Passing It On

One night my husband came home fuming. He had been changing trains in Nishifunabashi Station as usual, and had met another foreigner.

"Where are you from?" the fellow foreigner had asked, and my poor unsuspecting husband went and told him.

"British?" the foreigner spat out, in an indisputably American accent. "You mean English?"

My husband nodded.

"Well, I'm Irish. We hate you guys."

Having already had a rough day, my good husband couldn't let this go. "Why?"

"Oh, you know," the American said, gesturing vaguely. "For all that stuff you did."

For what it is worth, my husband was born in 1960 and this man admitted that he was a third generation American.

Now I suspect that this man was exceptional in his narrow-mindedness; that he too may have had a bad day and just wanted to take it out on somebody. But his attitude, though perhaps extreme, is not uncommon in America.

I will never forget the first time I heard an uncle of mine tell another uncle about my husband, whom he had just met. "He's English," I clearly heard him say, "but he's real nice."

Catch that use of 'but'?

One of the legacies passed on from generation to generation in my mother's family was a mistrust of the English. Not the British, the English. This feeling was vague and complex and had many roots, but it was very much a presence. We all knew that the English were elitest. That they had a class system and snubbed people they deemed inferior. They were opportunistic and greedy too, having violated the Union's blockade of Southern ports during the Civil War, thus actively aiding and abetting the South to export their sinful, slavery-tainted cotton. (We were largely Unionists in my family and tried to forget the few rebels in our background.) The English, so the story went, had hired Germans to fight us during the American Revolution, not wanting to sully their own hands. They had done everything in their power to stir up hostile Indians against us; they owned the Kentucky mines that we Welsh, Irish, and Scots had toiled, bled, and even died in. They made their children take difficult tests at an excessively early age and moreover, they didn't even raise them, entirely trusting to nannies and other menials to do their dirty work. Besides, they ate with fish forks and knives; they had a queen, and they put on airs.

It was only after I started working at a British company in Tokyo that I saw how wrong some of these assumptions had been. Plenty of my co-workers -- people we would have identified as English -- were in fact of Irish or other extraction. No one I ever met admitted to being raised by a nanny, and those with poncey, elitist ways were openly mocked. When Prince Charles came to open our school with the soon-to-be Japanese crown prince, those in management were hard put to find any junior staff members to join the welcoming crowd. Big deal seemed to be the prevailing attitude.

Having lived in the U.K. for almost eight years, I have seen for myself that the image many Americans have formed about the British, and the English in particular, is little more than a silly stereotype no more to be trusted than the image many people have of us Americans as ignorant, xenophobic loudmouths. And yet this attitude against the English persists, and people are only too eager to have their prejudices reinforced.

"Where's the place Braveheart happened?" an American tourist in Scotland once asked me. "We want to go visit it."

"You'll have to go back to California," I told him. "Braveheart was pretty much a Hollywood fiction. It's a hodge-podge of things that sort-of happened and a lot of things that didn't."

He didn't believe me. His ancestors were Scotch-Irish too, and like me, he'd been raised to think that the English were a bunch of poncey elitists just itching to subjugate, loot, and rule the world. He cited the British ship owners who benefited from the slave trade, the ships that broke through the blockade to purchase Southern cotton, the English who sent thousands of Irish men and women to work as slaves in the Caribbean.

Hollywood has been quick to capitalize on anti-English sentiment, and people accept what they see in the movies as the gospel truth. Even my kids' classmates point to Braveheart as an example of English cruelty when what it really shows is the power of Hollywood and the tenacity of our own prejudice.

This is not to say that the English haven't done plenty of bad things historically. Of course they have, as have so many countries. But just as I resent the stereotypes held against Americans, I find these prejudices against the English exasperating and baffling. It is as though England's past empire has made the English a safe target for those of us who are looking for others to bash.

We can pass on so much to our children. Knowledge, a love of reading or sports or collecting, family stories, any number of useful tips and ideas. We can and should tell them about history, too; the great wrongs that have been perpetrated in this world should never be forgotten. But why do we choose to pass on our hatred and prejudices? Why is it not possible to discuss the events of history without encouraging our children and grandchildren to nurture the same grievances our ancestors had?

I told the American tourist something I had just learned: that it was a handful of Englishmen and women who started the movement against the slave trade. That a town of newly-freed slaves was named after one of them in Jamaica, that these people dedicated most of their lives to the abolition of slavery.

But he was too busy writing down Bannockburn to listen.