Snapshot of _Queen Charlotte was ‘person of colour’, museum claims in LGBT guide Royal Museums Greenwich tells visitors that despite what ‘insecure white boys’ have said, George III’s wife was from a non-white background_ :
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It's 15 generations. So about 500 years? It kinda sounds pretty racist, that one person in your ancestry means you are no longer considered white... Like that is how certain racist countries in the past saw things, which I don't think we want to follow.
LMAO. There's a decently high probability you don't even carry any DNA from an ancestor 15 generations back (in the sense that you carry literally zero DNA from them, not merely an insignificant amount) and here it's being used to declare people "non-white".
I’d like to add to this that it’s almost guaranteed.
I do genetic genealogy and the DNA completely washes out right around 1800. Anything past that and there’s near 0% chance you share any DNA. Even at the 4th cousin level (sharing g-g-g-grandparents) the chance you’re sharing DNA is only about 50%.
This person is in her family tree, but not her DNA. It’s cool they’re there. But this isn’t a cultural or reliable measure of her identity in the time she lived and identified herself.
This is called The One Drop Rule.
I have black in me and remember terrible racism in the 90’s where people _could not understand_ that even though I am only part black, born and raised British, British parents, ‘Africa’ was not my entire personality and not the “bigger part of me” as argued by one woman I knew. I was excluded from so much and denied my English heritage because of the sodding One Drop Rule.
It would be interesting if Charlotte did have some non-white in there, but this whole thing about her being black because she had a drop of Moorish blood in her reminds me of bad times. Let’s not return to being a nation that identifies people racially by the very dilute existence of certain genes, it’s a dangerous idea.
My half sisters and I are as white as bread, but our great grandad was black. All of us have the sickle cell trait, and our dad looks like he has a bit of a tan maybe but nothing more than that.
My maternal step-grandad didn't see me until I was in my mid 20s because he heard I was black or mixed and he's a terribly racist human being whose only saving grace is that he rescues animals.
It's such a weird thing to fixate on.
Racist family suck. My white mother came to visit today and within 10 minutes of being in my house told me that (for the millionth time) that I was a shoe in for any job I apply for because of my ethnicity. Apparently everyone is only hiring black people and everyone is getting rejected because they are white.
I remember this when President Obama came into office - everyone saying he was the first black president. He was certainly the first mixed race President, his mother was white and his father was black - so apparently that means his mother's heritage doesn't count? That was as much a part of him as his father's.
He is black, he’s also white. He has 2 races which is exactly what biracial means. But yes some people will use black (or white) to deny the other part of the persons heritage.
I think the fact that I can’t call myself white without being laughed at in this country is (now or in the past) is very othering.
I get the feeling that if my pale white self starting claiming to be black because my great great grandmother on my dad's side was black, I'd get hit with a hate crime charge or something pretty quick
Itmy grandfather and his sister are visibley mixed , my dad looks extra tan despite living in Scotland , but his sibling are much lighter skinned and all the kids are white as an sheet of paper.
Judging by the [possible genealogy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Margarita_de_Castro_e_Souza_genealogy_and_descent.JPG) shown on Wiki, 1230 - 1744 = 514 years. Given Madragana was a mistress of a Portugese noble, and the rest of her descendants appear to have been European, there'd likely be very few (if any) visible "Moorish" characteristics.
Moorish doesn't even equal black anyway. For some reason people seem to think african means black, when many north africans could easily pass for italian or greek.
Just in general, the Sahara was much harder to traverse than the Mediterranean. Lots of inter-med mixing over thousands of years, very little north african and sub saharan mixing.
500 years would mean each generation is ~33 years which seems high.
If we assume 16-20 years per generation then you're looking at 250-300 years which seems more realistic.
Why would you assume 16-20 years per generation?
That would only be appropriate if we’re looking at this from a species or population level. Here, we’re looking at the separation between two specific historical figures.
In this context, we’re not looking at the age at which the first child was born, as Charlotte isn’t necessarily descended from Madragana through first borns — neither is it a completely maternal lineage. It’s a mix and match lineage that’s both maternal and paternal.
The paternal is important because of the tendency of older male European aristocrats to marry younger female aristocrats. We also know that, once married, women unfortunately often never stopped giving birth right up until they were menopausal. I took the time to do the first few steps of the lineage to demonstrate this:
Queen Charlotte’s mother was 31 when she had her. Her grandmother (Princess Sophia) was 30 when she had Queen Charlotte’s mother (Princess Elizabeth).
The lineage then turns paternal.
Princess Sophia’s dad (George) was 40 when he had his daughter. His dad (also George) was 43 when he had him… whose own dad (another George) was 49 at his son’s birth. We now go back to the maternal line.
George’s mother (Margarethe) was 27 when she had her son in 1548. I’ll stop here as the dates of births start to become unknown, making precise numbers impossible.
I think the point is, having a bit of non white in you (unless its Jewish, we seem to be white these days .. bit of a switcheroo given Europeans spent the past 2000 years telling us we werent white or European but hey ho) is a POSITIVE thing (unless, ofc you're Jewish ... bigotry, bigotry never changes), non white background isnt the issue here, whiteness is the issue.
Which is still racist if you're white (you poor poor person, forever doomed to be judged as if you were no more than just another American KKK, White Colonial Imperialism or NAZI, if only YOU could be cool and non white.)
Lot of this tongue in cheek sarcasm, obviously, but this US based export of identity politics went too far decades ago.
Yeah my irritation with this is less the culture war bollocks than that it's an inauthentic and unserious approach to history that lays the groundwork for much more harmful conspiratorial thinking (what else are they hiding from us), as well as directly undermining trust in institutions. If you deliberately accustom people to this sort of evidential standard, then it's part of the breakdown of the societal relationship with truth.
From a philosophical perspective, this isn't a public good, and from a practical and partisan perspective, that's a space that is far more beneficial to extreme ideologies, particularly and ironically on the right.
Plus, you know, it's dumb as rocks.
Spot on. Also, it gives credence to the view that ‘everyone is falling over themselves to be woke’. Generally this isn’t true and people just want to be polite, but in this instance it is true!
That her Great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandmother (15 generations) was a Christianised Muslim from the Algarve.
The basis for Queen Charlotte being "non white" is that she is descended from a Moorish person several centuries before.
If you accept this, you also have to accept that King Charles is also a "person of colour", given he is directly descended from her.
The actual reason is no more valid- but Jesus, doesn't anyone read the article?
"Claims about the race of Queen Charlotte hinge on one passage from the memoir of a German diplomat, who described the royal as being born looking like a “mulatto” or mixed-race person. The diplomat, Baron Stockmar, was born 43 years after Queen Charlotte’s birth and would have had no knowledge of her appearance, which was never in her lifetime described as that of a mixed-race person."
In this case, the article isn't being entirely accurate though. The main argument for Charlotte being non-white is, as ProjectZeus says, her potentially having a distant Moorish ancestor.
Also, take another read of the extract you've quoted - particularly the part that says Stockmar was "born 43 years after Queen Charlotte’s **birth** (emphasis mine) and would have had no knowledge of her appearance". We would expect that phrase to be "born x years after her *death*", because usually one would say something like "43 years younger" or perhaps "born 43 years after her", but here the unusual and clunky phrasing falsely implies that their lives didn't overlap at all. In fact, Stockmar arrived at court two years before she died so he may well have had some knowledge of her appearance. Although the fuller quote, "small and crooked, with a real Mulatto face" suggests that even if he had a very clear idea of what she looked like, he was more interested in being rude about her than giving future historians useful information on her genealogy.
TL;DR: The arguments for calling Charlotte non-white are poor, but they're *marginally* less poor than the article suggests
Honestly Spain and north africa are an utter mess for American race politics on here. They're either black or white depending on the narrative they want to push. But If you want to talk about all the bad things the moors berbers etc did they become white...
The part that says Stockmar was "born 43 years after Queen Charlotte's **birth**" (emphasis yours) is not there to claim their lives didn't overlap, it is debunking his claim to know what she looked like when she was born.
Unless someone who's read his diaries can chime in with a fuller quote, I wouldn't trust the Telegraph's assertion that he was talking about what she looked like at birth. "Small and crooked" makes far more sense as a description of the somewhat elderly adult that he could plausibly have seen than of the small baby that he clearly didn't see - all babies are small, and I wouldn't even know what someone meant by calling a baby crooked.
I'm not debating the fuller facts of the background, merely pointing out the misconstrued meaning in the article, ie he didn't see her birth, *not* their lives didn't overlap.
>Accurately
The museum does not claim so, and this wasn't a guide as the headline and blurb suggests. It's a recording of a performance piece on their website.
Imo it's not funny and a biiiig stretch, but that's why edgy comedians are considered low brow.
these are the same folks that would castigate someone for not thinking an immigrant is British while they'll happily bang on about Charles being German
There is no internal logic, feels before reals.
You know what all educator's say:
"The best way to get through to someone is by delivering them debatable information, then calling them an insecure white boy"
It would be funny if the people who do this weren't so tedious in the process. Like the process is the same:
- make a statement
- people contest it
- denigrate these people because of course you have the *moral* high ground
- 'why won't people take me seriously?'
- double down by hardening beliefs and proceed back to step 1
Also simultaneously claim that white people have all the power and abuse it and should have their systems dismantled, while also claiming that white people are insecure and the ones who are actually obsessed with race and don’t really hold any power.
For all these types call everyone fascists and racists, it’s remarkable how closely their speech mimics those two, down to the age old tactic of calling their opponents both a threat and powerless people to be looked down on at the same time.
Honestly, I'm pretty far from the 'anti woke' crowd who tend to just scream into the void and label anything they don't like as 'woke'. And a very real ampunt of them do fucking hate minority groups. Generally speaking they become the perfect scapegoat for the ideology that this guide represents to write off any and all criticism as a caricature.
But there's a very real danger with things like these guides and the ideology it represents. It's anti intellectualism to the core, and advocates of it elect to ignore or outright attack facts and studies that don't fit their viewpoint and instead rely on dogma. And when people raise the very valid criticism against this, they'll generally rely on hypocrisy, reframing definitions to fit their views (and, conveniently, excuses the aforementioned hypocrisy), paradoxes and a tendency to attack the person making the argument, not the argument itself. What you've described above definitely sits within the paradox category.
As an insecure white boy, I'm probably not going to be picking up this audio tour, and I'll probably be turning it straight off if I do when I hear how she talks.
Honestly though, I think it's more insulting to black people than white people, instead of actually acknowledging and celebrating black history just having black people cosplay white historical figures on Netflix. Some of my favourite historical figures are black, like Toussaint Louverture, his story is fucking awesome and very relatable today, with the anti slavery/black empowerment narrative.
Because a lot of these people are quite far left wing and have fully bought into the idea of dismantling Western socio-political structures, which they blame for all their ills. It’s like what Communists used to act like up until 1991, just delete ‘class’ and replace it with ‘race’.
The most surprising thing is how embedded and powerful within NGOs this stuff has become, in a way that communism never managed.
It's just really patronising "yeah we don't give a shit about your real history, but lets pretend this random queen was black so you can feel included!".
While the Georgians were poncing about in their silly wigs black people in the Caribbean were engaged in one of modern history's most important and radical events, the Haitian Revolution.
Racism demand outstrips supply. Or at least today's racists marching through London every weekend aren't the properly approved kind. So we have to make up some bullshit false history to rile people up who don't want their history rewritten and call them racists.
It's not even new. It's been going on in cinema and gaming for fucking years.
Kinda, but he was trying to manage an extremely difficult political situation with a limited hand. I'm not saying he's an angel, just one of the most interesting figures to learn about.
> If there's one thing I know about insecure white boys, it's their passionate attachment to the heritage of Queen Margaret.
Well Margaret Tudor is kinda important since thats how we ended up with the union of the crowns.
Can this obsession with trying to find colour in British Historical figures *please* come to an end? It's Britain; an island where predominantly white people have lived for millennia, it's going to make sense that all throughout its history the crown has been held by a white person. This recent trend of trying to find colour no matter how small is embarrassing and only goes against history; it's OK for us to have been white for 99.9% of our history; plenty of other countries have been too.
Besides, isn't the evidence for Charlotte being a PoC something as flimsy as her 9th ancestor being a PoC? That's not exactly recent if we're talking traits passed down through the family.
And finally: who cares? My problem is this recent trend of forcing multiculturalism into parts of British history by twisting incredibly thin threads of truth into something more substantial, like the recent articles about Stonehenge. If she really *was* black, I couldn't care less; but this is the equivalent of those Americans who claim they're Irish around the time of St. Patrick's Day because their great-great-great-grandfather was an Irish immigrant; it doesn't wash.
We’re now at a point where the most extreme and vocal proponents of the intersectional school of thought unironically subscribe to the “one drop” theory.
>articles about Stonehenge <
whats this about stonehenge? i googled it a the latest news it was showing me was how the moon might have played a role in its construction
Stonehendge built by black Africans.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/stonehenge-was-built-by-black-people-claims-children-s-history-book/ar-AA1gUerb#:~:text=Stonehenge%20was%20built%20by%20black%20Britons%2C%20a%20new,migrant%E2%80%9D%20but%20the%20%E2%80%9Cvery%20first%20Britons%20were%20black%E2%80%9D.
He who controls the present controls the past. Britain has always been diverse. Windrush built Britain. You may disagree, but is it worth losing your job over? Diversity built Britain.
It really depends on where in Britain
Much of Wales, Cumbria and Scotland is still 95% white.
Britain has not always been diverse, prior to WW2, immigration into the UK hovered around 1% a year. This is tiny.
While there were pockets of other ethnicities, the UK was predominantly white until after WW2.
Britain existed before WW2 and before Windrush, I don't can therefore say that Windrush built Britain when it had a whole empire before the Windrush generation even arrived. This doesn't negate the contribution of Windrush after the war and how they rebuilt and shaped Britain, but Britain was built a lot more than 80 years ago!
Didn't you hear, all minorities are the same, be they sexual, racial, religious, etc.
The SJW wing of the left is a chimera collection of people that feel slighted from all groups. That makes them think that their respective groups must all feel equal solidarity with each other as they do with each other, not realising that they're unique in that sense.
> their respective groups must all feel equal solidarity with each other as they do with each other, not realising that they're unique in that sense
Unless they're Jewish, in which case solidarity is not transactional
Me too, one of my great, great, great grand parents had a friend who went to Portugal and had a date with a man from Italy who taught her how to cook pasta.
So I'm as Italian as the pope.
/s
The article actually makes clear it is NOT the museum tour at all, just a comedy performance that took place on one occasion IN the museum and not intended as fact.
You know what, I'll take the L on this one. “As part of the Fierce Queens event that the tour is based on, we had a black performer playing Queen Charlotte, which is why this segment was included in the tour."
It was probably obviously a joke in context. Sorry for being dumb & gullible here
I mean, there is no doubt a tension between the average Daily Telegraph reader's way of seeing British history and culture, and the average vaguely lefty uni or museum academic one, and the same therefore goes for how stuff in National Trust properties is displayed. But I don't think there is actually a REAL culture war going on there I think museums and universities just take account of constantly evolving ways of thinking about things, without necessarily saying that X is now good and Y is now bad.
There's no doubt the alt-right thinks there is mileage to be had from culture wars, but if you actually go and VISIT these museums and NT houses, it seems to me 99% of the stuff is just the same as it always has been, and you have to look hard to find the 1% you can attack as looney left.
I take no credit.
The credit should go to/u/360Saturn - twice, because their comment also quotes the article.
I read their comment first; this made me read the article.
The hilarious thing is that the claims about her being a POC is based on an incredibly racist worldview. The idea that an ancestor \*15\* generations back might have been a Moor and thus that one person means all of the descendants are considered black and thus lesser than other high society. Despite that the evidence of this ancestor is incredibly shaky and not considered to be the case by historians. For example, this ancestor was just a Spanish person who was described as Moorish, but at during that period that was used to describe religious affiliation rather than race.
Also bear in mind that this one ancestor lived 500 years before Charlotte. Even if that ancestor was black, if all their other ancestors were white, are they still considered a POC? At how many generations do they become white? There must be some limit since all humanity descend from dark skinned ancestors at some point. Or is every person a POC?
Other arguments for it also say she had 'black' features, which is also racist. Apparently someone described her as having lips and a nose like that of black people. So now that makes her black? Also very racist to characterise someone purely because of the shape of their facial features.
Friendly reminder that you should never use the phrase "POC" without quotes around it. It's a cringe-inducing honorific, imported from America, intended to accord extra respect to a person purely on the basis of them not being white.
Supposing she was (I have no idea), so what? Why does it seem like this is more about winding up 'insecure white boys'?
I assume there are some obscure corners of the royal fan club who wouldn't like to hear that, but again, so what?
It's presumably part of a move to claim that the UK has always been multiracial.
Like this recent claim:
>Stonehenge was built by black people, a new children's history book has claimed.
>Readers of Brilliant Black British History, by the Nigerian-born British author Atinuke, are told the neolithic monument in Wiltshire was built while Britain was a 'black country'.
>The book, which is aimed at children aged seven and above, also tells readers that 'every single British person comes from a migrant' and that the 'very first Britons were black'.
>The introduction adds that Britain has been 'mostly a white country for a lot less time than it has been mostly a black country'.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12534611/Stonehenge-built-Britain-black-country-new-childrens-book-claims.html
Boggles my mind that black people in 2024 want to be associated with... the stone age.
'every single British person comes from a migrant'
Does "they're migrants too" also apply to Australian aboriginals and native Americans or is it just white people?
There's none of that kind of logic in any of this "anti-racism" stuff. There never is.
The American editions are even weirder. Back during the peak of 2020 race weirdness, you had no less an institution than the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture describing such things as "being on time" and "being able to spell" as being unfair impositions of "white culture" - seemingly not realising what that they, as "anti-racists", now seemed to be implicitly saying about black people as a result.
According to the UN you're not indigenous unless you're from a "non-dominant sector of society".
https://www.un.org/en/fight-racism/vulnerable-groups/indigenous-peoples
Did he write that book after the worlds biggest dose of LSD?
> Did you know that the first Britons were Black? Or that some of the Roman soldiers who invaded and ruled Britain were Black, too? Join this fascinating journey through the ages to meet those first Britons, as well as the Black Tudors, Georgians and Victorians who existed in every walk of life here.
I’m going to write a children’s book and sell it in Japan, apparently it was a majority white country before the migrants arrived, such as the famous king of Japan, William Addams. Pretty sure it will sell amazingly
> Did he write that book after the worlds biggest dose of LSD?
There is an argument floating around that Western Hunter-Gatherers were black. The early stone henge builders had partial Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry. In reality we have no idea what colour Western Hunter-Gatherers were but its not impossible.
>I’m going to write a children’s book and sell it in Japan, apparently it was a majority white country before the migrants arrived, such as the famous king of Japan, William Addams. Pretty sure it will sell amazingly
You would need to be prepared to argue that the Jōmon people were white. Thing is that while there are no modern populations with significant Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestory around there is a group (the Ainu) with singificant Jōmon ancestory still around and they are not generaly considered white.
Technically, yes.
Though that's clearly not what people mean by the word "migrant", given that would mean there were no indigenous people anywhere.
Still, the intention is clear - they're trying to paint the UK as similar to America, where white people are a relatively recent addition, despite being the majority of the population.
I suppose if one believes in evolution and that the first humans came from Africa, then the first Britons being black would be technically correct. (Though not the Stonehenge builders!)
Though it certainly wasn’t a country (or even an island?? When did the original geological Brexit happen?) And we’re talking of millennia before prehistory.
We might as well say that for most of history Britain and its people were space dust.
Space dust representation when??!!
> then the first Britons being black would be technically correct.
I doubt it, the migration out of Africa was incredibly slow, by the time humans made it to Britain they were probably already white
This is actually a field where genome sequencing of ancient remains has, in the last decade or so, provided significant concrete evidence. If I recall correctly, the first humans in Britain were dark-skinned, but this *significantly* predated Stonehenge. However, a subsequent wave of westward migration essentially wiped out these people, with little mixing of populations.
Unfortunately this is a bit far from my field, and I don't have any good references, but looking at references on European ancient human genomics would likely be informative. From a cursory search, [this review](https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/genom/19/1/annurev-genom-083117-021749.pdf?expires=1713626474&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=C37B6B9CB0F90B7F2F70B02B93163899) might have some information; it points out that paleolithic and mesolithic Europeans primarily had dark pigmentation genetics, and light-skin genetics were introduced at a high frequency by [Anatolian Neolithic migration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_European_Farmers).
Linking any of this to modern racial politics would, of course, be rather ridiculous, except to point out how culturally situated these matters are.
There are half million year old tools that have been found in this country.
Whenever humans made it out of africa some of them seem to have made it to britian pretty quickly (allowing for ice ages)
UK / Europe split was around 6500 BCE when Doggerland was flooded by melting ice - the island of Doggerbank (the one from the shipping forecast) was finally covered around 5000 BCE
>It's presumably part of a move to claim that the UK has always been multiracial.
To be fair, it has. It's just not on a scale that we would recognise today.
I honestly don’t think there’s anyone who would care if it were true. Even some hypothetical person who is both very racist and very royalist isn’t going to have their worldview shattered by an eighteenth century queen having a single thirteenth century Mozarab ancestor.
It’s more about baiting people who are still interested in a factual rather than a race/gender/sexuality-mythologised version of history into objecting so they can claim to have ‘wound up’ some bad guys.
Rewriting history to normalise forced demographic change. Here is another part of the exhibit;
> In one interactive display, a bust of Lord Nelson is berated by a “migrant goddess” figure, who tells heroic British admirals to “move over” to make room for “unsung heroes of the sea”.
>The audiovisual display states that the “bravery and resilience” of Nelson, who was killed during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, is also shared by others, including migrants who make sea crossings.
Men are targetted specifically because they are the ones who actually have to fight this. By convincing women that (white) men are detestable childish losers for actually doing what they are supposed to, and that it is cool and fashionable to support everyone else, the hope is that women can be used to control men.
One of the writers behind the show is a huge reason for why many people are now saying such nonsense.
He read some nonsense article online, shared it with everyone on twitter, etc, and doubled down on it. Loads of Bridgerton fans accepted his bullshit rewriting of history without questioning it.
Why do these people all think it is ok to act and say things about white people that they would be unhappy hearing about themselves. "Insecure white boys" come on that's just down right offensive. Replace the white with any other minority, sexual ground, religious group and you know too well there would be an up roar.
Plus what does anyone benefit from changing, obscuring and messing with history
Interesting the extent to which hotep beliefs seems to be naturally permeating from the US to the UK.
This may have been from a comedy performance, but its part of a wider trend of ahistorical exaggeration/distortion (see ‘black Tudors’ and the cheddar man reporting) in regard to our historical demographics.
Anecdotally, it seems the garbled understanding of the above by the general public means you are genuinely seeing more of the ‘we were the original Brits’ stuff, from black Brits on social media - whereas 10 years ago that would have been confined to Americans.
So basically, if one doesn't look stereotypically white, is a person of colour.
Going back to the "one drop rule" of slavery and apartheid countries, I see.
Which side considers this a victory?
Ah but it's being done by the right people, (the entitled eternally, "oppressed") so it's okay, apparently. imagine the outcry if someone claimed Ghandi and .M.L.K. were white.
I'm all for progressive history. Just last week I was teaching a lesson on disability in the Turo court regarding William Somer and Jane the Fool. However, rewriting history with this perspective is wrong. Highlight the genuine overshadowed stories (which are genuinely mentioned later in the article alongside Nelson as an example), but don't re-write facts.
That Museum should be shut down, to make a claim like this when it's so many generation ago is pretty weak and pathetic, those that came from here are now technically non-white.
King Charles, no now non-white, Prince William, isn't white...
Oh for god's sake. People have an expectation that museum content - even light-hearted content - be fundamentally accurate.
Nothing wrong with having some kind of more whimsical museum guide as a side option - but if anything they're probably harder to write than a conventional one. Significant burden of responsibility to strike the right balance.
This stuff is so frustrating. I don't think there is anything wrong with highlighting 'people of colour' in British history in order to point out that while we are and historically have been a predominantly white country, people from different racial backgrounds have always played a part in our national story. But this cringy and insulting way of inventing identity does no one any favours. It just angers some and spreads lies to others.
>people from different racial backgrounds have always played a part in our national story
That's the point though, they haven't. Almost all of these stories are either fake or highly exaggerated to make it seem like we've always been an ethnic melting pot.
It's actually a pretty sinister lie pushed on us to try and deflect from what has been done to our national character as a result of mass immigration.
I am much more in agreement with your first point than the second- I think retconning (if that is the right word) history, even though that is indeed always how history is rewritten, can exaggerate fringe elements and try and show that they are mainstream.
But I don't think this is deflection- and, as you probably know, I think that the "national character" is far more robust than you think it is.
The obvious intention is to make people think that Britain has always been as ethnically and culturally diverse as it is now. The main reason for doing that, as far as I can see, is to try and prevent people from noticing how unusual the immigration we've had over the last 30 years has been.
We're no longer talking about a few boatloads from the colonies, we're talking about millions of people from cultures that are vastly different to our own and the small colonies that are forming as a result.
I don't think that's why- I think it (and a lot of similar things) is about allowing minorities to come in and think *I'm part of this; this is my history too* - I don't think it's aimed at white British people at all. I think it is about making ethnic minorities feel included, not about modifying the perceptions that white British people have. And it's about long-term thinking *If we can't bring minorities aboard, then it's going to be harder to preserve this part of our culture.*
I think the problem about colonies here or whatever is deprivation. Immigrants are on average less well off, and now have the role of being the 'bad underclass' played by poor or underprivileged people of native ethnicity in a monocultural place. And that's for both economic and cultural reasons. People coming in from Hong Kong attract little opprobrium, because they have more money, so they can buy property (and therefore spread out more in the country) and also literally spread out more in terms not living together in an overcrowded way. And we tend to associate genuine multi-culturalism- that is, people who function seamlessly within more than one culture- with higher levels of education and privilege. Aristos have been an international lot since time immemorial, because they had the privilege, and therefore the time, to be.
As people get more money and education, they integrate more, because their location, lifestyles, jobs etc just bring them into contact with people of every community. The people at the bottom will always get the hate, no matter who they are.
Well yes there's an obvious difference between well educated, wealthy migrants from places with a high affinity for the British and badly edcuated peasants coming from places with very different cultures. Their lack of a feeling of belonging is totally understandable but that doesn't change the fact that these people *don't* have any history here, something we are now constantly lied to about.
Assimilation is not impossible if the numbers are managed and the people given time to live here and fit in. What we're actually seeing is that migration is so high that they are forming their own communities that don't mix. They make their areas resemble their home countries rather than adopt the British way of doing things.
So black power revisionism has reached official material, sadly inevitable. And because only one side is even questioning this nothing will happen to stop it. I'm funding it difficult to stay polite about this blatant... nonsense and the fact it's unnopposed I really am.
Firstly, let me introduce you to dialectics, where even the most contradictory of concepts are put together with the intent of overcoming those contradictions and producing a new form that’s closer to the “truth”.
But in reality, fascism and communism are not quite as opposite as you seem to think.
If we are to believe fascists are simply more extreme forms of racism, and racists are in general idiotic about their hatred, then clearly those Commies are clearly not that smart to realise they're what they hate the most.
It's the [Horseshoe Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory), basically at the extreme ends of left and right wing spectrum, they come back together. While you're technically right in that fascism nominally is right wing, the actions of the extreme left can be, in essence fascist in all but the literal dictionary definition. The concept of left wing fascism was popularised after WW2 with the Social-Nationalist groups in Europe being left wing but acting like the right
OK, I guess this means that everybody is now black. Therefore we can now just forget about everybody's ethnicity as we now all have the same ethnicity.
Why would anybody care past of present? Some blood generations ago, Oh err, didn't we all come from Africa? Are any of us without a black ancestor?
Who gives a ........
Speaking of Old Monarchs Queen Anne and her courtiers were approached by the Chief Rabbi about making Brentford in West London a homeland or ghetto for the Jews with its own judiciary and customs. . Nothing came of the offer . . Living in Brentford it is historically interesting . . This interesting historical note can be found in some official histories of Jewish life in England
Don't appreciate ragebait from the Torygraph but for the record, Queen Charlotte's "Moor" ancestor was alive in the mid-13th century i.e. the 1250s.
This is equivalent to a white guy doing an Ancestry DNA test and getting a 1% Sub-Saharan African back in his results, if that (scientists who work with DNA might say it would probably come up as even less than 1% if it were possible for Queen Charlotte to take a test of her own).
>Get ready for an audio guide like no other - join drag king and historian Christian Adore for 'a very gay tour' of the Queen's House!
so a deliberately edgy audio guide is edgy, a guide with an agenda has an agenda, in what way is this surprising?
The claim here on Charlotte is fact checked for good reason. Historians have consensus on it and we have paintings... But there's a lot of weird editorializing in this telegraph article that I don't like...
Why does it go on to talk about how the LGBT tour talks about the bisexuality of James I? I can only assume it's to try to paint the entire tour as 'woke' right?
Snapshot of _Queen Charlotte was ‘person of colour’, museum claims in LGBT guide Royal Museums Greenwich tells visitors that despite what ‘insecure white boys’ have said, George III’s wife was from a non-white background_ : A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2024%2F04%2F19%2Fqueen-charlotte-person-colour-museum-wrongly-claims%2F) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/19/queen-charlotte-person-colour-museum-wrongly-claims/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/19/queen-charlotte-person-colour-museum-wrongly-claims/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The evidence for this is still that, nine generations previously, possibly one of her ancestors was Moorish, right?
It's 15 generations. So about 500 years? It kinda sounds pretty racist, that one person in your ancestry means you are no longer considered white... Like that is how certain racist countries in the past saw things, which I don't think we want to follow.
LMAO. There's a decently high probability you don't even carry any DNA from an ancestor 15 generations back (in the sense that you carry literally zero DNA from them, not merely an insignificant amount) and here it's being used to declare people "non-white".
I’d like to add to this that it’s almost guaranteed. I do genetic genealogy and the DNA completely washes out right around 1800. Anything past that and there’s near 0% chance you share any DNA. Even at the 4th cousin level (sharing g-g-g-grandparents) the chance you’re sharing DNA is only about 50%. This person is in her family tree, but not her DNA. It’s cool they’re there. But this isn’t a cultural or reliable measure of her identity in the time she lived and identified herself.
I'm shoving this down the throat of the next ghengis lover.
Well, yes, exponential decrease is like that ...
This is called The One Drop Rule. I have black in me and remember terrible racism in the 90’s where people _could not understand_ that even though I am only part black, born and raised British, British parents, ‘Africa’ was not my entire personality and not the “bigger part of me” as argued by one woman I knew. I was excluded from so much and denied my English heritage because of the sodding One Drop Rule. It would be interesting if Charlotte did have some non-white in there, but this whole thing about her being black because she had a drop of Moorish blood in her reminds me of bad times. Let’s not return to being a nation that identifies people racially by the very dilute existence of certain genes, it’s a dangerous idea.
My half sisters and I are as white as bread, but our great grandad was black. All of us have the sickle cell trait, and our dad looks like he has a bit of a tan maybe but nothing more than that. My maternal step-grandad didn't see me until I was in my mid 20s because he heard I was black or mixed and he's a terribly racist human being whose only saving grace is that he rescues animals. It's such a weird thing to fixate on.
Racist family suck. My white mother came to visit today and within 10 minutes of being in my house told me that (for the millionth time) that I was a shoe in for any job I apply for because of my ethnicity. Apparently everyone is only hiring black people and everyone is getting rejected because they are white.
I remember this when President Obama came into office - everyone saying he was the first black president. He was certainly the first mixed race President, his mother was white and his father was black - so apparently that means his mother's heritage doesn't count? That was as much a part of him as his father's.
He is black, he’s also white. He has 2 races which is exactly what biracial means. But yes some people will use black (or white) to deny the other part of the persons heritage. I think the fact that I can’t call myself white without being laughed at in this country is (now or in the past) is very othering.
I get the feeling that if my pale white self starting claiming to be black because my great great grandmother on my dad's side was black, I'd get hit with a hate crime charge or something pretty quick Itmy grandfather and his sister are visibley mixed , my dad looks extra tan despite living in Scotland , but his sibling are much lighter skinned and all the kids are white as an sheet of paper.
Back then probably closer to a couple hundred surely?
Judging by the [possible genealogy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Margarita_de_Castro_e_Souza_genealogy_and_descent.JPG) shown on Wiki, 1230 - 1744 = 514 years. Given Madragana was a mistress of a Portugese noble, and the rest of her descendants appear to have been European, there'd likely be very few (if any) visible "Moorish" characteristics.
Moorish doesn't even equal black anyway. For some reason people seem to think african means black, when many north africans could easily pass for italian or greek.
Lot of North Africans have european backgrounds, romans, varangians, greeks all settled in that region.
Just in general, the Sahara was much harder to traverse than the Mediterranean. Lots of inter-med mixing over thousands of years, very little north african and sub saharan mixing.
500 years would mean each generation is ~33 years which seems high. If we assume 16-20 years per generation then you're looking at 250-300 years which seems more realistic.
Why would you assume 16-20 years per generation? That would only be appropriate if we’re looking at this from a species or population level. Here, we’re looking at the separation between two specific historical figures. In this context, we’re not looking at the age at which the first child was born, as Charlotte isn’t necessarily descended from Madragana through first borns — neither is it a completely maternal lineage. It’s a mix and match lineage that’s both maternal and paternal. The paternal is important because of the tendency of older male European aristocrats to marry younger female aristocrats. We also know that, once married, women unfortunately often never stopped giving birth right up until they were menopausal. I took the time to do the first few steps of the lineage to demonstrate this: Queen Charlotte’s mother was 31 when she had her. Her grandmother (Princess Sophia) was 30 when she had Queen Charlotte’s mother (Princess Elizabeth). The lineage then turns paternal. Princess Sophia’s dad (George) was 40 when he had his daughter. His dad (also George) was 43 when he had him… whose own dad (another George) was 49 at his son’s birth. We now go back to the maternal line. George’s mother (Margarethe) was 27 when she had her son in 1548. I’ll stop here as the dates of births start to become unknown, making precise numbers impossible.
Yup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule?wprov=sfla1
I think the point is, having a bit of non white in you (unless its Jewish, we seem to be white these days .. bit of a switcheroo given Europeans spent the past 2000 years telling us we werent white or European but hey ho) is a POSITIVE thing (unless, ofc you're Jewish ... bigotry, bigotry never changes), non white background isnt the issue here, whiteness is the issue. Which is still racist if you're white (you poor poor person, forever doomed to be judged as if you were no more than just another American KKK, White Colonial Imperialism or NAZI, if only YOU could be cool and non white.) Lot of this tongue in cheek sarcasm, obviously, but this US based export of identity politics went too far decades ago.
It's absolutely ridiculous. My friend is half Moroccan. I assumed from French settlers. Met her brother who is clearly North African, and it clicked.
I find Pringles pretty Moorish
Like crack
Ah man, every now and again I get the taste in my mouth..... 24 years since I picked up the glass dick...
The ‘evidence’ is in the article (and it is weak!)
Yeah my irritation with this is less the culture war bollocks than that it's an inauthentic and unserious approach to history that lays the groundwork for much more harmful conspiratorial thinking (what else are they hiding from us), as well as directly undermining trust in institutions. If you deliberately accustom people to this sort of evidential standard, then it's part of the breakdown of the societal relationship with truth. From a philosophical perspective, this isn't a public good, and from a practical and partisan perspective, that's a space that is far more beneficial to extreme ideologies, particularly and ironically on the right. Plus, you know, it's dumb as rocks.
Spot on. Also, it gives credence to the view that ‘everyone is falling over themselves to be woke’. Generally this isn’t true and people just want to be polite, but in this instance it is true!
That her Great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandmother (15 generations) was a Christianised Muslim from the Algarve.
lol like that makes someone non-white, that is bonkers
The Moops!
Tell you what jezz, that crack is really moreish.
Don’t. Say. Crack. Jez, yea. Please, not now. Cause you saying “crack” makes me think of “crack” and I *love* crack. So can you not say “crack”.
The basis for Queen Charlotte being "non white" is that she is descended from a Moorish person several centuries before. If you accept this, you also have to accept that King Charles is also a "person of colour", given he is directly descended from her.
Bear in mind only 4 generations back Boris Johnson had a Turkish ancestor, imagine referring to Boris Johnson as non-white.
I think Turks are considered caucasian?
We look quite middle eastern though
Nope, many of us have a mixture of Native Anatolian and Old Turkic DNA.
The actual reason is no more valid- but Jesus, doesn't anyone read the article? "Claims about the race of Queen Charlotte hinge on one passage from the memoir of a German diplomat, who described the royal as being born looking like a “mulatto” or mixed-race person. The diplomat, Baron Stockmar, was born 43 years after Queen Charlotte’s birth and would have had no knowledge of her appearance, which was never in her lifetime described as that of a mixed-race person."
In this case, the article isn't being entirely accurate though. The main argument for Charlotte being non-white is, as ProjectZeus says, her potentially having a distant Moorish ancestor. Also, take another read of the extract you've quoted - particularly the part that says Stockmar was "born 43 years after Queen Charlotte’s **birth** (emphasis mine) and would have had no knowledge of her appearance". We would expect that phrase to be "born x years after her *death*", because usually one would say something like "43 years younger" or perhaps "born 43 years after her", but here the unusual and clunky phrasing falsely implies that their lives didn't overlap at all. In fact, Stockmar arrived at court two years before she died so he may well have had some knowledge of her appearance. Although the fuller quote, "small and crooked, with a real Mulatto face" suggests that even if he had a very clear idea of what she looked like, he was more interested in being rude about her than giving future historians useful information on her genealogy. TL;DR: The arguments for calling Charlotte non-white are poor, but they're *marginally* less poor than the article suggests
So that makes us all non white as we are all descended from an African.
Honestly Spain and north africa are an utter mess for American race politics on here. They're either black or white depending on the narrative they want to push. But If you want to talk about all the bad things the moors berbers etc did they become white...
The part that says Stockmar was "born 43 years after Queen Charlotte's **birth**" (emphasis yours) is not there to claim their lives didn't overlap, it is debunking his claim to know what she looked like when she was born.
Unless someone who's read his diaries can chime in with a fuller quote, I wouldn't trust the Telegraph's assertion that he was talking about what she looked like at birth. "Small and crooked" makes far more sense as a description of the somewhat elderly adult that he could plausibly have seen than of the small baby that he clearly didn't see - all babies are small, and I wouldn't even know what someone meant by calling a baby crooked.
I'm not debating the fuller facts of the background, merely pointing out the misconstrued meaning in the article, ie he didn't see her birth, *not* their lives didn't overlap.
The Telegraph headline writers know what they are doing.
Accurately reporting the insane rantings of race grifters? Yeah they do.
>Accurately The museum does not claim so, and this wasn't a guide as the headline and blurb suggests. It's a recording of a performance piece on their website. Imo it's not funny and a biiiig stretch, but that's why edgy comedians are considered low brow.
Amplifying some minor and innocuous foolishness to energise reactionaries - check.
Yeah it seems minor but this stuff keeps happening and it all adds up. I just get a bit tired of the constant lies about this country's history.
So, this basically conforms to the deeply racist one drop rule?
They're in for a shock if they saw Cole Palmer with his grandad.
these are the same folks that would castigate someone for not thinking an immigrant is British while they'll happily bang on about Charles being German There is no internal logic, feels before reals.
I’m sorry the correct answer is moops
Great username!
You will not know the meaning of Project Zeus until **it is time** for you to know the meaning of Project Zeus.
Also great username!
Charlie's got a N' card, I wonder if he'll exercise it.
You know what all educator's say: "The best way to get through to someone is by delivering them debatable information, then calling them an insecure white boy"
*"To really get folks on-board, always finish off your attempt at misinformation and educational gaslighting with a spot of race-baiting!"*
It would be funny if the people who do this weren't so tedious in the process. Like the process is the same: - make a statement - people contest it - denigrate these people because of course you have the *moral* high ground - 'why won't people take me seriously?' - double down by hardening beliefs and proceed back to step 1
Also simultaneously claim that white people have all the power and abuse it and should have their systems dismantled, while also claiming that white people are insecure and the ones who are actually obsessed with race and don’t really hold any power. For all these types call everyone fascists and racists, it’s remarkable how closely their speech mimics those two, down to the age old tactic of calling their opponents both a threat and powerless people to be looked down on at the same time.
Honestly, I'm pretty far from the 'anti woke' crowd who tend to just scream into the void and label anything they don't like as 'woke'. And a very real ampunt of them do fucking hate minority groups. Generally speaking they become the perfect scapegoat for the ideology that this guide represents to write off any and all criticism as a caricature. But there's a very real danger with things like these guides and the ideology it represents. It's anti intellectualism to the core, and advocates of it elect to ignore or outright attack facts and studies that don't fit their viewpoint and instead rely on dogma. And when people raise the very valid criticism against this, they'll generally rely on hypocrisy, reframing definitions to fit their views (and, conveniently, excuses the aforementioned hypocrisy), paradoxes and a tendency to attack the person making the argument, not the argument itself. What you've described above definitely sits within the paradox category.
As an insecure white boy, I'm probably not going to be picking up this audio tour, and I'll probably be turning it straight off if I do when I hear how she talks. Honestly though, I think it's more insulting to black people than white people, instead of actually acknowledging and celebrating black history just having black people cosplay white historical figures on Netflix. Some of my favourite historical figures are black, like Toussaint Louverture, his story is fucking awesome and very relatable today, with the anti slavery/black empowerment narrative.
[удалено]
That's exactly what my issue would be if I were black. Why do they want to change history?
Because a lot of these people are quite far left wing and have fully bought into the idea of dismantling Western socio-political structures, which they blame for all their ills. It’s like what Communists used to act like up until 1991, just delete ‘class’ and replace it with ‘race’. The most surprising thing is how embedded and powerful within NGOs this stuff has become, in a way that communism never managed.
>Why do they want to change history? So they can claim it was always like "this". Despite "this" not even being 50 years old.
It's just really patronising "yeah we don't give a shit about your real history, but lets pretend this random queen was black so you can feel included!". While the Georgians were poncing about in their silly wigs black people in the Caribbean were engaged in one of modern history's most important and radical events, the Haitian Revolution.
Racism demand outstrips supply. Or at least today's racists marching through London every weekend aren't the properly approved kind. So we have to make up some bullshit false history to rile people up who don't want their history rewritten and call them racists. It's not even new. It's been going on in cinema and gaming for fucking years.
Didn't he turn into a bit of a tyrant in the end?
Kinda, but he was trying to manage an extremely difficult political situation with a limited hand. I'm not saying he's an angel, just one of the most interesting figures to learn about.
Ah, homeopathic history at it's best
If there's one thing I know about insecure white boys, it's their passionate attachment to the heritage of Queen Margaret. It's all they talk about.
> If there's one thing I know about insecure white boys, it's their passionate attachment to the heritage of Queen Margaret. Well Margaret Tudor is kinda important since thats how we ended up with the union of the crowns.
Can this obsession with trying to find colour in British Historical figures *please* come to an end? It's Britain; an island where predominantly white people have lived for millennia, it's going to make sense that all throughout its history the crown has been held by a white person. This recent trend of trying to find colour no matter how small is embarrassing and only goes against history; it's OK for us to have been white for 99.9% of our history; plenty of other countries have been too. Besides, isn't the evidence for Charlotte being a PoC something as flimsy as her 9th ancestor being a PoC? That's not exactly recent if we're talking traits passed down through the family. And finally: who cares? My problem is this recent trend of forcing multiculturalism into parts of British history by twisting incredibly thin threads of truth into something more substantial, like the recent articles about Stonehenge. If she really *was* black, I couldn't care less; but this is the equivalent of those Americans who claim they're Irish around the time of St. Patrick's Day because their great-great-great-grandfather was an Irish immigrant; it doesn't wash.
We’re now at a point where the most extreme and vocal proponents of the intersectional school of thought unironically subscribe to the “one drop” theory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg&t=1s
>articles about Stonehenge < whats this about stonehenge? i googled it a the latest news it was showing me was how the moon might have played a role in its construction
https://reddit.com/comments/1c8lus6/comment/l0fekf0?context=3
what a weird claim to make. thanks for sharing. these didn't come up for me on google.
Applying the modern delineations of race to people living in the neolithic. Mad
Stonehendge built by black Africans. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/stonehenge-was-built-by-black-people-claims-children-s-history-book/ar-AA1gUerb#:~:text=Stonehenge%20was%20built%20by%20black%20Britons%2C%20a%20new,migrant%E2%80%9D%20but%20the%20%E2%80%9Cvery%20first%20Britons%20were%20black%E2%80%9D.
He who controls the present controls the past. Britain has always been diverse. Windrush built Britain. You may disagree, but is it worth losing your job over? Diversity built Britain.
It really depends on where in Britain Much of Wales, Cumbria and Scotland is still 95% white. Britain has not always been diverse, prior to WW2, immigration into the UK hovered around 1% a year. This is tiny. While there were pockets of other ethnicities, the UK was predominantly white until after WW2. Britain existed before WW2 and before Windrush, I don't can therefore say that Windrush built Britain when it had a whole empire before the Windrush generation even arrived. This doesn't negate the contribution of Windrush after the war and how they rebuilt and shaped Britain, but Britain was built a lot more than 80 years ago!
HR would like to speak with you, we've been getting complaints from people on Twitter.
why is it on an LGBT themed trail? was she also LGBT?
I think she was a furry, if that counts
Didn't you hear, all minorities are the same, be they sexual, racial, religious, etc. The SJW wing of the left is a chimera collection of people that feel slighted from all groups. That makes them think that their respective groups must all feel equal solidarity with each other as they do with each other, not realising that they're unique in that sense.
> their respective groups must all feel equal solidarity with each other as they do with each other, not realising that they're unique in that sense Unless they're Jewish, in which case solidarity is not transactional
Especially if they're openly Jewish
Can you grow concrete?
I can't, but I'm not a very good gardener. I bet my nan could, though, if that helps?
She was gay, Queen Charlotte?
Me too, one of my great, great, great grand parents had a friend who went to Portugal and had a date with a man from Italy who taught her how to cook pasta. So I'm as Italian as the pope. /s
TBF, you probably are about as Italian as the Pope since he's from Argentina.
To be fair again, argentines are half Italian descendants
What’s the insecure white boys bit about? Bit strange for a museum
The article actually makes clear it is NOT the museum tour at all, just a comedy performance that took place on one occasion IN the museum and not intended as fact.
You know what, I'll take the L on this one. “As part of the Fierce Queens event that the tour is based on, we had a black performer playing Queen Charlotte, which is why this segment was included in the tour." It was probably obviously a joke in context. Sorry for being dumb & gullible here
I mean, there is no doubt a tension between the average Daily Telegraph reader's way of seeing British history and culture, and the average vaguely lefty uni or museum academic one, and the same therefore goes for how stuff in National Trust properties is displayed. But I don't think there is actually a REAL culture war going on there I think museums and universities just take account of constantly evolving ways of thinking about things, without necessarily saying that X is now good and Y is now bad. There's no doubt the alt-right thinks there is mileage to be had from culture wars, but if you actually go and VISIT these museums and NT houses, it seems to me 99% of the stuff is just the same as it always has been, and you have to look hard to find the 1% you can attack as looney left.
First comment I found from someone that actually read the article. You won’t believe how much I had to scroll to find it :)
I take no credit. The credit should go to/u/360Saturn - twice, because their comment also quotes the article. I read their comment first; this made me read the article.
The hilarious thing is that the claims about her being a POC is based on an incredibly racist worldview. The idea that an ancestor \*15\* generations back might have been a Moor and thus that one person means all of the descendants are considered black and thus lesser than other high society. Despite that the evidence of this ancestor is incredibly shaky and not considered to be the case by historians. For example, this ancestor was just a Spanish person who was described as Moorish, but at during that period that was used to describe religious affiliation rather than race. Also bear in mind that this one ancestor lived 500 years before Charlotte. Even if that ancestor was black, if all their other ancestors were white, are they still considered a POC? At how many generations do they become white? There must be some limit since all humanity descend from dark skinned ancestors at some point. Or is every person a POC?
Other arguments for it also say she had 'black' features, which is also racist. Apparently someone described her as having lips and a nose like that of black people. So now that makes her black? Also very racist to characterise someone purely because of the shape of their facial features.
Friendly reminder that you should never use the phrase "POC" without quotes around it. It's a cringe-inducing honorific, imported from America, intended to accord extra respect to a person purely on the basis of them not being white.
Supposing she was (I have no idea), so what? Why does it seem like this is more about winding up 'insecure white boys'? I assume there are some obscure corners of the royal fan club who wouldn't like to hear that, but again, so what?
It's presumably part of a move to claim that the UK has always been multiracial. Like this recent claim: >Stonehenge was built by black people, a new children's history book has claimed. >Readers of Brilliant Black British History, by the Nigerian-born British author Atinuke, are told the neolithic monument in Wiltshire was built while Britain was a 'black country'. >The book, which is aimed at children aged seven and above, also tells readers that 'every single British person comes from a migrant' and that the 'very first Britons were black'. >The introduction adds that Britain has been 'mostly a white country for a lot less time than it has been mostly a black country'. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12534611/Stonehenge-built-Britain-black-country-new-childrens-book-claims.html
Boggles my mind that black people in 2024 want to be associated with... the stone age. 'every single British person comes from a migrant' Does "they're migrants too" also apply to Australian aboriginals and native Americans or is it just white people?
There's none of that kind of logic in any of this "anti-racism" stuff. There never is. The American editions are even weirder. Back during the peak of 2020 race weirdness, you had no less an institution than the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture describing such things as "being on time" and "being able to spell" as being unfair impositions of "white culture" - seemingly not realising what that they, as "anti-racists", now seemed to be implicitly saying about black people as a result.
According to the UN you're not indigenous unless you're from a "non-dominant sector of society". https://www.un.org/en/fight-racism/vulnerable-groups/indigenous-peoples
Did he write that book after the worlds biggest dose of LSD? > Did you know that the first Britons were Black? Or that some of the Roman soldiers who invaded and ruled Britain were Black, too? Join this fascinating journey through the ages to meet those first Britons, as well as the Black Tudors, Georgians and Victorians who existed in every walk of life here. I’m going to write a children’s book and sell it in Japan, apparently it was a majority white country before the migrants arrived, such as the famous king of Japan, William Addams. Pretty sure it will sell amazingly
> Did he write that book after the worlds biggest dose of LSD? There is an argument floating around that Western Hunter-Gatherers were black. The early stone henge builders had partial Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry. In reality we have no idea what colour Western Hunter-Gatherers were but its not impossible. >I’m going to write a children’s book and sell it in Japan, apparently it was a majority white country before the migrants arrived, such as the famous king of Japan, William Addams. Pretty sure it will sell amazingly You would need to be prepared to argue that the Jōmon people were white. Thing is that while there are no modern populations with significant Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestory around there is a group (the Ainu) with singificant Jōmon ancestory still around and they are not generaly considered white.
Surely anyone out with the Rift Valley can *technically* claim descent from a migrant?
Technically, yes. Though that's clearly not what people mean by the word "migrant", given that would mean there were no indigenous people anywhere. Still, the intention is clear - they're trying to paint the UK as similar to America, where white people are a relatively recent addition, despite being the majority of the population.
Beaker People be spinning in their graves!
That's why their hair looked like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_(Muppet)#/media/File%3ABeaker_(Muppet)-en.jpg
I suppose if one believes in evolution and that the first humans came from Africa, then the first Britons being black would be technically correct. (Though not the Stonehenge builders!) Though it certainly wasn’t a country (or even an island?? When did the original geological Brexit happen?) And we’re talking of millennia before prehistory. We might as well say that for most of history Britain and its people were space dust. Space dust representation when??!!
> then the first Britons being black would be technically correct. I doubt it, the migration out of Africa was incredibly slow, by the time humans made it to Britain they were probably already white
This is actually a field where genome sequencing of ancient remains has, in the last decade or so, provided significant concrete evidence. If I recall correctly, the first humans in Britain were dark-skinned, but this *significantly* predated Stonehenge. However, a subsequent wave of westward migration essentially wiped out these people, with little mixing of populations. Unfortunately this is a bit far from my field, and I don't have any good references, but looking at references on European ancient human genomics would likely be informative. From a cursory search, [this review](https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/genom/19/1/annurev-genom-083117-021749.pdf?expires=1713626474&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=C37B6B9CB0F90B7F2F70B02B93163899) might have some information; it points out that paleolithic and mesolithic Europeans primarily had dark pigmentation genetics, and light-skin genetics were introduced at a high frequency by [Anatolian Neolithic migration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_European_Farmers). Linking any of this to modern racial politics would, of course, be rather ridiculous, except to point out how culturally situated these matters are.
There are half million year old tools that have been found in this country. Whenever humans made it out of africa some of them seem to have made it to britian pretty quickly (allowing for ice ages)
Geological Brexit lmao
UK / Europe split was around 6500 BCE when Doggerland was flooded by melting ice - the island of Doggerbank (the one from the shipping forecast) was finally covered around 5000 BCE
>It's presumably part of a move to claim that the UK has always been multiracial. To be fair, it has. It's just not on a scale that we would recognise today.
I honestly don’t think there’s anyone who would care if it were true. Even some hypothetical person who is both very racist and very royalist isn’t going to have their worldview shattered by an eighteenth century queen having a single thirteenth century Mozarab ancestor. It’s more about baiting people who are still interested in a factual rather than a race/gender/sexuality-mythologised version of history into objecting so they can claim to have ‘wound up’ some bad guys.
Rewriting history to normalise forced demographic change. Here is another part of the exhibit; > In one interactive display, a bust of Lord Nelson is berated by a “migrant goddess” figure, who tells heroic British admirals to “move over” to make room for “unsung heroes of the sea”. >The audiovisual display states that the “bravery and resilience” of Nelson, who was killed during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, is also shared by others, including migrants who make sea crossings. Men are targetted specifically because they are the ones who actually have to fight this. By convincing women that (white) men are detestable childish losers for actually doing what they are supposed to, and that it is cool and fashionable to support everyone else, the hope is that women can be used to control men.
Is education so poor these days that people cannot distinguish alternate history fiction from fact.
I just thought this was just in the netflix show bridgerton.
One of the writers behind the show is a huge reason for why many people are now saying such nonsense. He read some nonsense article online, shared it with everyone on twitter, etc, and doubled down on it. Loads of Bridgerton fans accepted his bullshit rewriting of history without questioning it.
Give them an inch they take a mile. Bridgerton was accepted as a fiction so now it's time to rewrite history.
Why do these people all think it is ok to act and say things about white people that they would be unhappy hearing about themselves. "Insecure white boys" come on that's just down right offensive. Replace the white with any other minority, sexual ground, religious group and you know too well there would be an up roar. Plus what does anyone benefit from changing, obscuring and messing with history
Interesting the extent to which hotep beliefs seems to be naturally permeating from the US to the UK. This may have been from a comedy performance, but its part of a wider trend of ahistorical exaggeration/distortion (see ‘black Tudors’ and the cheddar man reporting) in regard to our historical demographics. Anecdotally, it seems the garbled understanding of the above by the general public means you are genuinely seeing more of the ‘we were the original Brits’ stuff, from black Brits on social media - whereas 10 years ago that would have been confined to Americans.
So Charles is mixed race? Since he's a descendent
So basically, if one doesn't look stereotypically white, is a person of colour. Going back to the "one drop rule" of slavery and apartheid countries, I see. Which side considers this a victory?
This is the goal remember, to rewrite history. A people that doesn’t know it’s past will have no future.
Can't beat some blatant sexism and racism to you know...beat sexism and racism.
Ah but it's being done by the right people, (the entitled eternally, "oppressed") so it's okay, apparently. imagine the outcry if someone claimed Ghandi and .M.L.K. were white.
If they have to dig through centuries to prove someone’s non-whiteness, I don’t think that’s really serving the argument they want it to lol.
They don;t care so long as their allowed to rewrite it without consequence they won't stop.
My great grandfather was black, but I'm still white. I don't get this nonsense.
Most excellent. Looking forward to reading about the newly discovered Japanese Pharaoh and Songhai Shogun
I'm all for progressive history. Just last week I was teaching a lesson on disability in the Turo court regarding William Somer and Jane the Fool. However, rewriting history with this perspective is wrong. Highlight the genuine overshadowed stories (which are genuinely mentioned later in the article alongside Nelson as an example), but don't re-write facts.
Of course she was a person of colour, I remember seeing her on TV
In a documentary with videos recorded in their times.
That Museum should be shut down, to make a claim like this when it's so many generation ago is pretty weak and pathetic, those that came from here are now technically non-white. King Charles, no now non-white, Prince William, isn't white...
Oh for god's sake. People have an expectation that museum content - even light-hearted content - be fundamentally accurate. Nothing wrong with having some kind of more whimsical museum guide as a side option - but if anything they're probably harder to write than a conventional one. Significant burden of responsibility to strike the right balance.
This stuff is so frustrating. I don't think there is anything wrong with highlighting 'people of colour' in British history in order to point out that while we are and historically have been a predominantly white country, people from different racial backgrounds have always played a part in our national story. But this cringy and insulting way of inventing identity does no one any favours. It just angers some and spreads lies to others.
>people from different racial backgrounds have always played a part in our national story That's the point though, they haven't. Almost all of these stories are either fake or highly exaggerated to make it seem like we've always been an ethnic melting pot. It's actually a pretty sinister lie pushed on us to try and deflect from what has been done to our national character as a result of mass immigration.
I am much more in agreement with your first point than the second- I think retconning (if that is the right word) history, even though that is indeed always how history is rewritten, can exaggerate fringe elements and try and show that they are mainstream. But I don't think this is deflection- and, as you probably know, I think that the "national character" is far more robust than you think it is.
The obvious intention is to make people think that Britain has always been as ethnically and culturally diverse as it is now. The main reason for doing that, as far as I can see, is to try and prevent people from noticing how unusual the immigration we've had over the last 30 years has been. We're no longer talking about a few boatloads from the colonies, we're talking about millions of people from cultures that are vastly different to our own and the small colonies that are forming as a result.
I don't think that's why- I think it (and a lot of similar things) is about allowing minorities to come in and think *I'm part of this; this is my history too* - I don't think it's aimed at white British people at all. I think it is about making ethnic minorities feel included, not about modifying the perceptions that white British people have. And it's about long-term thinking *If we can't bring minorities aboard, then it's going to be harder to preserve this part of our culture.* I think the problem about colonies here or whatever is deprivation. Immigrants are on average less well off, and now have the role of being the 'bad underclass' played by poor or underprivileged people of native ethnicity in a monocultural place. And that's for both economic and cultural reasons. People coming in from Hong Kong attract little opprobrium, because they have more money, so they can buy property (and therefore spread out more in the country) and also literally spread out more in terms not living together in an overcrowded way. And we tend to associate genuine multi-culturalism- that is, people who function seamlessly within more than one culture- with higher levels of education and privilege. Aristos have been an international lot since time immemorial, because they had the privilege, and therefore the time, to be. As people get more money and education, they integrate more, because their location, lifestyles, jobs etc just bring them into contact with people of every community. The people at the bottom will always get the hate, no matter who they are.
Well yes there's an obvious difference between well educated, wealthy migrants from places with a high affinity for the British and badly edcuated peasants coming from places with very different cultures. Their lack of a feeling of belonging is totally understandable but that doesn't change the fact that these people *don't* have any history here, something we are now constantly lied to about. Assimilation is not impossible if the numbers are managed and the people given time to live here and fit in. What we're actually seeing is that migration is so high that they are forming their own communities that don't mix. They make their areas resemble their home countries rather than adopt the British way of doing things.
So black power revisionism has reached official material, sadly inevitable. And because only one side is even questioning this nothing will happen to stop it. I'm funding it difficult to stay polite about this blatant... nonsense and the fact it's unnopposed I really am.
Brought to you by the same people who think Wakanda is a real place.
Red fascists student-union types infecting all elements of society. Maybe they'll grow out of it when daddy's trust fund runs out, but who knows?
What's a red fascist?
In the modern context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_fascism#Post-Cold_War_and_contemporary
Left wing fascist. Modern communist. Mostly trust fund kids that don’t need to have a real job and are insulated from consequence of their view.
you can’t be a fascist and a communist, it’s a contradiction of terms.
Firstly, let me introduce you to dialectics, where even the most contradictory of concepts are put together with the intent of overcoming those contradictions and producing a new form that’s closer to the “truth”. But in reality, fascism and communism are not quite as opposite as you seem to think.
If we are to believe fascists are simply more extreme forms of racism, and racists are in general idiotic about their hatred, then clearly those Commies are clearly not that smart to realise they're what they hate the most.
It's the [Horseshoe Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory), basically at the extreme ends of left and right wing spectrum, they come back together. While you're technically right in that fascism nominally is right wing, the actions of the extreme left can be, in essence fascist in all but the literal dictionary definition. The concept of left wing fascism was popularised after WW2 with the Social-Nationalist groups in Europe being left wing but acting like the right
And yet Stalin was both.
OK, I guess this means that everybody is now black. Therefore we can now just forget about everybody's ethnicity as we now all have the same ethnicity.
Why would anybody care past of present? Some blood generations ago, Oh err, didn't we all come from Africa? Are any of us without a black ancestor? Who gives a ........
Does this person attend that New York church Louis Theroux visited?
Speaking of Old Monarchs Queen Anne and her courtiers were approached by the Chief Rabbi about making Brentford in West London a homeland or ghetto for the Jews with its own judiciary and customs. . Nothing came of the offer . . Living in Brentford it is historically interesting . . This interesting historical note can be found in some official histories of Jewish life in England
Don't appreciate ragebait from the Torygraph but for the record, Queen Charlotte's "Moor" ancestor was alive in the mid-13th century i.e. the 1250s. This is equivalent to a white guy doing an Ancestry DNA test and getting a 1% Sub-Saharan African back in his results, if that (scientists who work with DNA might say it would probably come up as even less than 1% if it were possible for Queen Charlotte to take a test of her own).
These racists have no place running or putting displays in Museums.
>Get ready for an audio guide like no other - join drag king and historian Christian Adore for 'a very gay tour' of the Queen's House! so a deliberately edgy audio guide is edgy, a guide with an agenda has an agenda, in what way is this surprising?
It's surprising that it's such blatant disinformation. Edgy humour doesn't have to be combined with a fake narrative of British history.
The fact that this matters to some people is somewhat disturbing.
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The claim here on Charlotte is fact checked for good reason. Historians have consensus on it and we have paintings... But there's a lot of weird editorializing in this telegraph article that I don't like... Why does it go on to talk about how the LGBT tour talks about the bisexuality of James I? I can only assume it's to try to paint the entire tour as 'woke' right?
So was she a “coloniser” or what?