Supposedly some sort of Celtic Studies blog

i will never be able to understand people who say things like "don't bring politics into this discussion" or "don't make the situation political" etc etc. like everything is politicised whether you want it to be or not.

Politics is a daily part of life and anything can be defined as politics if someone doesn't like who's saying it.

this comment i screenshotted was in response to comments asking "why the group needed to become political" when someone asked how to say "free palestine" in scottish gaelic. because yeah politics is in everything, whether you want it to be or not. it's also especially ridiculous to be annoyed at politics in a group about scottish gaelic i.e. a minoritised language, where scottish/wider uk politics are not-infrequently brought up, including discussions around the history, oppression, and revitalisation of the language. like surely those things are all political too yes??

i think a lot about that quote (at least i think it was hozier? i cannot find a link to it now unfortunately) where he's talking about how if a teacher asks a child to draw a home, it's going to look different for each child depending on the politics that effect their life, like their cultural, ecomonic, social, etc backgrounds. some might draw a terraced house, a posh detached house, a caravan, a small flat, etc, even though they are likely not thinking about the politics of what they're drawing at all or even know a lot about politics because they're children. politics permeates everything, whether you are aware of it or not. idk it might not have been hozier and i might be misremembering the full extent of the quote, my health is bad as i'm typing this.

idk, just as someone who's part of minority cultures, disabled, and trans, i have to live every day painfully aware of how politics effects every single aspect of my life (and as a white person, although the effecst of that are in a different way to my minority identities), and it utterly astounds and bewilders me that some people are just so ignorant to the politics effecting their eveyr day experiences, decisions, and actions. and how some of them seem to choose to be ignorant by getting annoyed at anyone who tries to bring up politics.

and the number of people in that comment section going "well regardless of what you think about the situation, don't bring up politics" or "regardless of who you support, this is what the translation is..." and like no!!!! not "regardless of who you support", as a minoritised culture that's suffered at the hands of imperialism, you should be showing solidarity and support with other minoritised peoples who are suffering, yes?? as a celtic language speaker, i don't want to build a community with people who are happy to be silent on the suffering that other peoples are facing (especially as a member of a celtic nation in britain of all places, the place that issued the balfour declaration - it would be insanely hypocritical of us, surely, to cry about our own oppression but then show utter apathy to oppression that we are complicit in. arthur balfour himself was scottish and the uk prime minister at the time, david lloyd george, was welsh.)

i hate that "don't bring politics into this" basically seems to be code for "we can talk about politics and issues that we face, but not the suffering and colonisation of others bc that's Too Much. i only want to talk about things that are comfortable for me and anything i don't like is too political"

At it's most sinister, blood percentage is used in places like America to rob Native peoples of their Native identifies if they have below a certain percentage of Native ancestry. Regardless of if they've lived their entire lives brought up by other Native Americans and are very much a part of their culture. The ultimate aim of this is to completely erase Native American cultures, languages, histories, and anyone who identifies with them. Which is genocide.

I won't tolerate those kinds of people who love to talk about their "Celtic warrior blood" or whatever when that ideology lines up with fascism and eugenics.

Your lived experiences with a culture are what make you a part of said culture, not what's in your DNA. Modern Celtic identity is based on the presence of a modern Celtic language, not on DNA.

It is very frustrating when I see Celtic diasporas (mostly Irish/Scottish diasporas in America) claim they're allowed to call themselves Irish because they have "10.5% Irish blood" or whatever, but then turn around and say that immigrants who actually live in Ireland are not really Irish, or that the children of immigrants who have lived in Ireland their whole lives aren't really Irish either.

I identify as Welsh because I was born and raised in Wales. Quite frankly, it would be weird if I didn't identify with the country I've lived in my whole life. But that doesn't mean I can't also identify with my family's cultures. My family are Cornish, Scottish, and Irish, and I identify as Cornish/Scottish/Irish diaspora because I was raised by my family from those places. I do not identify with those places because of my "blood percentage".

My mam is from Scotland and has an Irish mother and a Scottish father. She also identifies as Welsh because she lives in Wales and it's her home. She has a right to learn Welsh and to call herself Welsh. I also have family in Wales who weren't from Wales originally, and who still don't identify as Welsh. And that is entirely their own choice.

I also have an English great-great-grandfather and an Ulster Scots great-great-grandfather. Whatever "percentage English" or "percentage Ulster Scots" that makes me, I don't care. My English and Ulster Scots ancestors passed away long before I was born. I wasn't raised by them and I don't identify with those cultures. I identify as having English and Ulster Scots heritage, because they are undeniably part of my family history, although they are not really that relevant to me. My English great-great-grandfather moved to Ireland after the famine, and my Ulster Scots great-great-grandfather moved to Scotland around a similar time. Obviously this was long before I was born, and I didn't know them at all. I haven't had any relatives in Northern Ireland since pre-partition, and the culture of the north has changed a lot since then, and I'm not going to claim I somehow have innate knowledge or am some sort of authority on modern things like the Troubles.

The Celtic Nations and languages are for everyone, whether they were born here or if they chose to make a Celtic Nation their home later in life.

We can't cry about how we are oppressed, and then turn around and act absolutely vile towards other minorities.

We can't cry about how hardships in our Celtic Nations forced people to emigrate to other countries, and then turn around and get angry at immigrants coming to the Celtic Nations who are also looking to escape hardships in their home countries.

How hypocritical is that?

My mam's side of the family have only been in Wales since the mid-1980's, and my dad moved later, but because I am white I am seen to "belong" to Wales more than non-white people. I know non-white people who are first language Welsh speakers and whose families have been in Wales for much longer than mine. But their Welshness is brought into question a lot more than mine is. Both them and me are Welsh. Someone who moves to Wales tomorrow and makes this country their home is also Welsh and belongs here just as much as the rest of us.

Although I have had the odd person be weird to me about my cultural background, it's not anything like what I've seen non-white Welsh people receive. It puzzles me how other white people in Celtic Nations can claim they experience racism, when surely they can clearly see how much worse non-white people in Celtic Nations get treated. Do they forget the word xenophobia exists? Or even anti-Irish sentiment or Celtophobia? At worse, white Celtic people claiming they experience racism are actively making it harder for non-white Celtic people to talk about their experiences of racism within the Celtic Nations (that they receive from white Celtic people).

How are you not aware of what other people in your own country are experiencing? Are you really such a self-centred hypocrite that you'll (rightfully) complain about how people ignore the oppression that Celtic Nations and Celtic languages have faced, but then ignore minorities within our nations who are also suffering?

And what does "(whatever)% blood" actually mean practically for you? Culture isn't passed down through DNA, it's something you usually learn from the people raising you (and the country you live in, if the county's culture is different to your family's). A couple of times I've had people tell me I'm not really Welsh even though I've lived my entire life here, just because I was the first person in the family born in Wales. The blood percentage model leaves no room for my Welshness and my lived experience being raised in Wales, just because I'm not "ethnically Welsh".

When I get called "half-Cornish" because my dad is from Cornwall, what does that even mean? Which half of me? People with multiple cultural identities like me should be celebrating them all, not splitting ourselves in to fractions and percentages. We should be celebrating our abundance of cultural experiences and connections, both to the place we're from and the places our families are from.

If you are a member of any Celtic diaspora and want to identify with that place, then go ahead, but you need to actually put in the work to be part of that culture. Learn the history and the language, read the literature, and very importantly learn about the modern culture of that place especially if you have no living relatives from there. The culture will have changed a lot if your ancestors emigrated 100 years or 200 years or however long ago.

Don't just say you're Irish-American/Scottish-American/etc as some sort of claim of being a minority, while putting in absolutely no effort to be a part of or to help save that oppressed culture that you claim to care about. Being a part of a culture means that you have to do the difficult things that are also part of it, not just the easy things that benefit you or that you can use to seem more "interesting" or "exotic" or "minoritised" or whatever.