From the Times Online (UK):
The Government is proposing to rename ethnic minority groups along US lines in an attempt to strengthen and highlight their British roots.
Minorities could be described as, for example “Asian-British†rather than simply as “Asian†under proposals being considered by Hazel Blears, the Home Office Minister.The plan to adopt the American practice of identifying ethnic heritage will be controversial with some British ethnic minorities likely to claim that it is racist. The idea was condemned as fatuous and retrograde by critics last night.
Ms Blears’s idea, outlined in an interview with The Times, would introduce “double-barrelled†nationality as a way of giving people pride in both their ethnic background and their Britishness.
A brief note to Ms Blears:
Pride is personal and emotional and has no place—hyphenated or otherwise—in what is a legal descriptor. In fact, if such a descriptor is to act coherently at all, it should concern itself solely with designating the country of citizenship.
Brits of Asian descent, to use the Times’ example, are of course free to call themselves ”Asian-British” or simply “Asian” (for that matter, they’re also free to call themselves “Children of the Sun God, 19th Generation-British” or just plain “Kenny”). But, barring those Brits who hold dual citizenship (in which case an official hyphen is called for), the British government should do no such thing—and should simply remove “pride” from the equation and return the designation to disinterested description of legal standing.
You can’t see me, but I’m rolling my eyes at Ms. Blears. Is the tought here that they wouldn’t have had British citizens carrying out the July bombings if only Britons has been in the habit of calling them Arab-British?
The obvious questions being: What if my mom is Asian-British (or whatever) and my dad is African-British? Am I then Asian-African-British? African-Asian-British? Begging the easily answerable questions: How well has this been thought out? Is this frickin’ stupid? Resulting in the default summary question: Why do you hate freedom?
I wonder if this comes out of the delusional notion that people turn to terrorism because they have low self-esteem. It seems to me that their self-esteem is entirely too high, as is anyone’s who thinks he has the right to murder his fellow citizens for his own political purposes.
Good Lord, “Asian-British” sounds even stupider than “Asian-American” or any of our other hyphenated idiocies.
Actually, I suspect the thought is rather opposite. Namely that if the English were referring to English-born citizens of Asian descent as British or English rather than as Asian, then perhaps the bombers would have felt a bit more connected to England.
Nonetheless, I think the plan is rather fatuous. If you were born in England, even if your family originates from Pakistan, you should be referred to as British or English. Not as Asian. Period, the end. To Jeff’s point, if the individual, as a matter of personal choice, wishes to be called Asian-British or whatever, fine. But legally? British.
FYI, Asian in England means something different than it does to Americans. It refers to people from the Indian subcontinent. Hence, Pakistanis would be referred to as Asians.
Personally, I prefer “Debbie.” Or maybe “Cricket.”
I consider myself a Mongreloid. I think that would work for most folks tell the truth.
I personally like “imported-british”, that way you only need one label for all ethnic groups. What could be more efficient and fair than that? I also advocate they ought to require all natural born Brits to be designated “domestic-british” just to eliminate the potential “hyphenation” discrimination suits.
ANTI-HYPHENIST!
Lesley, my point was that it doesn’t matter in the least what they are called by other citizens. There’s nothing the British could have called them that would have made those men assimilate or persuaded them to abandon their deat-cult perversion of Islam. It seems rididculous to me to think otherwise.
The main reason we don’t have the home-grown terror problem that Western Europe does is that we place societal pressure on all immigrants in the US to pull their own weight and assimilate. We also don’t have anywhere near the anti-American and anti-semitic hate speech that’s pretty much mainstream thought among Euro-leftists. It’s pretty tough to expect Arab immigrants to give up ideas like that when you’ve got MPs and half the media spewing the same vile rhetoric that you hear out of Wahabbist mosques.
This is England, right?
“Yobs” or “Not Yobs.”
Problem solved. Cut me my check (and not the euro funny money…I want sterling!)
I think so far I am the only one in the comments thread that has outted herself as British.
When I was growing up, I frequently heard that our minorities—itself, not a very commonly-heard phrase in Britain, until recently—preferred calling themselves British to English.
The inference, I suppose, being that British sounded less ethnic, and more transnational.
(Tangentially, in England on the rare times I have to refer to myself ethnically, I use English, but abroad, only British. Curiously, in several languages, e.g. “Britannique” and “Britânica” would get you odd looks in France or Brazil, etc)
And though Asian—which someone, thankfully, did mention above means those of Indian/Pakistani/Sri Lankan/Bangladeshi origin to us—is quite common indeed, the equally rare times I heard them use the cognate was as in:
British-Asian, never Asian-British.
Anthony Minghella, the director of Talented Mr. Ripley, amongst others, is referred to as British-Italian, not Italian-British, which sounds ludicrous to British ears.
There may be reasons why in America you use the descriptive adjective ahead of the national one, but I have never understood the reason why that is.
And by this I am not saying that I find it odd that it’s even done, but that people should self-
describe themselves ethnically first, then nationally.
I may be wrong here, but I have always thought in a country where no one ethnicity can truly lay claim to America as a whole (no, not even the British, or the Germans, or Italians, Irish, Jews, Africans, etc.—they are just part of a whole), that this was correct.
But in a country where regardless at the huge amounts of immigration throughout centuries, that there was a definitive native people, and everyone else came second, conceptually.
I find this a very interesting topic.
It’s highly, highly important, however, not to get fall into the xenophobia trap, as many times I notice happens when discussing this topic.
(“If you don’t want to be American go back to “X”!”)
That shouldn’t be the emphasis.
However, having said that, as to the topic at hand, I find this latest solution to a wider problem (multiculturalism that doesn’t work in “ancestor countries” like the UK and France, as opposed to “descendant countries” like the Americas), bizarre, unwieldy, and frankly, laughable.
As usual, the PC crowd just don’t get it
I wonder what Lord Nazir Ahmed, our first British-Asian peer, has to say about this suggestion…
Cheers,
Victoria
A little long-winded there Vickie, wot!
(sorry, couldn’t help it…it was just laid out there like a clam on the beach)
Oh right sorry. I forgot this is how women are supposed to sound.
“Oh wow, you’re right, lol!!1”
Cheers,
Victoria
You left out the hyphenated hymen squeal.https://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/18788/#
https://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/18788/#
Sheesh…look what happens when you leave it up to the broads….
A Conservative broad.
Put that in your soda fountain, and jerk it, fella!
Cheers,
Victoria