The racist term the French can’t stop using
The disturbing French hostility to Britain has resulted in the use terms stemming from 19th century eugenics and race theory
I wouldn’t usually consider myself a snowflake. I can laugh it off when I’m called whitey, rosbif, cracker and any number of slightly questionable slang terms for women. But this French trend to refer to a nation of people by pseudo-ethnic groups is something I have to call out: not just as something I find uncomfortable, but something that sets a dangerous precedent.
Of course, factually speaking, the ‘British’ aren’t a group of warrior-farmer settlers from the modern-day German and Czech borders. We aren’t running around in glittery helmets and throwing swords in lakes as offerings to the Gods. We also, genetically, know we aren’t Anglo-Saxons: we’re from all over the place. You can be 100% British and 100% genomically Sephardi. You can be British and have had both your parents arrive from Sweden, or the Congo. We don’t think about ourselves as one ethnicity, because know we never have been: Vikings, Druids, Normans, Celts, Romans, German and Irish refugees in the 1800s, Neolithic farmers from Spain, even Irish, Scottish and Welsh famine refugees to England- we know we’re a melting pot. Even someone who has never known anyone to marry outside of their rural Yorkshire village doesn’t claim ‘British racial purity’. We don’t believe in a singular British ‘race’ today because we know that is not just malicious, it isn’t the truth, very literally in our bones, who we are.
Of course, it hasn’t always been like that.
Let’s have a quick look at the image above. At a glimpse, it might be rightly dismissed as simply hilarious nonsense, no more dangerous than a pseudoscience article on hand shapes in the Daily Mail. But if you take a look, you can see darker, nastier elements seeping into the ‘reasoning’ behind the phrenological diagram. The straight, thin nose. The straight, smooth hair. The sharp chin. Racism is so seeped into this way of thinking, that eugenics associates degeneracy with anything considered ‘not of the race’. And by race, they don’t just mean ‘white’: they mean ‘Anglo Saxon’.
When the Victorians were seeking to justify the British Empire, they decided to employ ‘science’ to why Britain was so successful at oppressing, invading and abusing other countries, and dominating the industrial world. The answer was eugenic theory. Across Europe and America, there were suddenly ‘ranks’ to whiteness based off pseudo-history of the European tribes. ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were British, and the best, with straight noses and light hair (of course, nonsense: how many white Britons have black or brown hair) and the lowest were the ‘Italian tribes’ who had been ‘infiltrated’ by the ‘lower races’. The French, struggling and deeply embarrassed by their deteriorating status in the world and diminishing empire, sneered at the British for this, yet readily accepted the privilege of being from a ‘higher racial order’ and employed their own racial supremacy theories over their peoples and neighbours. Nowadays, we know that these ‘tribes’ and ‘ethnic groups’ mixed and replaced and integrated with eachother so much that there is barely in anyone in Europe who can claim not to have at least 5 mixed heritages.
But the name, Les Anglo Saxons, stuck as a sneering, sarcastic retort to British patriotism and nationalism. And now, embarrassed by the vaccine situation on the Brexit front, the term has come back with a vengeance, and with it the same pseudoscience history it employs.
This isn’t a matter of being offended: it’s about the monster of racist eugenic theory rearing it’s ugly head and re-entering the narrative on how we see ourselves. It’s about the totally false notion of ‘racial purity’ in Europe coming back into the narrative of who we are: the idea that we are in some way a distinguishable ‘race’ against the French, British or Polish. The idea that land or status belongs to us because of the features on our skull or melanin levels in our bodies. For me, it is eerily Nazi, a term that should have been stopped in reference to modern peoples in 1945.
The British aren’t Anglo-Saxon. We are black, we are white, we are Welsh, we are Scottish, we are Irish, we are Polish, we are German, we are French, we are Muslims, we are Jews, we are Normans, we are Vikings, we are Celts, we are Zulus, we are Syrians and we are Native Americans. That term is an insult to every Pakistani, Caribbean and African British person in the UK.
And to avoid the return of Nazism to everyday language, This Rosbif politely and publicly requests that our French friends across the channel stop using it.
