Ffs - you don’t take “problems with white supremacy seriously” by ceding a phrase used by our most heroic & admirable king to racists, & replacing it with a word profoundly inadequate to explicating the complexities of how an Anglian/Saxon polity emerged. thetimes.co.uk/article/drop-t…
To reiterate: anyone not driven mad by spending too long in the hothouse of a US humanities department can recognise that when French economists, American Nazis & British archaeologists use the phrase ‘Anglo-Saxon’, they all mean different things by it. It’s really not difficult.
The only way that will change is if academics persist in waving the white flag (sic), surrendering the use of the phrase, & allowing racists to take possession of it.
Not least because ‘English’ is already the word that white racists in England tend to use to describe themselves, whereas for most people in this country ‘Anglo-Saxons’ = the losers who got shat on at the battle of Hastings
Plus, of course, describing the early Anglian & Saxon kingdoms as ‘English’ would be as anachronistic & distorting as describing Clovis as ‘French’.
Absolutely. The very contingency of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, the way it was constructed by Alfred to signify the emergent kingdom of what would become England, & to be back-projected onto an imagined past, is what makes it so useful.
It’s basically a projection of an academic culture war in the US onto the very different circumstances prevailing in this country. One might almost call it colonialist.
An excellent one point, & one that resolves me herewith to stop chuntering on about what is basically a storm in a very small academic tea cup
