Identity — defining and refining it

Hiro asked for this page after a thread of his own drifted from “what is the definition of English as a people” into Jews as an ethnoreligious group, nation vs nation-state, self-determination, network states, and finally what actually grounds identity. He says the last part reads as a way forward. This page keeps it.

Two halves, both needed: what you are given (ethnicity, race, nationality, ancestry, religion) and what you intentionally build (narrative, moral horizon, recognition, practice). The first half is a set of axes that are constantly confused with each other. The second half is the work.

Part 1 — The given: four axes, not one

The single most useful idea in the whole thread: the words people argue about most violently are separate dimensions, and most of the argument is people answering different questions and thinking they disagree. The UK census already treats them as separate questions — ethnic group in one, national identity in another — which is why a person can tick Black and English on the same form without contradiction.

• Ancestry / descent — who your people were. The raw lineage.
• Ethnicity — the ONS definition: “the social group a person belongs to, and either identifies with or is identified with by others, as a result of a mix of cultural and other factors including language, diet, religion, ancestry, and physical appearance.” Note “a mix” — skin colour is one ingredient, not the definition.
• Race — perceived physical difference, read by others. A social construct, not a biological category: human genetic variation is continuous and mostly within populations, not between them.
• Nationality — a legal status: the state that recognises you (nation = a people; nation-state = the state that claims to be its home).
• National identity — belonging and self-description: English, British, Hong Konger. Chosen, claimed, contested; not the same question as the one above.
• Religion / worldview — belief and practice. Fuses with ethnicity in an ethnoreligious group.

Diagram 1 — the axes you are given, and the three conflations that break the argument

flowchart TB
  subgraph G["What you are given — inherited, not chosen"]
    ANC["Ancestry and descent — who your people were"]
    ETH["Ethnicity — background: shared culture, language, history, self-identification"]
    RACE["Race — perception: physical difference read by others; a social construct, not biology"]
    REL["Religion — belief and practice; fused with ethnicity in an ethnoreligious group"]
    NAT["Nationality — law: the state that recognises you"]
    NATID["National identity — belonging: what you call yourself, English or British or Hong Konger"]
  end
  CONFL["Conflation — treating two different axes as one thing"]
  F1["Error 1: race read as ethnicity — skin colour as a barrier to a northern ethnic identity"]
  F2["Error 2: ethnicity read as national identity — only the ethnically English may be English"]
  F3["Error 3: religion read as nationality — Jew treated as equal to Israeli, or the reverse"]
  ANC --> CONFL
  ETH --> CONFL
  RACE --> CONFL
  REL --> CONFL
  NAT --> CONFL
  NATID --> CONFL
  CONFL --> F1
  CONFL --> F2
  CONFL --> F3
  NATID -.->|"same person, two separate answers"| ETH

Examples from the thread

• English. “The English people” is used in three senses at once: an ethnic group (Anglo-Saxon and Romano-British descent), a cultural identity, and a national one. Polling says the public now runs mostly on the second and third: More in Common found 74% of English people say Englishness is not defined by ethnicity, and IPPR found only 3% think being a “good” British citizen requires white skin. The argument in the press is not really about the facts; it is about which axis the word is allowed to mean.
• “Black English”. Not a formal category anywhere — the census asks ethnic group and national identity as two separate questions, and the ONS tested a combined “Black Welsh” label and found respondents barely noticed it. The label is shorthand that merges two axes.
• Jews. An ethnoreligious group: ancestry, culture and religion bound together, with the modern Western split between “religion” and “ethnicity” not applying cleanly. You can be Jewish and secular; you can convert in, and the convert joins the people, not just the congregation.
• The Sindhi / Hong Kong case in the thread — 26 years in one place, 26 in another, Sindhi descent, born in Hong Kong, resident in the UK. The honest answer is not a single word: ancestry (Sindhi), birth (Hong Kong), residence and national identity (British and/or Hong Konger) are four different axes, and the thread’s own conclusion was “you don’t fit neatly into a single ethnic or national box — which is exactly why the census separates them.”
• Network states. Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State (2022) defines it as “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.” Useful here as a thought experiment about identity without territory — and as a warning: it needs a single moral innovation, a recognised founder and a small, ideologically pure group. A diaspora of millions with three different political projects is not that.

Part 2 — The intentional: identity as work

This is the part Hiro says fits. The thread’s own summary of the anthropology and philosophy is that the “something missing” feeling is not a lost homeland or an unclaimed label. It is four things you have not done yet.

Diagram 2 — the four intentional moves, and what they address

flowchart LR
  subgraph SRC["The material you work with"]
    M1["The given axes — Diagram 1"]
    M2["Displacement and diaspora — identity no longer moored to one territory"]
    M3["The missing term — no single origin story closes the gap"]
  end
  subgraph WORK["The four intentional moves"]
    W1["1. Narrate it — one story across the chapters"]
    W2["2. Articulate a moral horizon — the commitments you cannot step outside of"]
    W3["3. Seek recognition — love, rights, solidarity"]
    W4["4. Practise it — identity is made by what you do, and in the between"]
  end
  OUT["A self you author — rooted by commitment rather than by blood or soil"]
  M1 --> W1
  M2 --> W1
  M3 --> W1
  W1 --> W2
  W2 --> W3
  W3 --> W4
  W1 --> OUT
  W2 --> OUT
  W3 --> OUT
  W4 --> OUT
  OUT -.->|"refines the given, never erases it"| M1

1. Narrate it. Paul Ricoeur and Alasdair MacIntyre: identity is the narrative unity of a life — the story that makes your chapters cohere. The gap is a narrative gap: chapters exist, the story joining them does not yet.

2. Articulate a moral horizon. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: “My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done.” Identity is not a substance you find; it is the set of strong evaluations you can’t step outside of. His answer: you do not find it, you construct it — in dialogue.

3. Seek recognition. Taylor again, with Axel Honneth: identity is dialogical, made with others who recognise you — on three levels: love (close relationships), rights (legal and civic standing), solidarity (shared cultural values). The “missing” feeling is often a recognition deficit: no community sees the full configuration of who you are.

4. Practise it. Fredrik Barth: ethnicity is boundary maintenance — made in the act of distinguishing, not before it. Arjun Appadurai: deterritorialisation — identity flowing through media, capital and migration rather than one place. Homi K. Bhabha: the third space — the in-between is not a compromise between two cultures but a new site where identity is produced.

The philosophical spine behind it. Stuart Hall in Cultural Identity and Diaspora (1990) names the feeling exactly — the “missing term, the great aporia” at the centre of a diasporic identity — and answers it: cultural identity “is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’… it belongs to the future as much as to the past.” Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul” — rootedness being a recognised place in the world, not blood and soil. And Hannah Arendt supplies the warning: rootlessness is the condition in which people accept any identity that offers coherence, at any price.

Where this meets the news — the current row, sourced (alf-news, 2026-10-06)

This part is alf-news’s sourced state of play, not my reading of the politics, and it is kept here because it is the live illustration of Part 1. Markers: PIPE = from alf-news’s own FreshRSS pipeline; SEARCH = general web search. Two items are already filed in the vault by the news pipeline and are linked.

The trigger is a party conference motion, not a court case. The Green Party of England & Wales passed the binding policy motion “Zionism is Racism” at the Brighton conference on 4 Oct 2026, 1,022–813 (first tabled Feb 2026 by Greens for Palestine, which recruited non-members to carry it). Its text calls Zionism an “ethnonationalist” project that “privileges one ethnic group on the basis of the subjugation of others”, to be “treated as any other form of racism”; it backs one democratic state across historic Palestine, and states that anti-Zionism should not be equated with antisemitism and is “not aimed at the religious or ethnic background” of Zionists. The amendments that failed are the crux: Amendment III — shielding members affiliated to “Zionist” synagogues and communal bodies from discipline — lost 684–1,026, as did the softer single-state wording; both were backed by leader Zack Polanski, who missed the vote to campaign in a byelection. [PIPE: Green Party feed, Sky News; SEARCH: New Statesman, Guardian, Jerusalem Post] → vault: 261004 Green Party Adopts Zionism is Racism Motion (Brighton)

Watch the axes slide — this is the Part 1 pattern, live.

• Backers put it in race: an ideology, explicitly not a people.
• Opponents put it in nationality / self-determination, and in religion: Movement for Progressive Judaism — “Jewish self-determination is a right. Declaring it racist is an attack on Jews”.
• Israel’s foreign ministry puts it in the IHRA frame: “a clear antisemitic text according to the IHRA definition, as it denies the Jewish people’s right to self-determination” — and banned Polanski from entering Israel.
• A fourth axis, belief, is where the courts are: Equality Act 2010 s.10, Bristol v Miller [2026] EAT 84 (4 Aug 2026) upheld anti-Zionism as a protected philosophical belief, holding it “coherent to describe as racist” an ideology of a state “for only one race of people” — with the caveat that the university conceded no finding that the claimant’s comments were antisemitic. That last point is exactly why quoting a judgment, not a headline, matters.
• Reaction: Chief Rabbi Mirvis, “poisonous antisemitism… a threat to British Jews and to Britain”; Board of Deputies, the Greens are now “an extremist party”; the Jewish Greens chair may leave. 18 Labour MPs complained to the EHRC; 9 referred it to Sussex Police; the EHRC says it will “consider each complaint carefully” and has not opened an investigation. The European Green Party “unequivocally distance[d]” itself, and Germany’s Green co-leader called it “intolerable and unacceptable”. [PIPE: Channel 4 News, Times News, Sky News; SEARCH: Jewish Chronicle, BBC, Guardian, Reuters]

The UN layer inside the window: the UN General Assembly endorsed the France/Saudi-drafted “New York Declaration” resolution on 12 Sep 2026 by 142–10–12, reaffirming the Palestinian right to self-determination (the resolution number is not stated in the reporting alf-news could retrieve). [SEARCH]

The Englishness strand is the same argument on another axis. Sunak’s Sunday Times column (20 Sep): “Britishness must not be turned into a DNA test… if you’re born and brought up in England, what are you other than English?” — Rees-Mogg: “everyone who has a British passport is equally British or English… a mongrel people, not an Aryan master race”. Against that: Reform’s Suella Braverman (Question Time, ~2 Oct) insisting she cannot be English, and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain pushing ancestry-linked citizenship — while Nadhim Zahawi says non-white people can be English. Then the opinion data pulls both ways: IPPR (Dec 2025) finds the share who think Britishness is something you’re born with nearly doubled in two years, 19% → 36%, while More in Common finds ~74% say ethnicity does not define Englishness. [PIPE: Sky News, Intentional News; SEARCH: Guardian, IPPR, More in Common] → vault: 261001 BBC Question Time — Immigration, Englishness and Belonging (Tottenham)

Not current — said rather than padded. No census flashpoint in the window: ethnic group and national identity remain separate questions, with recommended tick-boxes due Autumn 2026. Sindhi self-determination surfaced only as the World Sindhi Congress’ Geneva conference (23–24 Sep 2026, UNHRC side-event) — a diaspora-conference strand, not a news row. Network states are not current either. [SEARCH]

My assessment (Alf), one line: the reporting is being fought on axes that cannot meet — belief and law (Equality Act s.10, Miller) against self-determination and nationality (IHRA) — while the race framing is the Greens’ own chosen ground, which is why a legal challenge is the likely next move. That is an argument about which axis the word is allowed to mean, which is precisely what Part 1 says these arguments always are.

The pattern to watch for in any identity story: which axis is being slid into which. Arguments about Zionism, antisemitism, Englishness or immigration are usually arguments in which one side answers the ethnicity question, another answers the national identity question, and a third answers the religion question — and each calls the others dishonest. The tool in Part 1 is what makes the argument legible without having to agree with either side.

Corrections and provenance

• The thread is Hiro’s own material, not a source. It is a Brave Ask conversation — a lead, not evidence. Every load-bearing claim above was checked separately.
• The skin-colour premise in the thread was false and is stated as false there. Skin colour is polygenic (UV, vitamin D, folate, drift, selection), varies more within populations than between them, and sets no boundary on where an ethnic origin can be. “Northern ethnicity” and dark skin are not in tension.
• One figure was off and is corrected here. The thread said 62% of American Jews see their identity as ancestry and culture rather than religion. Pew’s 2020 survey reports ~21% mainly ancestry, ~22% mainly culture, ~10% both — so about half, not 62%. The direction of the claim holds; the number did not.
• Verified figures used above: ONS ethnic-group definition (the “social group a person belongs to…” wording, via ONS/ScotPHO/gov.uk); More in Common’s 74% and IPPR’s 3%; Pew 2020 on Jewish identity; Hall, Weil, Taylor, Ricoeur, MacIntyre, Honneth, Barth, Appadurai, Bhabha, Srinivasan — quotes checked against the texts or published PDFs.

The way forward — my assessment (Alf)

Four moves, in the order that actually works, and none of them needs anyone’s permission:

1. Write the story down once. Not the ancestry tree — the narrative: the two chapters, the inheritance, and what you take from each. A page like this one, but yours, and honest about the parts that don’t fit. Narrative gaps close by writing, not by finding.
2. Name the commitments. Taylor’s move: list the things you genuinely cannot step outside of — the ones that would make your life unrecognisable if traded away. That list is the horizon. It is more durable than any label, because no one else can revoke it.
3. Audit the recognition. Where are you fully seen — love, rights, solidarity — and where are you only partially seen? A recognition deficit is fixable by choosing rooms, not by choosing a new identity.
4. Let practice settle it. Barth’s point is the practical one: identity is made in the distinguishing. Show up where the people are, do the thing, and the belonging gets built as a by-product.

One caution, mine: none of this requires resolving the political arguments about Englishness, Zionism or self-determination. Those are other people’s fights about their axes. Yours is the smaller, more tractable question of the four moves above — and the thread’s own best sentence is that the missing thing was never a place.

Open threads

• News section sourced with alf-news on 2026-10-06 — re-date it when the story moves; it is the only perishable part of this page.
• Offer, not assumed: an Excalidraw version of either diagram, if it’s easier to annotate by hand.
• public: false. This is personal material; it stays in the vault.