Glasgow, last Friday, around 11:00pm. After a bottle and a half of wine, having just escaped a house party, I marched over to Great Western Road to meet a friend and was duly taken to the chain Irish bar Kitty O’Shea’s, because where else in Glasgow can you get an overpriced Guinness and slur the words to Fisherman’s Blues? But walking in, I was disappointed to realise the music being played sounded (at least to the English ear) like traditional Irish music, rather than the commercial faces of Irishness-as-sold-to-Brits I’d come to know and love: The Pogues, The Dubliners, and whoever the Belle of Belfast City is.
But this didn’t last, and as Dirty Old Town began to play I was relieved at last to hear something I could sing along to – but disheartened that beneath my lefty-liberal veneer lay an appropriative instinct that all this Irishness was great, sure – as long as I could enjoy it.
Then, on Sunday, I caught Reform MP Suella Braverman’s appearance on Question Time, where she claimed that she doesn’t consider herself English, despite having been born in London. Her parents weren’t born in England: she wouldn’t want to “co-opt Englishness as an ethnicity.”
What a confounding position: when did Englishness become an ethnicity? ‘English’ doesn’t mean ‘white’ any more than ‘Italian’ means ‘Catholic.’ The English territory is not interchangeable with the majority ethnicity in England. In Scotland, I routinely complete forms asking my ethnicity with “white English;” if these were synonymous, only one would be necessary. Yet, this argument wholeheartedly contends that Englishness is whiteness, something none of us had encountered until some overzealous ethnonationalists overdosing on talk radio started spouting between race riots, but now have to debate as a serious position.
A more charitable treatment of Braverman’s view would be that she thinks Englishness is dependent not only on skin colour, but having some ancestral presence in England. In this light, Braverman would subordinate England’s Jewish community to the status of outsiders – given Jewish ancestry in the Middle East, and relatively recent Jewish migration due to hostility around the world (most notably the Holocaust) – amidst staggering persecution of the British Jewish community: a worrying echo of the antisemitic trope that Jewish people are not loyal to the country where they reside. Is that what Braverman was aiming for?
The English have co-opted Irishness. We listen to Fontaines D.C., watch Normal People and generally pretend we’re Shane MacGowan, so long as it’s palatable to us. The rest of Irish culture – all those songs in the pub we don’t want to hear – get thrown aside as an unimportant, quaint subculture we can dip into. Irishness is belittled rather than communicated with.
If non-white people born in England are no longer considered English, then England does the same injustice to all non-white English culture. Zadie Smith’s novels, The Specials’ music, Jude Bellingham’s football – all patronised as insignificant curiosities rather than vital part of England’s national character.
The pity is that despite these contributions being English, they often aren’t treated as such. Black England players are praised for success, then suffer vituperative racist abuse after defeat. If only these reactionary cultural currents could recognise the indispensability of non-white Englishness to Englishness as a whole.
But who am I kidding? They just want to hear Dirty Old Town.
“Official portrait of Suella Braverman MP crop 3” by David Woolfall is licensed under CC BY 3.0.
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To be English is not to be white
Glasgow, last Friday, around 11:00pm. After a bottle and a half of wine, having just escaped a house party, I marched over to Great Western Road to meet a friend and was duly taken to the chain Irish bar Kitty O’Shea’s, because where else in Glasgow can you get an overpriced Guinness and slur the words to Fisherman’s Blues? But walking in, I was disappointed to realise the music being played sounded (at least to the English ear) like traditional Irish music, rather than the commercial faces of Irishness-as-sold-to-Brits I’d come to know and love: The Pogues, The Dubliners, and whoever the Belle of Belfast City is.
But this didn’t last, and as Dirty Old Town began to play I was relieved at last to hear something I could sing along to – but disheartened that beneath my lefty-liberal veneer lay an appropriative instinct that all this Irishness was great, sure – as long as I could enjoy it.
Then, on Sunday, I caught Reform MP Suella Braverman’s appearance on Question Time, where she claimed that she doesn’t consider herself English, despite having been born in London. Her parents weren’t born in England: she wouldn’t want to “co-opt Englishness as an ethnicity.”
What a confounding position: when did Englishness become an ethnicity? ‘English’ doesn’t mean ‘white’ any more than ‘Italian’ means ‘Catholic.’ The English territory is not interchangeable with the majority ethnicity in England. In Scotland, I routinely complete forms asking my ethnicity with “white English;” if these were synonymous, only one would be necessary. Yet, this argument wholeheartedly contends that Englishness is whiteness, something none of us had encountered until some overzealous ethnonationalists overdosing on talk radio started spouting between race riots, but now have to debate as a serious position.
A more charitable treatment of Braverman’s view would be that she thinks Englishness is dependent not only on skin colour, but having some ancestral presence in England. In this light, Braverman would subordinate England’s Jewish community to the status of outsiders – given Jewish ancestry in the Middle East, and relatively recent Jewish migration due to hostility around the world (most notably the Holocaust) – amidst staggering persecution of the British Jewish community: a worrying echo of the antisemitic trope that Jewish people are not loyal to the country where they reside. Is that what Braverman was aiming for?
The English have co-opted Irishness. We listen to Fontaines D.C., watch Normal People and generally pretend we’re Shane MacGowan, so long as it’s palatable to us. The rest of Irish culture – all those songs in the pub we don’t want to hear – get thrown aside as an unimportant, quaint subculture we can dip into. Irishness is belittled rather than communicated with.
If non-white people born in England are no longer considered English, then England does the same injustice to all non-white English culture. Zadie Smith’s novels, The Specials’ music, Jude Bellingham’s football – all patronised as insignificant curiosities rather than vital part of England’s national character.
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The pity is that despite these contributions being English, they often aren’t treated as such. Black England players are praised for success, then suffer vituperative racist abuse after defeat. If only these reactionary cultural currents could recognise the indispensability of non-white Englishness to Englishness as a whole.
But who am I kidding? They just want to hear Dirty Old Town.
“Official portrait of Suella Braverman MP crop 3” by David Woolfall is licensed under CC BY 3.0.
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