Jason Okundaye’s piece on defining Englishness mirrored my own experiences as a member of an ethnic minority (Of course you can be English if you’re not white. So why can’t the right leave the question alone?, 26 September).
As a child, growing up in multicultural Leicester in the 1990s and 2000s, I was “corrected” by adults in positions of authority – the vast majority of whom were white – for wanting to call myself English. It was a descriptor that I could not claim and, implicitly, was not my right because of my skin colour. I learned very quickly that referring to myself as British was the better, less objectionable option.
It always rubbed me up the wrong way. At what point does my family become “English” enough? How many generations later? I love my country of birth, and when I am abroad my Englishness is never brought into question, so why can my country not accept me as I am?
I believe that lived experiences like mine indicate why ethnic-minority adults “prefer an identification with Britishness”: a potent mix of historically being put in one’s place, and a desire to avoid exhausting circular arguments with those who cannot see beyond the colour of one’s skin.
Maariyah Seedat
Toronto, Canada
Given that my grandparents’ family names are a mixture of Norman French, Dutch and Huguenot French, and we have probably lived within the borders of England from arrival to today, and that I was born in London, is it strange that I have always regarded myself as British and not English?
My understanding of being English is either the staid and stuffy upper classes residing in rural isolation or having some background role in an embassy or assurance office or living in a working-class community of very similar people in the terraced streets around a (former) factory.
That isn’t me. I am as invested in the other British cultures of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, the West Indies, Pakistan, Australia, India, Bangladesh, New Zealand, Canada, Africa and the US, not to mention western Europe and more recently eastern Europe.
Simply being English is such a restrictive definition, and I am proud to be counted as British as any of my neighbours.
Mark James Slater
Helston, Cornwall
Jason Okundaye asks “Can you be English and non-white?” The answer is no, according to the government’s own system of coding ethnicities for the 2021 census. English appears as a subcategory of white, and not elsewhere. Thus it is not possible using this coding scheme to describe oneself as, for example, Black English, whereas you can choose to declare yourself Black British.
So the racist implications of “Englishness” are baked into the coding scheme until such time as “English” is moved out of its colour category and treated as a cultural identity (whatever that is) rather than as a consequence of DNA.
Dr Richard Seabrook
Beckenham, London
While Jason Okundaye claims as a simple truth that “there is no single, historically fixed population from which today’s ‘English’ have descended”, he misses a more important general point.
While I am able to claim to be a personally responsible agent as a grandfather, father, husband, researcher and writer, I am unable to claim responsibility for the fundamental structure within which I have acted and continue to act. I was born in Canterbury, Kent and thus I am English. My birth certificate, dated 20 October 1938, records my “sex” as “boy”. I am simply not responsible for my nationality or gender.
I am accordingly neither proud nor ashamed to be an Englishman: that is just a matter of fact. And this in turn means that I cannot either adulate or castigate others of different nationality or gender on the grounds of those characteristics alone. The right’s fixation based on bloodlines and biological inheritance has no foundation: it is baseless and crass.
Alan Baker
Cambridge
