With everything that has been going on in recent months and
all the anger that has been stirred up against different cultures, it got me
thinking about the history of this little island we call Britain. Specifically,
I've been thinking about all the "white America" and "proper
British" comments that I've been seeing all over the internet. Now, I'm
fortunate in that my friends and my husband do not think that way; the people
that I love are almost all very inclusive in the way they view the world. There
are, of course, those who are not and because I love them for many other
reasons and don't want to lose them from my life, I try not to argue too much
with them. Sometimes that is damn hard!
What I wanted to point out is that if land can belong to
anyone - and I'm not convinced that any species "owns" land - then
clearly America could be said to truly belong to the indigenous people who
remain. If you look at things a little differently and say that length of inhabitancy
means that a culture or race owns land then the African-American population has
a pretty good claim. I know, I know, people are going to jump in and say that Caucasians
were on that land mass now known as the USA first, as they were the ones in
charge of slavery (yes, I am aware that African tribes participated in
capturing and selling people from other tribes to European slave traders). Yes,
you're right, there were some Caucasians there before Africans taken as slaves
arrived. However if you take the mean date of arrival of ancestors of
African-Americans and Caucasian Americans, then African-Americans have been
there longer. Before people start jumping up and down and saying that their
ancestor arrived very early on, I want to just reiterate that I did say the
"mean date of arrival of...ancestors" not the date of arrival of one
particular individual's ancestors.
It isn't just America that has a mixed history and one that
includes invasion and destruction of the oldest cultures to be living on the
land. Britain has been invaded and conquered more times than people realise. I
suspect that many people know about the Roman invasion, settlement or conquest,
but forget about the rest. Off the top of my head - and sticking to the past
two millennia only - I can think of the Romans, the Jutes, Angles, Saxons,
numerous Viking raids and settlements, the Normans, Danish invasion, numerous
Irish raids on coastal towns and the French invasion of 1797. There are
undoubtedly more and in all honesty I haven't slept for a couple of days at
this point so I don't have sufficient brains to dig through all my academic
books to give dates and facts relating to specific incidents.
My point really is that I don't understand what people mean
when they say that they are "pure British (or English, Welsh,
Scottish)". We've been invaded far too many times for any such thing to
exist, even if it did mean something. Do people mean that their ancestors have
been here for a couple of hundred years, or longer? I wonder if those people
realise that all sorts of people with all tones of skin colour have been living
on this land for hundreds of years too - and like in America's case, maybe even
longer than their own ancestors. I remember reading a section of one of my
course books, during my history degree, where it was mentioned that Queen
Elizabeth I had complained about the number of black people living in London.
She died in 1603; large scale trans-Atlantic slave trade began in 1509 with the
Portuguese, though strictly speaking slavery was not allowed on British shores despite existing
throughout the Empire. There also exists the strong possibility that sailors of
various racial backgrounds where already living in Britain prior to that. Just
how long do the angry people think someone's ancestors have to be living
somewhere before the modern day descendant is "British" or "American"?
There was mass immigration in Britain in the 1960s and that did cause a lot of
anger at the time, but come on people, it's hardly the first time that large
groups of new people have come to live on these shores. Even from then, we are
now several generations down the line.
I saw a wonderful little video clip the other day where a
group of people who were proud of their heritage - nothing wrong with that -
but also had a little prejudice towards some other culture, took a DNA test
that traced their ancestry. One that I found particularly poignant was a
Kurdish woman finding out that not only did she have some Iraqi ancestors, but
that there was actually a cousin of hers in the room who was Iraqi. The shocked
expressions on the faces of those who took part and the wonderful mix of
ancestors in the DNA was really touching to watch. If I had the money, it is
something that I would definitely do and would encourage anyone to give it a
go.
