Comment by foldr
2 days ago
The usual meaning of English. Say, roughly the criteria that would make someone eligible to play for the England football team. Skin color has nothing to do with it, and I can assure you that very few English people either know or care whether they have any ‘Celtic’ ancestry.
No-one questions the Englishness of white men born in England to two non-English parents. People raising the absurd non-issue of Rishi Sunak’s Englishness are just concealing their rather obvious prejudices with a lot of bafflegab about ‘English ethnicity’ (a concept which not even they can really take at all seriously, if they at least have some acquaintance with English history).
There are Ethnic groups in England that have been present for several thousand years. Some people clearly mean this and can't articulate it better.
Rushi Sunak ancestry is obviously Indian. I don't really care about his ethnicity (he another politician in a suit to me), but I can understand what people mean when they say he isn't English without automatically assuming they are Racist.
Sports teams aren't a particularly good criteria, I could be Scottish or Welsh and play for England, it's one of those idiocracies of living in a country that pretends to be 4.
Denying the existence of an ethic group is extremely racist, and is often considered a precursor to other much more serious issues.
If you have any acquaintance with English history you would be well aware that there are native ethnic groups that have been in the UK since approximately the end of the younger dryas around 11,000 years ago.
The last major migration was the anglo-saxons around 1500 years ago.
These groups still exist and the majority of the UK population can still trace their origin back to one of these groups.
>If you have any acquaintance with English history you would be well aware that there are native ethnic groups that have been in the UK since approximately the end of the younger dryas around 11,000 years ago.
And you'd be aware that nothing even vaguely corresponding to 'England' existed 11,000 years ago. If you are willing to lump the descendants of Romans, Normans, Jutes, Durotriges, Iceni, Vikings, etc. together into one group and call them all 'English' just because they happened to live in the territory of what is now England, then you've already conceded the point that the identity is national, not ethnic.
But hey, over in the other thread you are denying that Boris Johnson is English, so it's clear that you have a rather eccentric concept of the category.
It's interesting that other native groups, all of which have intermixed with others over thousands of years don't have to defend their right to their ethnic identity.
The English ethnic group is defined by a shared genetics and culture, the English enthic group isn't just political it is biological and can be identified via DNA.
I wouldn't consider my definition eccentric, it's based on the UN defintion: Ethnic group or ethnicity refers to a group of people whose members claim a common heritage or common ancestry and usually speak a common language and may have some common cultural practices.
The other thread argued that Boris Johnson is ethnically Turkic (I have no idea if that is true) on the assumption it is true, Boris Johnson may meet the requirement of a common language, but does not meet the requirement of a shared ancestry to be ethnically English.
Many of the groups that you mentioned existed in the UK over 1000 years ago, and shared in the same invasions, same issues, and developed a shared culture due to that shared history and closeness of relations, and of course as evidenced by DNA analysis interbreeding.
So yeah I would say that in the space of a millennium multiple groups can become one group.
I also