To which Kisin responded: “He’s a brown Hindu; how is he English?” A clip of the exchange went viral, provoking a furious wider debate, with critics condemning the claim that a “brown Hindu” could not be English, and myriad racists emerging from the online woodwork to protect the whiteness of English identity.
“There is no consensus on what constitutes an ‘ethnic group’,” the Office for National Statistics observed when describing ethnic categories used in the 2001 census.Ethnic groups are defined by a bundle of attributes such as a shared language, culture, religion, history and ancestry; which of these are significant varies from identity to identity.
After the war, Huxley helped Unesco formulate its first “statement on race” in 1950, which argued that “it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term ‘race’ altogether and speak of ethnic groups”.
An argument about Rishi Sunak’s identity reveals how ideas of ethnicity and race have become conflated.
In a discussion about immigration with the podcaster Konstantin Kisin, the former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson insisted that Rishi Sunak “is absolutely English, he was born and bred here”.
