I replied in agreement to a tweet recently, which was misunderstood - what a shocker right? The gist of that tweet was, that being British is not tied to just nativeness and skin colour, it is a set of values and culture which allows us to stand united under one flag. And obviously I agree with it. After an unnecessary stream of attack by various bots and trolls, I deleted my reply.
But let's try again, over here, so that my point is understood more clearly. And mind you, this is just my thoughts at this moment. I understand this to be true for now unless convinced otherwise by a strong counter argument.
Nationality is a legal description of a person, ethnicity a cultural one, and race a physical one. In the modern era, we can go by these classifications, so that we can understand the relation of our ancestral past better with our modern selves, and acknowledge the contributions made along the way to the ethnic culture and national values. Either one does not have to participate in the erasure of another and should not.
A country's ethnicity and nationality, is heavily influenced by the native race unless there was not a dominating one or sustained one to begin with i.e. Americas. Other races can have a buy-in and adopt ethnicity & nationality of a country and so belong to it. That is to say you can be British but not Anglo-Saxon if you weren't born one. And by the same token you could be Saxon but not British, if your ancestors chose to remain in their native lands or travel elsewhere.
This can be prominently observed in the Roman Empire, where Romans were originally Italic Latins from Rome but as they expanded and absorbed more people than their own, they became an ethnic cultural group, where being Italic Latin was no longer the only precursor to being a Roman. Britain itself, took the baton from Romans in this regard, and works in it's optimum cultural level in this capacity.
Ethnic culture keeps a nation intact, and an attack on it can destabilize harmony. Despite having high probability of this happening from external sources, this can also be done by the native race i.e. loving an international organization like EU more, hating your own national flag, sneering at all your traditions and hence creating anti-national sentiments. Nothing is right or wrong, bad or good, unless you know what it is in service of then you can determine the intention. A disenfranchisement from your culture and values, due to high levels of alienation from the governing system, can make you feel like so.
This can be observed to be exasperated currently in North America where relatively native race did not remain dominant or did not sustain its ethnic culture onto the rest and so is finding itself in a friction with its own existence as there is nothing else to fall back to.
In Britain the problem right now is that we are seeing an increasing hostility against the native races and they are experiencing a high sense of alienation i.e. denoting a particular racial identity, the many iterations of white, as the root of evil and denying them any cultural significance. This is obviously corrosive, counter productive and flat out wrong. Any discussion seems like an attack on their existence, on their identity. But you have to bare in mind that in trying to combat your adversary you don't become your own adversary. A sense of belonging is very important to us all. And to deny one a right to belong, is an attack on their existence.
When these attacks come thick and fast, we seem to forget that we all come from the same place, that we are all made up of the same thing, everything else is a superficial aid to our existence, so we should be able to decide how much it matters and in what way it matters.
As hard as it might be, I believe you can have good faith arguments about these topics, without attacking one another. And we need to have these discussions, in a world where everyone seems to be focused too much on their identity while simultaneously losing their identity. But we have to remember, that no matter what we do or what we discuss, we need to lead with love. Otherwise, it is a pointless endeavour.
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