport (yet!).

OK, I'm fairly certain, but we're going back to pre-WW2 (maybe even WW1) when mixed marriages and Jewish people in general weren't exactly popular so as far as I know it was never confirmed. In any case, whatever religion she was at birth, she converted to Methodist on marriage. We're going off a Jewish maiden name, a woman who "looked" Jewish, and some genetic conditions particularly prevalent in the Ashkenazi Jewish community (and very rare outside of it). I believe my Mum traced a branch of cousins who are living in Israel and still practising Jews. I don't "know" because the woman in question was long dead before my birth and by all accounts never talked about her childhood and had no contact with any of her family. We think she was born somewhere overseas.

The point is that the DNA test didn't pick up on it, and that Ashkenazi Jews are an ethnic group not just a religion.

Even if you are offending the person (in this case another pp) you happen to be saying it to?

Why is it offensive? Plus OP asked for opinions.

So you were not brought up in Germany nor had citizenship. So this scenario is not the same as you

I was brought up there until I was 5. How many years does it have to be before you assume that nationality?

My children were born in China and we lived there for a time as a family. I knew other expat families whose teens spoke perfect Chinese, they sounded like Beijingers.

They will never, ever, ever be considered Chinese nor would they ever be given citizenship unless they did something pretty amazing (I recall an American woman got it for some deeds she did during the Communist Revolution lol). Some Chinese-Americans could get it based on blood, but even that process is far from straightforward.

The British government has apparently decided that the English ethnicity is worthless and will throw away a millennium of history chasing some sort of utopian mirage. It would be funny if it wasn’t so stupid.

The land doesn’t make a people. The people themselves do. Change the people and the land becomes totally different.

I feel the island of Hispaniola is very interesting here. Two very different groups of people occupy that same island, and as a result, the group outcomes are very very different. You can see the border very starkly: the Dominican side is covered in dense forest, while the Haitian side has been completely deforested.

Incidentally, the Dominican Republic is one of the few New World countries that doesn’t allow birthright citizenship, not hard to guess why.