#in europe no such thing as listing race or ethnicity when you apply only your grades and test scores

[futuristicbarbie]

idk if i understood it right but usa will remove race from university applications..why are ppl calling this problematic and freaking out lol

[butyouvealwaysbeenthecaretaker]

“it’s very clear that Europeans think indigenous people don’t exist where they live...I think it’s time Europeans start understanding whose land they’re on and that there are indigenous people everywhere, so i’ve made a short, incomplete list of indigenous and nomadic peoples of Europe. Feel free to look up more about them, especially if you’re living on their land:“

Love how, insidiously, this is now a conversation about indigenous-and-nomadic people, not indigenous people, because someone has realised they can’t hit the Brits with the guilt hammer otherwise.

It’s not about justice - it’s about winning; because “if you’re living on somebody else’s land, you need to give it back, apologise, make reparations, and leave” is a pretty standard Daily Mail take on the concept of Travellers.

& what’s fucky about this whole conversation to me is that in the British context, this is what racism sounds like. The specific context in America, this might not be racist, due to the “minority ethnicities cannot be a racist oppressor of the majority-in-power” loophole. But “strangers are living on our land and we define outsiders in ethnic terms”, is the definition of British racism. From the small-scale troubles of the Travellers - who very frequently make camp illegally on fields which belong to other people, as there are insufficient stopping-places provided for them, and many of what there is are heavily polluted. To the larger scale xenophobia against migrants and other “outsiders” coming to “our land”, and a defining of British or English (or Scottsh/Irish/Welsh) identity in narrow and racist ways which are suspicious that a 1st or 2nd generation immigrant can ever be truly what we mean by an Englishman.

I’m not trying to be clever; you just can’t apply only people with the ancient racial heritage of this land ought to have ownership of it and political power here to England. That’s what our locally home-grown racists sound like. You know, like, the indigenous English. The Romanichal Travellers arrived in England in the 16th Century. They’re not the indigenous English; and if that sounds like racism to you, you’re correct! And that’s why actual British anti-racist campaigners do not promote the indigenous English as a culturally meaningful idea.

In England, there is no indigenous people (in the sense that this applies to America or Australia) who have been dispossessed of their lands and heritage in recent history, and continue to be socially marginalised as a result. 

You can make arguments about the Scots and the Welsh and the Cornish, but obviously that doesn’t work for OP, because all those people are white. Those are our mainland-survivors-of-colonialism with ongoing-struggles-for-sovreignty narratives. When I say “stop applying American racial theory over here”, this is kinda what I mean; because these people are the nearest local analogy for it, and yet OP is excluding them from their list. Either because they don’t know anything about British history and shouldn’t be speaking about it, OR because it just doesn’t fit the sort of political narratives they’re comfortable with.

In conversations about race in the UK, it’s generally the people-from-abroad who are an ethnically marginalised demographic - be it the Romanchial, or the Windrush generation, or people from the EU, and so forth. And people-who-are-natively-from-here who are the most powerful demographic. And the idea of being natively from here is the weapon through which racism is enacted.

I think when Americans encounter arguments like this, they have a knee-jerk reaction that someone is trying to get away with something; someone is trying to distance themselves from whiteness, or racial privilege, or complicity in colonialism or whatever; and that when someone who is not an American says “we don’t really have that kind of dynamic here”, they’re so used to hearing people who are blind to their nations history their auto-response is you do you just need to unpack your privilege faster. But sometimes...things are just different.