Cancelling the Anglo-Saxons

There is a lot of angst among historians over the word "Anglo-Saxon." As in this screed from Canadian historian Mary Rambaran-Olm:

The scholarly field that investigates early England supposedly draws its name from the people studied, although the labels ‘Anglo-Saxonists’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon studies’ are fraught with inaccuracies. Today’s field represents more than just literature and linguistics, as archaeologists and historians (material, art, and otherwise) are all under one large umbrella. Historically, Anglo-Saxon studies itself has reinforced superiority of northern European or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ whiteness. Today we see the word misused extensively as a label for white identity despite it being inaccurate. . . . While some scholars outside the US argue that the term’s misuse is an American problem, it is also noteworthy that some British scholars—some of whom identified themselves as ‘English’ or more gallingly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ on academic listservs and across social media—and their institutions remain so intimately wedded to this inaccurate term. The contested term is not neutral. In fact, one cannot be neutral in the face of racism. Scholarly work, even historical studies, are never separate from current social and political realities.

To be fair, yes, "Anglo-Saxon" is a modern term that was rarely seen in early medieval Britain. (Three times, according to this essay.) But the same could be said for "Welsh" and "Irish." If I were teaching a course on this period I would title it "Early Medieval Britain," because only about 30 to 40 percent of the genes of modern British people come from the invaders sometimes called Anglo-Saxons, which means there were a lot of other people around. But some of the people opposed to "Anglo-Saxon," including Rambaran-Olm, prefer "English" or "England", which are equally rare before about 1000 AD and equally exclusive of many residents of the island.

And, to be fair in another way, "Anglo-Saxon" does have a long history of use in racist discourse. But do you know what other word has a long history of use in racist discourse? "White." The author of our screed feels that while the racist term "Anglo-Saxon" is so awful that it must be banned, she is obsessed with "whiteness" and injects it into every other sentence. How is "white" any better than Anglo-Saxon? This is one of my main beefs with woke anti-racism, that so many of its advocates are as obsessed with race as the KKK. 

But wait, there's more. As the term was used by racists, Anglo-Saxon never just meant "white," nor did it mean "northern European whiteness." It meant "white northern European Protestant." Among those it pointedly excluded were Irish and Jews. It seems weird for a British historian not to know that Anglo-Saxon rose to prominence, not as a term for discriminating white from black – "white" worked perfectly well for that – but as a way to cast undesirable whites out of the charmed circle. In her world, there are only "whites" and "people of color," and anybody who is white but wants to claim a legacy of oppression is a fraud.

I have lived long enough to marvel over all the things that people like Mary Rambaran-Olm seem to have forgotten. I have written here several times that nobody cares any more about the pioneers of second-wave feminism, the women who stormed the corporate world and fought for equal pay. These days they're just priveleged white people, or, if they make any noise, Karens. And how could any British historian not pause to remember that just fifty years ago Northern Ireland was torn apart by a near civil war between Protestants and Catholics, spawned in part by discrimination against Catholics harsher than anything "people of color" endure in England today? Plus, you know, the Holocaust.

Too many modern anti-racists are exclusively focused on the gap between "white people" and everyone else, as if that were the only axis of oppression in history. People who care about justice need to look up from their petty obsessions and extend their care to all of  humanity.