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Comment by Earw0rm | Hacker News Reader

I'm not here to accuse you of racism. This isn't X.

But there are some words here which require closer examination. "A people".. "themselves".. "we".. "our past".

Who, exactly, gets to draw the boundary line around a people, or determine finally and canonically how "the" story of "our" past should be told? To whose ancient philosophers, priests and spiritual leaders should we look for wisdom?

This is not to say that stories of the past have no value, but which ones are mine and which are yours, and whose record of past events is the most accurate or conveys the most wisdom, that's much harder to say.

Signed, a UK citizen who is and forever will be pissed off with Brexit, not principally because of the needless economic damage or the lives uprooted, but because someone else decided to cast me as part of a "we" I never asked nor wanted to be part of.

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But views and norms are shared within a country and you can make accurate predictions about people based on their race, country of birth and country where they grew up.

- A white person from Sweden is likely to be pro choice by American standards. (95% chance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Sweden#:~:text=A.... )

- An Egyptian is likely to think that FGM is normal and a good thing. (Over 85% https://egypt.unfpa.org/en/topics/female-genital-mutilation-.... )

- A Lebanese person will probably have antisemitic views (Over 85% chance https://global100.adl.org/country/lebanon/2014)

I recently went to a wedding. Who got drunk and started a fight? Was it the only Irishman?

I would predict that a white British person thinks that gun ownership should be restricted to military and police. A Swiss person will think that everyone should be given a rifle by the government. (Over 95 percent of Swiss households have a fully automatic rifle)

You can group people by ethnicity and nationality, then observe big differences between the groups.

Nationality? Certainly. Race / ethnicity? With extreme caution. Most Black people in the US have enough of a shared history that it's a useful label, for example. But Ghana, Eritrea and Eswatini share almost none, even if their people might be superficially lumped together as ethnically Black African.

But even if you can successfully draw a boundary around a people (Brits? White Brits? And that's before we even get into the whole Welsh-English-Scots thing), which stories do we tell? And how do we update them as - for example - it has become more and more apparent that Britain's relative prosperity during the 18th & 19th centuries was largely at the expense of conquered peoples and Empire territories - many of whose descendants (Indian, Irish, Jamaican or Ghanaian) are now an integral part of society here?

How do we avoid crude re-tellings of WW2 where the Nazis are cast as certain and irredeemable baddies from the beginning, when the greatest of their atrocities - the one that marked them out forever as a greater monster than any of the Western allies, who had a far from unblemished record - wasn't actually known to our leaders until very late on in the war, by which time the Nazis were facing almost certain defeat?

(I'm not saying, to be clear, that the Nazis were anything other than utterly evil - but up until the scale and nature of the Holocaust became apparent, the story did not resolve so cleanly into "good vs evil" as the way it's commonly told today).

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