Embarrassed to be English

[Traballi]

Got ancestry results back recently and apparently I'm 98% English, tiny bit of Irish but not even Scottish or Welsh. It wasn't a surprise as already looked into family history and been here for centuries.

I'm actually embarrassed of my English lineage to be honest. What's there to be proud of with our appalling history of colonialism and more recent dallyings with the far right and flag shagging?

I see the British flag up where I live and I honestly cringe. I'm also married to someone who is from a country we have a history of conflict with too so that doesnt help although DH doesnt hate us excessively (won't name country in case outing but with our history of wars/ conflict/ invasion, it could be dozens of places lets be frank)

I guess I've had a different perspective on Englishness over many years through the people I know from overseas and I speak other languages too. I also went to a Catholic school (in England) which taught us about slavery and what happened in Northern Ireland. None of which was nice about the English (teacher was Irish). I'm grateful for these perspectives though as I wouldn't want to be brainwashed into being a blind patriot.

I have friends with strong Irish and Welsh roots and they have a real sense of identity to hold onto with it, ancestral languages that they're interested in and a feeling a pride.

If you're English, it's hard to feel like that unless you're in Tommy or Nige's crew, which makes me even less inclined towards patriotism tbh.

Does anyone else feel like this? It's a bit sad really. I'd love to at least be half something else to cling to that identity instead and ignore the English but.

Luckily my DC is only half English and has two other nationalities through DH, and is being brought up in Wales so will probably feel more Welsh. I'm also obtaining a passport from another country through DH soon and I'll be using that for all overseas travel as soon as I can so I can appear to be from there instead.

AiBU or do others feel like this? Being English just isn't cool.

Get a grip! Regardless of heritage you should always be proud of where you are from, this is what made you into the person you are today !
Im English, mother was welsh and apparently 33% Scottish and yet I have no Scottish relatives ?!
All from the UK are a hodge podge , your 2% is probably Scandinavian ! Even us English had English slaves if it makes you feel better .

Also the Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, French, Dutch and quite a few others. Take up stamp collecting - it really is quite enlightening to see just how many islands and countries all over the world have a European colonial past. It wasn't just the English, not by a long, long way.

Ireland has oppressed women in the most horrifically violent ways in living memory.

Eh?

Dublin was a center for slave trading in the middle ages.

The slave traders were Vikings, not English. The trade lessened after the English strengthened and were able to push the Vikings back.

This with bells on.

And children

I just wouldn’t describe my education as nationalist at all, and I went to a very small catholic school in rural Ireland run entirely by nuns who wouldn’t spit on the English if they were on fire!

I dunno, the Holocaust managed to kill around 15 million people between around 5 - 8years and targeted them due to a belief that they were subhumans not worthy of life.

British colonialism might have a higher mortality rate, sure, but thats over the course of a couple of hundred years and the victims were more kind of "in the way" of colonial greed rather than the direct focus of it. The deaths per year ratio is probably many times smaller than what Nazi Germany achieved in less time than it takes to go through school.

People who don't understand the flag debate now are either really fucking thick or really fucking racist.
It's not the waving the flag of the migrant Palestinian, St. George, that's the issue, it's where it's done, by whom, and for what reasons.
Chavs draped in the flag yelling at asylum seekers outside a hostel- the flag is offensive and threatening. Likewise chavs plastering them all over lamposts and flyovers because a Far Right fringe group ran by paedophiles and abusive men with convictions for domestic violence - it means fuck off foreigners.
Waving the flag on special occasions eg Remembrance Sunday- this is a moment of pride- many immigrants will welcome that too.

But hey- unless you really are dumb- you must already know this.

Don’t bother, I said this earlier and it doesn’t suit the strange anti-irish sentiment on the thread so they denied it!

you do realise that we are not unique in our behaviours, the Dutch, French, and Belgians among others are equally guilty, it’s history, very few nations have a past free from oppression, slavery and colonialism. I find this attitude rediculous. Move forward and stop beating yourself with a big stick.

Tolerant? Is it the same country we live in? Saying as a foreigner you have a major problem of racism snd xenophobia on the UK

What do you call the mass kidnapping of babies from young women, killing them and throwing their bodies into sewers?

We fought with Harold in 1066 - proud as punch - if I lived in a country I loathed I would get the fuck out of it - don’t waste your life here love!

Having a few racists doesn’t make a whole country intolerant.

England is very tolerant and that is reflected in policy and laws. Compared to a hell of a lot of other countries we are practically heaven.

I’m not sure the level of understanding of the Ancestry DNA ‘results’ is particularly high on MN.

It’s so odd that people want to whitewash Ireland’s deeply problematic history of oppression of women and children. And gay people.

Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Russians and Chinese (they still own their colonial possessions), Turks, Egyptians, Ghanaians… Empire is a ubiquitous part of human history. Modern nation states are historically anomalous.

Not that long ago hotels housing asylum seekers were set on fire.

Don’t be ashamed at all - what’s there to be sorry for. Your lineage is just that. Your outlook in life and how you carry yourself should be the focal point. I am of dual citizenship and proud of the part that makes me English. I love this country for a lot of reasons but am grateful I have a second nationality due to one of my parents.

England had been invaded and has invaded other countries so many times - there is no guilt to bear on your part. Do you love your life here? If you do - then sod what others think.

So my original point stands then?

It’s not anti Irish sentiment- it’s fact

@Ihavesomeideas

https://historyireland.com/clean-hands-ireland-slavery-and-the-slave-trade/
Extract below ….
It is important to note that it was legislation rather than moral scruples that kept the Irish from getting even more intimately involved in the slave-trade—a series of Navigation Acts passed by the Westminster parliament in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prioritised British ports and vessels over their Irish counterparts and denied Irish merchants the right to trade directly with the West Indies in goods such as sugar or slaves. Essentially, Britain’s subjugation of Ireland kept the country out of the slave-trade, kept Ireland from subjugating others. This is a facet of Ireland’s relationship with slavery and the slave-trade that seems not to have been noticed in the myriad of opinion pieces and articles published in the Irish press in the aftermath of the brutal killing of George Floyd. The Irish abroad—be it in the Caribbean, the American South or, as was the case for the Walshes, Sarsfields and other Wild Geese, in the slave-trading French port of Nantes—certainly had little compunction about participating in and benefiting from the enslavement of captured Africans. Indeed, it is very easy to imagine an alternative history in which port cities like Dublin and Cork (especially Cork, with its strategic position as the last stop before America) became as enmeshed with slave money as Bristol or Glasgow, and where the main business at today’s City Hall meetings would be the contentious renaming of streets, public spaces, arts venues and other institutions.
Despite the limitations on what they could trade, many Irish merchants became rich supplying the British, French and Dutch islands of the Caribbean with provisions (the islands themselves focused solely on the production of cash crops such as sugar, cotton, indigo and coffee). The port of Cork, in particular, owed much of its success in the eighteenth century to this trade, devising special techniques to ensure the preservation of its beef, butter and fish in high temperatures. The better-quality meat went straight to the plates of the plantation owners, while the slaves made do with ‘cow beef’—the carcasses of elderly dairy cattle, specially fattened and cut up into small pieces. Belfast, too, had strong links with the Caribbean, supplying the coarse linen and shoes with which plantation-owners clothed their slaves. Some of these merchants, like the Blakes from Galway and the Creaghs from Limerick, went on to settle in the Caribbean; a David Creagh, for example, purchased a plantation in Barbados in the early eighteenth century, for which he bought more than 200 slaves for c. £25 a head. Bankers, too, got involved—the la Touche family, for example, founding shareholders of the Bank of Ireland, owned slaves in Jamaica—as did many others from the ranks of the professionals. Indeed, University College London’s ground-breaking ‘Legacies of British Slave Ownership’ database is replete with the names of Irish men and women—from Cobh to Coleraine and from Sligo to Swords—who benefited financially when the British government abolished slavery in 1833, with estimates suggesting that the Irish-born or Irish-domiciled slave-owners received an £800,000 slice of the £20 million (£1.4 billion in today’s money) compensation pie.

Not in terms of it being a tolerant country, no.

OP said she’s raising her DC in Wales so it’s the naughty Welsh who are hanging the flags around her town, not the English.

That happened in Ireland before they arrived. It hasn’t happened here. No migrant hotel has been successfully set in fire or burnt down.