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Adam Wren

@G0ADM

Feb 19

I want to make my position on race/ethnicity as legible as possible. So a short 🧵

Let’s start with Race:

The edges are fuzzy but ‘race’ is real. This is an exclusionary category, if you are racially European/white you aren’t Asian. It’s a deeply predictive category and matters for all sorts of things like tolerance to painkillers and medication.

As an easy example: at some point in the Europe-Asia spectrum you start/stop being able to digest dairy. East Asians can’t drink alcohol without getting a red facial flush, but also their sweat doesn’t have any smell(?)

Next up — ethnicity.

Ethnicity is complicated because it has two components: genetic and linguistic/cultural heritage.

The genetic components of ethnicity are remarkably stable across time, to the extent that we can still reliably identify the tribes that settled here:

These are nested categories, in order to be English you first need to be European/white, and then descended from one of the germanic tribes.

The linguistic/cultural components of ethnicity are far less stable and change over time. The english people have spoken 3 different languages, and our culture has shifted significantly even within our lifetime.

This is where most of the arguments are happening. We should probably use different words to refer to the ‘biologically english’ and the ‘culturally english’ Our language doesn’t do this but many do, for example the Russians have:
- Rossiyane (culturally russian)
- Ruski (genetically russian)

Biological ethnicity is an exclusionary category — you can’t have two Scottish parents and claim to be english. Unless you have mixed heritage you can only accurately claim one genetic ethnicity.

Cultural ethnicity (for lack of an appropriate word) is different. It’s not exclusionary. Meaning you can have overlapping or claim multiple categories at once and it’s related to, but not wholly reliant on your genetic heritage. For example there are Americans that are 100% genetically English but would be hostile to the label and instead identify with and consider themselves culturally American (or applachian, or midwestern). They’ve undergone a process we call ethnogenesis (the creation of a new ethnicity)

Conversely there are people that are 100% dutch or polish that consider themselves ‘basically english’ after being born and raised here, what they’re are pointing to is that they’re not ethnically but are culturally english, to the point they would be recognised as outsiders if they were to go to the Netherlands or Poland.

Genetics and culture are not completely disentangled from eachother, and it’s obviously much easier to adopt a culture if you’re from a genetically and culturally similar group, but genetic ethnicity can never be assumed without descent from the group it’s referring to.

Fraser isn’t completely ridiculous to claim that Rishi is english, as he seems to have sincerely and completely adopted English culture, but Rishi will never be genetically english and has never claimed to be, referring to himself instead as ‘British Indian’.

‘British’ confuses things but the while the term used to collectively refer to the Scottish, english and welsh people, it mostly points to being ‘culturally’ English these days, which you can tell by how violently the Scottish & Irish tend to refuse the label. It’s become a term of assimilation mostly disassociated with ethnicity, which is how we get British Indians, British Persians, British Jews and so on. It’s a term that mostly refers to people having adopted English cultural norms, although it also unhelpfully refers to legal nationality and our government seems determined to hand out passports to anyone, so is becoming increasingly worthless as a descriptor.

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Adam Wren

@G0ADM

Jan 3

I’ve never asked this before but please share and retweet:

I’ve created a gofundme to raise money for the release of the full court transcripts of the grooming gang cases which not even the victims are able to access due to the extensive costs

<details in next tweet👇>

Court transcript requests in the UK are prohibitively expensive, typically costing £2-£4 per page, often totaling thousands of pounds, it’s often the case that even victims cannot access them. Even in cases of clear public interest, these costs create a significant barrier to transparency.

Our initial goal is £15, 000 to:
1. Secure a complete transcript from the Oxfordshire case and other high profile cases dependant on the money raised
2. Document and streamline the transcript request process
3. Create a framework for future transcript requests

Financial transparency:
- All funds will be used solely for official transcript requests
- If requests are unsuccessful, all donations will be refunded
- Any remaining funds will be applied to future transcript requests

gofund.me/4de86dfc

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