I don’t really have an ethnicity-related problem with appearance, for the most part. OK, I am nervous of people with very short haircuts, due to experience with skinheads in the past, and likewise more nervous of people with copious tattoos or multiple piercings – but unless you regard “skinhead” as an ethnicity, that doesn’t really figure. It is, of course, a tribe of sorts, so it might be an ethnicity… That, of course, is appearance which is chosen rather than being an ineradicable evidence of heredity. I’m also nervous of people who are visibly over-muscled, again due to experience with such people in the past, but that is usually a choice (and my negative experiences may have been the indirect result of aggression due to steroid use). I do find some facial structures more attractive than others, and those are sometimes race-related – for instance, I don’t tend to think Inuit are beautiful. But I do find a lot of Somalians very attractive. Skin colour is really pretty much an irrelevance – I’m more taken aback by peculiar hair colours, to be honest. Though if someone wants to dye their skin blue, for instance, I might find that offputting… In other words, I worry about some aspects of appearance which are a matter of choice rather than those which are innate. The thing there is that some aspects of appearance are very much a part of some ethnic identities.
Am I ethnicist as regards language? I prefer, for instance, to be among people who speak my own language. I can also be comfortable in a French-speaking environment (see below) or, at least to an extent, in one speaking Italian or Spanish. Even German or one of the Scandinavian languages, at a pinch, although I don’t actually speak more than a few words of any of them – English is at its root basically a Germanic language, and I live in a part of the country with significant numbers of dialect loan words from Scandinavia, and I thus don’t feel entirely adrift linguistically – and Dutch just makes me feel that if I listened just a little harder, I could understand it! I don’t have any facility with Slavic languages at all, and so the fact that my town has become about 15% Polish since Poland joined the EU and I therefore hear quite a bit of Polish spoken in town does make me feel a little uneasy – but not massively so. Were the percentage to change to, say, 50%, though? I think I might be starting to find difficulty feeling “at home” if that were the case.
I’ve recently read a fascinating piece on the dominance of English. English is a language significantly formed out of what is often now called “cultural appropriation” – where English speakers have found that a foreign word captures a thought in a way which the English of the time doesn’t, they typically just appropriate the word, and the word “becomes English”. At the same time, English is imperial – it displaces minority languages in many places where it is dominant (Cornish vanished completely, although there are attempts to revive it, Welsh and Scots Gaelic hang on by a thread, and in Canada the Québecois are fighting against their children and grandchildren failing to learn French, despite strenuous attempts to keep the language viable as at the very least a second tongue). English insinuates itself into other cultures – it is by far the most widely spoken second language, and although some variant of Chinese remains the most widely spoken first language, English is the most widely understood and used language overall. Part of this dominance is due to the famous refusal of English speakers to learn other languages, initially the English, now the Americans, but there has always been a need for a lingua franca (which, as the name suggests, was at one time French in Europe, including Russia), and English has now such dominance in that respect that any alternative arising is hugely improbable.
I worry about this, not least because each language has its own character, its own set of words which are not duplicated in other languages (witness the fact that English has needed to steal so many), its own literature, its own feel. I would be much the poorer in expressing myself if I did not have a sufficient facility with French to be able to function (at least after a few days of immersion) in that language. I wouldn’t describe myself as ever having been fluent; I’m not a natural linguist, but have got to the point where I sometimes think in French – and, if I’m in a French speaking environment, think mostly in French. But I regard French as needing to be protected, notably in Québec, where (were I a citizen of the province) I might well support the banning of English as a language, because the power of English is so great (I was a vocal supporter of the independence of Québec when they last held a referendum on the subject). This might well be regarded as supporting a kind of linguistic apartheid, which is a worrying thought for me. Is this, perhaps, ethnicist in its own way?
Religion is largely not a problem, as regular readers of this blog will realise. I worry about religions only when they encourage their followers to be violent towards others (or, if I want to be really picky, to treat them as anything worse than equals-not-of-my-tribe), which is something which afflicts at least part of almost any religion I can name. Even Quakers, Jains and the Amish are inclined to treat others as non-equals in ways which are, to say the least, oppressive, and those religions are otherwise historically as non-violent as any I can think of. There are even Buddhists and Taoists who encourage violence towards those not of their religion… There have been, however, religions with which I would have very major problems – the religion of the ancient Aztecs, for instance, many of those in the ancient Near East (followers of Moloch or some of the Baals, for instance) or those of various cannibal tribes on Pacific islands. My tolerance for religions, it seems, ends where the religion has as one of its fundamental tenets the killing of others. Sam Harris, famously, thinks there is a similar fundamental defect in Islam; I do not agree, at least not as regards the religion as a whole.
Having written the above (which has stuck in draft form for a long time), I’m thinking about whether any of this makes me technically racist. I could worry that any preference for ones own tribe over others is, in fact, somewhat racist – but given my problems with feeling comfotable with people who are definitely of the same race as me but who elect to distinguish themselves by certain appearances, I at least think that I may be “ethnicist”. I don’t tend to notice skin colour unless it’s extremely different from mine, which some years ago prompted my daughter to accuse me of racism by denying others their minority status in some way, but I do notice (for instance) language, accent and dialect, the way someone is dressed and if they have unusual hairstyles, a lot of tattoos or piercings – and I find some of those offputting. Yes, I try not to allow that to influence the way I interact with others, but it’s still something which, while I might wish to eliminate it, is something I can’t avoid.
I’ll admit that I find the insistence of many on the left in stressing labels which are racial or ethnic to be worrying – to me, that feels like a kind of racism – and it most definitely hinders attempts to think of humanity as a whole, as St Paul famously stated in Gal. 3:28. Indeed, I think it is operating as a kind of “divide and conquer” which is self-imposed – if you spend so much time working out what group people should identify with in order to give their lack of privilege due weight, how are you ever going to nurture solidarity, whether of the “working class” or even of humanity?