'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

Ethnicity

Family, clannish, ancestral, racial, cultural, national, tribal; are the words which appear when you search for the meaning of the word ‘ethnic’. They represent much of the cause behind human survival and success as well as much of the cause of its grief.

This grief is mainly because certain influential thinkers over the millennia have ascribed a pre-eminence to their particular group, and a desire to follow a set way of life which brooks no change or outside inclusion.

Most of us grow up with a certain ethnic background, but the lucky ones are exposed to the cultures and beliefs of many other peoples. This is normally enough to bring their own culture into perspective as being just one in a melting pot of many others, better at some things and worse at others.

Ethnicity is often bound up with lineage. Recently, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson traced his family back to a Hanoverian Prince and so back to George 11, King of England. As he rightly pointed out, there were many other thousands of other antecedents who he could just as easily ended up with, as the number of grandparents multiply with every generation further back you go, or the number of ‘greats’ that you tag onto the front of the ‘grandparent’ title. Boris used the male line to trace his way back in time, but if for instance you were Jewish, it would be the female line you would use, even though Westernised Jews are happy for their surnames to follow that of the male. This means that it is entirely possible for you to be a Caucasian of Anglo-Saxon decent, while still being a Jew under the Judaic system. I am a case in point as my great-great grandmother was Jewish and I am directly descended from her maternal line. If nothing else, this goes to show what a bag of wind the whole thing is.

It is like the Irish pride in their Celtic heritage which with the advent of genetics has also proved to be a bunch of blarney, as apart from a very small number of people on the Western fringes of the Country, they all come from Viking stock. The Vikings made Dublin a major base from which to launch their incursions into the North Atlantic and it seems that they hung around long enough to have caused a major genetic shift in the population.

Colour is another major factor in ethnic considerations, but this also has no genetic basis in fact. If you place a blond haired community in the heart of Africa, in twenty-five thousand years, their progeny would be black. Take a black community and place them in Sweden and over the same period of time their descendents would be blonde.

So, on the basis of lineage and colour, ethnicity just doesn’t stack, and as far as any national adherence is concerned, there have been countless attempts over the ages to produce a nation of ethnic purity, which have all nose-dived into oblivion with such unfailing regularity that we can surely take this to be a practical non-starter.

This leaves Culture as the one hook left for ethnicity to hang its hat on, and a very strong hook it would be, if it wasn’t for the fact that so many of us have more than one cultural background, and that more and more of us are saying ‘Vive La Difference!’ in what we eat, in the words we use, and in the thoughts we think. After all, what are the cultures of the world, but a mix of what came before, and tomorrow’s cultures, a mix of what exists now.

In short, ethnicity is a dead-end bunch of junk which tries to justify everything from genocide to who your children should marry and needs to be kicked into touch by the big boot of truth and freedom for all mankind.

  

       

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