The British Race?

As it happens, yes, I do believe there is a British race. Ii just happens to be matrilineal. One way or another, most British people (or at any rate most of those who "self-identify" as ethnically English, Welsh or Scots) will find that they have mitochondrial DNA that goes back to ancestors who have lived here since the Ice Age. One way or another, most of us can legitimately say that this is where we're "from". And yes, if all your folks came over here at any time in recorded history then, no offence, but you are "different".

I saw this though recently and it irritated me. (Ditto my friend Dom B's "ethnicity estimate"!) And the more I think about such things the more they irritate me.

Partly there's the philosophical problem that looking up the "ethnic origins" of one's ancestors only kicks the can further down the road. If you're British and your ancestors were from Scandinavia then what of that? Where did their ancestors come from? And so on! And that of course leads us on to the question of how one's supposed to classify genes. If a high proportion of modern Scandinavians aren't "really" Scandinavians then what exactly is "Scandinavian DNA"? Which is really just another way of asking the more pertinent and less politically correct question, which is of course that of race. Because these aren't races we're talking about.  There is no Italian race.  There never was an "Anglo-Saxon race". Why do we even use such terms? What actually is a race anyway? And how much "difference" does difference actually make?

The main problem with the race question, of course, is simply that people (nowadays especially) are just plain squeamish about asking such questions, let alone using racial terminology. On the other hand though it's also fundamentally unclear whether or not races even exist in the first place. If they do then it could be fair enough to make generalised statements about groups of people based on skin-colour or hair-texture. Are men with blond hair and blue eyes likely to be cleverer than men with dark skin and big penises. Maybe yes, maybe no - provided, that is, these are genuinely different races we're talking about and not just purely accidental differences that have no bearing on anything else. If they are then we can test for such things, if they aren't then what difference does it make and why should anyone care anyway? (It's possible that skin-colour really is just skin-deep.) In reality, of course, no one has ever suggested that there even are any "pure" races - or at least that there are now or have been since the Ice Age. And as for "selective breeding", isn't that what we all do anyway?

But yet another part of the problem, but just as obviously, is that people nowadays know nothing about history - their own or other people's. (Which country do they think the Angles, Saxons and Jutes came from - though of course this is also a particularly English problem, if only because in England history has always been about kings and queens rather than actual nations, but probably also because Anglo-Saxon England was scrubbed from the curriculum after the Great War, the Middle Ages went with the second war, and most of the British Empire had disappeared - on paper as it had in actuality - by the end of the 1960s.) And so whereas it may (or may not) be a fair enough point to make that there's no real reason to think that the people who live in Greece nowadays have very much (if anything!) in common with Alexander and Aristotle, let alone Homer and Hesiod, it's genuinely sad to reflect how little awareness modern Englishmen have of their shared ancestry with their European cousins - especially given the tragic consequences such attitudes have had in (still, just about) living memory.

In truth, a genetic test that discovers you may have some distant Romanian ancestor (who may very well have come over with the Romans) doesn't particularly prove or disprove anything. And if you're only 10% British then why not be proud of that (though to be honest being proud of who one's ancestors were is a fairly feeble thing to be proud of)?