About being "proud of your roots"

[CleansingSurfaceWipe]

I was just idly reading about Dermot O'Leary being "extremely proud of his Irish roots" (his parents are from Ireland, I believe, though he grew up in England). It suddenly struck me how weird I think that whole concept is.
Is it not just as absurd as someone being "ashamed"of their "roots"? How can they be a cause for either pride or shame?

Cleansing - my German friend (who is 30) feels a lot of shame about the fact that her grandparents were Nazis. She gets drunk and cries and apologises for it.

Do you feel that this is a good thing?

YY to the Remembrance Day thing. And it makes a good point for this thread. Toomuchrain - do you wear a poppy?

Cleansing - I think it's good that the younger generation of Germans are aware of their grandparent's actions and hold onto the idea of how badly things can go wrong when power is in the wrong hands. I feel for her that she has such a strong reaction to it. I don't think it's necessarily a good or a bad thing - it is what it is.

Doesn't pretty much everyone have ancestors who supported or perpetrated atrocities? My ancestors supported oppession, benefited from colonialism, participated from some of it and were also part of oppressed and colonised groups.

I don't feel the need to carry a permanent burden of personal shame. I do feel the need to recognise that my heritage puts me at an unfair advantage in some situations and to do my best to acknowledge and challenge that.

To clarify my previous post - I think we should all remember the past and try to learn from it. The past she is remembering relates to people she loves so it's understandable that she has an emotional reaction to it. She doesn't like the fact that her family did such horrible things. I think that's normal and it's not for anyone else to dictate how she should feel about it.

Cailin, why should this apply any more to your German friend than to any of us, though? Surely every one of us - whatever our grandparents did or didn't do - needs to understand how badly such power can corrupt? Why is it right that your friend has to cry for others' past deeds while her friends get to feel pride?
Sorry, I'm really not trying to pick a fight with you here. I'm just trying to understand.

X-post Cailin

I think it would be very difficult if your grandparents were around when you were growing up and you knew what they had done. I don't think people should feel responsibility for the actions of others (especially actions carried out before you were born) but depending where you stand on the nature/nurture question I can see that some might worry that relatives were capable of these things. Or to reconcile the actions with the people as they are now. It might also depend on the circumstances in which actions were carried out IYSWIM.

cailindana yes that is weird to be like that about another language. There are some names I've come across at work that I genuinely struggle to pronounce but I've never done the whole 'why is it so weird?' thing. Although I have had to do 'did I say that right?'.

I already explained - she's upset because she's not just remembering the past she's confronting the actions of someone she knows and loves (her grandfather) so it's much more complicated for her than it is for me, say, when I remember priests from my past who imprisoned women for having children out of wedlock, as I didn't know them.

Cleansing, those of us who are Irish don't escape the 'dealing with family members who perpetrated atrocities' thing either - and not overseas but at home.

Far from being solely winsome 'victims of history', Ireland is currently trying to come to terms with the fact of state-sponsored Church abuse and incarceration of children and women, to mention only one thing, and people of my generation are having to deal with the fact that our parents and grandparents, knowing what went on in, say, the Magdalen laundries, were too cowed/indoctrinated to mount any challenge to a vicious status quo. It's not Nazism, obviously, but it's deeply troubling.

But I think some people are misunderstanding the usage of 'pride', which I don't think in this context has much if anything to do with being proud of of feeling responsible for 'things your grandparents/great-grandparents did'.

Sorry x-post again.

I'm sure if I started a thread saying 'why do English people wear poppies, surely that's just something that happened in the past' I'd be ripped to shreds.

I agree OP that being proud of an accident of history over which you have no control is odd. Proud of an achievement - yes. So proud of overcoming prejudice, yes. Connected to, open about, interested in your roots, yes.

I do understand though, how 'pride' has come about as the opposite of others' attempts to enforce shame. 'Open and proud', with an obvious parallel to being 'out and proud' - embracing another accident of birth over which no-one has any control but about which we widely accept people expessing 'pride'. It's an expression of identity - or solidarity with others', in this case ancestors', identity.

On the face of it though, I find it odd when some people I know bang on about being 'proud' that their parents were working class. I would understand pride in achievement e.g. overcoming adversity and bringing up a lovely family, giving their children good opportunities, despite hardship. That isn't how it's expressed though. It's about 'being' not doing.

What's really odd is that the people who say this have become blatantly, self-acknowledgedly middle class themselves, so are rightly proud of their own achievements in escaping the economic constraints of a WC life. They weren't 'proud' enough about their parents' WC identity to choose to embrace and perpetuate it for themselves (and why should they). They found being comfortably off professionals, better. Which makes their pride in their parents' class per se, rather than their achievements, sound very patronising, or just absurd.

Personally I'm not going to claim pride in anything I haven't achieved. Nor am I going to feel shame, on a personal level, over anything others' did, in the past, over which I had no control. As a member of a society that continues to benefit from past degradations of others and plundering of their resources though, there is a responsibility at a societal, political level to acknowledge how past actions have influenced where we are today and particularly, how and where the attitudes that enabled that to happen, continue to play out. So, I think our responsibility is for the present and future but we should learn from the past.

Pride and responsibility for the past actions of others inhabiting the same land can cause all sorts of trouble and confusion. But, pride and responsibility for political structures and ideas that have a long history but which exist now, does make sense and is important. Part of that is discarding the ideas and practices we cannot take pride in now.

But I think some people are misunderstanding the usage of 'pride', which I don't think in this context has much if anything to do with being proud of of feeling responsible for 'things your grandparents/great-grandparents did'.

Yes, I agree that this is potentially separate from the original issue.
It's just that the argument for pride in nationality seemed often (though not universally) to stem from "I'm proud of what my ancestors managed to survive/overcome".

Lottie, do you wear a poppy?

I'm sure if I started a thread saying 'why do English people wear poppies, surely that's just something that happened in the past' I'd be ripped to shreds.

Not by me you wouldn't.

Cailindana I was at a conference the other day and met an Irish woman and we both commented how nice it was to meet another Irish person - despite migration I meet very few. Both she and another Irish professional I met previously were desperate to go home, they hate it in England. I like it but I can see why they find it hard. It can be so dispiriting having to defend who you are all the time.

Honestly, I find that a pretty strange way to behave when not in your own country. I've worked abroad (in European countries) and I wouldn't have dreamed of carrying on like that. Its pretty much guaranteed to make you quite unpopular amongst your hosts - I'm pretty sure the answer in most countries would be to go back home if you don't like it. Surely what you do when you live abroad is try to make friends amongst the local people, rather than being in some little British or whatever warp? If I hated being in a country that much I would leave, but presumably they, like me, were there for something that wasn't provided in their home country?

Its very easy to fall into that trap when living abroad, to criticise every little thing that is different from home and make yourself pretty miserable as a result, and taking every little thing as a Great Slight. I started doing it once and then gave myself a talking to and started enjoying the differences and making myself be more tolerant. In fact, I went abroad to meet people from different places, not just from my own country, so I can't imagine ever making a big deal about someone being from my own country and saying I hated the country I was in. That just seems a really negative and pointless thing to do.

Sure, some foreigners can say things which you don't like, and I've incidences of borderline racism, but its important to keep it in perspective I think and remember that most people aren't evil demon racists who engineer their entire country towards not offending you.

Agree. It's an accident of birth. Thing I find is there was a thing that seemed to happen under New Labour, perhaps as part of multi culturalism, where "roots" were deemed to be of huge significance. I've never even been to the country where mum grew up. Nor do I want to. Why should I?

I was born here and frankly if you chopped me in half, I'd have "London" written through me like a stick of rock. But somehow people equate having no interest in "roots" as being weird or ashamed. I'm blunt these days, I say frankly she's delighted she got away, delighted she didn't have to raise girls there. It does seem to make people stop and think.

Do you feel poppies are unnecessary Cleansing?

Have you not seen all the comments about "chav" names? People use all sorts of euphemisms when talking about names. For Irish boys names, they will often describe them as "naughty boys' names". What they mean are that those names (Liam, Conor etc) are associated with working class children. Liam, Jaden and Lexie-Mae would all fall into the same category of names.

I do think that this is an important point, because "being proud of your roots" is something that isn't just for immigrants but also for people from working class backgrounds working in professional/traditionally middle/upper middle class fields.

cailindiana I'm not excusing the idiots who can't grasp that different languages have different spellings. However do you speak Irish yourself? My SIL is Irish but doesn't speak it, beyond the basic that she learned in compulsory lessons at school. I know that fluency in Irish varies massively depending on background.

Is it possible that these people are having difficulty grasping the concept because they don't perceive you as being a speaker of this different language, given that you are interacting with them in native English?

NB I am not suggesting that people should only name children from languages that they speak fluently. Just trying to work out what these idiots are thinking.

Yes I speak Irish fluently.

On poppies, I don't think they come into this. I wear a poppy partly because when I stood in graveyards full of unknown unidentified men, I felt that I would like to acknowledge what they went through. I like to stop and remember it. That's all.

But...as far as Irish roots go..I don't think there are many people in Britain who don't have Irish roots somewhere in there. Most people I know have at least one Irish grandparent etc.
To be honest, maybe I am oblivious, but the only people I have ever heard making potato jokes etc are actual Irish people, or people with 2 Irish parents.
I am surprised to hear that Irish prejudice is apparently so widespread.
I have a mish mash of immigrants /refugees in my background and like pp have said I am definitely interested in their stories and culture, but consider myself as English as can be (despite actually being about one eighth English genetically!)
Proud..no not as such. Just as I wouldn't be ashamed if my grandparents or great grandparents had been Nazis.
And for all any of us really know our saintly immigrant ancestors could have been a right set of Bastards.

I am proud of Yorkshire though, but like greenpotato said that is entirely different.

There's an Irish family name that I love and I would have loved to give it to my DS but I couldn't bear the thought of the endless comments I'd have to put up with and then he'd have to put up with because of it.