re: #177 Obdicut

It is a really weird thing that the English started using Anglo-Saxon at all; I’m fairly sure it started as an inherently racist statement about how the English ruled and everyone else sucked, but even so I can’t see where they really got off saying it. The population of the English at the time of the Norman conquest was an Anglo-Romano-Saxon-Jutish-Celto-etc.

It’s really a pretty stupid phrase; completely inaccurate, with ugly racial overtones, conveying no meaning.

In the 19th century the term “Anglo-Saxon” was broadly used in philology, and is sometimes so used at present. In Victorian Britain, some writers such as Robert Knox, James Anthony Froude, Charles Kingsley[19] and Edward A. Freeman[20] used the term “Anglo-Saxon” to justify racism and imperialism, claiming that the “Anglo-Saxon” ancestry of the English made them racially superior to the colonised peoples. Similar racist ideas were advocated in the 19th Century United States by Samuel George Morton and George Fitzhugh.

The article goes on to note that the term is also used to designate occupants of the Anglosphere.

The tricky thing is, when current-day politicos evoke “Anglo-Saxon” tradition, what are they actually incorporating into that set?