As many of my readers are probably already aware, on 16 April 2021, Punchbowl News released documents, which revealed that Trump allies in the Republican Party, led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, had founded what they were calling the “American First Caucus,” which was supposed to be dedicated to promoting “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and infrastructure that “befits the progeny of European architecture.”
The caucus was immediately denounced as white supremacist. According to this article from The Washington Post, Greene is now trying to distance herself from the proposed American First Caucus, insisting that the documents Punchbowl News released were “a staff level draft proposal from an outside group.”
This relates to a controversy that has been boiling in the field of medieval studies for years now over the use of the name Anglo-Saxon. The term has been widely used for over two centuries to refer to the English-speaking inhabitants of Britain after the Germanic invasions of the fifth century CE until the Norman conquest in 1066. Now, though, many scholars, especially young scholars and scholars of color, argue that people should avoid applying the name in this way, because it is largely anachronistic, it inherently implies racial whiteness, and it alienates people of color. Below is a discussion of the issue, along with a few of my thoughts on the matter.
A brief disclaimer
Before I dive into this issue, I feel I should clarify that I am not a professional scholar of early medieval England. Instead, I am currently an undergraduate student approaching the end of my third year double-majoring in history and classical studies at Indiana University Bloomington. My main area of study is ancient Mediterranean history. My current intention is to earn a PhD and become a professor of ancient history. (And, yes, I am well aware that, with the current state of the academic job market, I almost certainly don’t have any realistic chance of becoming a professor of anything. I am considering other options.)
The first reason I am writing about this subject is because I am personally interested in the European Middle Ages. Even though it is not my main area, I’ve taken multiple classes on the subject at my university and I’ve written multiple articles on the subject on my blog—the longest of which is this article I originally published in May 2019, in which I attempt to debunk the popular misconception that the Middle Ages as a whole were a uniquely “dark” period of human history.
The second reason I am writing this article is because the debate going on in medieval studies right now over the name Anglo-Saxon is similar to the debate going on in ancient Greek and Roman studies over the name classics, which has similar problematic historical connections and implications. (If you want to know more about my thoughts on the name classics, I recommend this article I wrote in February 2021, in which I address the issue.)
Did the early English call themselves “Anglo-Saxons”?
Before we discuss the question of whether or not the term Anglo-Saxon should be applied historically, we need to address an important historical fact, which is that Anglo-Saxon was never the primary name that the early English used to describe themselves. In fact, they actually almost never called themselves by this name.
When the early English wrote in their own language (i.e., Old English), they most commonly described themselves as Englisc or Anglecynn. When they wrote in Latin, they most commonly described themselves as Angli. These names occur frequently in early English writings. The compound name Anglo-Saxons, by contrast, mostly only appears in the Latin form Angli-Saxones in Latin texts written by authors living in continental western Europe.
In October 2020, the scholar David Wilton published an excellent paper titled “What Do We Mean By ‘Anglo-Saxon’?: Pre-Conquest to the Present” in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Volume 119, Number 4. In this paper, he gives an exhaustive survey of the history of the use and meaning of the word Anglo-Saxon, which, as the subtitle of his paper suggests, spans from the earliest attestation of the name all the way up to the present day.
According to Wilton, the earliest known use of the term Angli-Saxones occurs in the Historia Langobardorum, a history written in Latin sometime between 787 and 796 CE by the Italian Benedictine monk and historian Paul the Deacon. Paul writes in Latin:
“vestimenta vero eis erant laxa et maxime linea, qualia Anglisaxones habere solent.”
This means, in English:
“Their vestments truly were loose and mostly linen, of such a kind as the Anglo-Saxons are accustomed to have.”
Despite this earliest attestation of the name Angli-Saxones in continental Latin, however, the name does not appear in any Old English or Anglo-Latin texts whatsoever until nearly a century later. The earliest known use of the name Angli-Saxones in a text written in Britain is a charter from the year 891 CE that refers to King Alfred of Wessex (lived c. 848 – 899 CE) by the Latin title Rex Anglorum-Saxonum, which means “King of the Anglo-Saxons.”
The name Angli-Saxones, however, very quickly fell out of use in England. Alfred’s son and successor Edward the Elder (lived c. 874 – 924 CE) continued to use the same title as his father, but Edward’s own son and successor Æthelstan (lived c. 894 – 939 CE) dropped the title Rex Anglorum-Saxonum in favor of the even more aspirational title Rex Totius Britanniae, which means “King of All Britain.”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a silver coin minted by Alfred, King of the Anglo-Saxons, bearing his image
After Æthelstan’s reign, the name Angli-Saxones and its variants begin to fade from the corpus of Anglo-Latin literature. By the time of the Norman conquest in 1066, the name had already been mostly forgotten. After the Norman conquest, the name Anglo-Saxons and its variants disappear almost entirely from writings produced in England. There is not a single attestation of the name in any work of Middle English literature and there are only a few attestations of the name in Anglo-Latin literature from this period.
Then, in 1586, the English antiquarian William Camden (lived 1551 – 1623) published a chorographic survey of Britain and Ireland titled Britannia. The book is written in Latin and uses the Latin name Anglo-Saxones to refer to the English people prior to the Norman conquest, thereby artificially distinguishing them from the English people of Camden’s own time. Camden’s book became the defining work of English antiquarianism for centuries thereafter and greatly promoted use of the name Anglo-Saxons.
Inspired by Camden, in 1589, the English literary critic George Puttenham (lived 1529 – 1590) published a work titled The Arte of English Poesie, which is the earliest known work in the English language written after the Norman conquest to use the term Anglo-Saxon. Other English-language writers followed in Puttenham’s footsteps and, by the mid-eighteenth century, the name was commonly used in historical contexts to refer to the English people before the Norman conquest.
ABOVE: Portrait of the English antiquarian William Camden, whose chorographic work Britannia helped revive the use of the term Anglo-Saxon
The invention of Anglo-Saxon as a racial term
In the late eighteenth century, people began to use the term Anglo-Saxon to refer to white English-speaking people of British ancestry in a racial sense to indicate that such people were seen as the true descendants of the early English from before the Norman conquest. In the nineteenth century, the racist ideology of Anglo-Saxonism developed, which held that people descended from the early English were innately racially superior to all other peoples, including not just peoples of non-European ancestries, but peoples of non-English European ancestries as well.
This ideology became tremendously popular among upper-class white people in Britain and the United States. Many prominent white British and American thinkers and intellectuals of the nineteenth century were believers in it, including the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle (lived 1795 – 1881) and the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (lived 1803 – 1882). Various forms of racial Anglo-Saxonism ultimately fed into and influenced Confederate racist ideology, twentieth-century Nordicism, and, ultimately, German Nazism.
Largely as a result of the extensive use of the word Anglo-Saxon by nineteenth-century and twentieth-century racists, the racial meaning of the word has become by far the most common meaning across all media in nearly all English-speaking countries. One of the most common places where the word Anglo-Saxon appears in public discourse is in the phrase “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” or “WASP,” which refers to a white person of British ancestry who is a member of a Protestant denomination of Christianity.
ABOVE: Photograph taken by Elliott & Fry in the 1860s depicting the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Caryle, who was an ardent believer in racial Anglo-Saxonism
How the term Anglo-Saxon is being used today
For his paper, David Wilton conducted an exhaustive survey of how the word Anglo-Saxon is being used in various English-speaking countries today. He closely examined the use of the term Anglo-Saxon in diverse corpora of writings from different countries spanning over the course of twenty-seven years from 1990 to 2017. The main corpora Wilton used for his survey are the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English, the British National Corpus, and the Corpus of News on the Web (NOW Corpus).
In his paper, Wilton classifies three distinct uses of the word Anglo-Saxon:
- An ethnoracial use to refer to white English-speaking people of British descent
- A historical use to refer to the English people before the Norman conquest
- A politicocultural use to refer to notions of Anglo-Saxon legal traditions
Wilton defined a use of the term Anglo-Saxon as “ethnoracial” in cases where the term was applied to a specific contemporary individual, in cases where the person using the term made reference to racial physiognomy, in cases where it was used as part of the phrase “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” and in other cases where the term was clearly being used to describe contemporary white people.
Wilton notes that the ethnoracial and politicocultural uses of the word Anglo-Saxon are sometimes hard to distinguish from each other and that, under some definitions of race, the politicocultural use of the word might also be classified as racial. Nonetheless, he prefers to distinguish between them for the sake of greater specificity.
Wilton found that, in writings from the United States, the ethnoracial meaning of the word is overwhelmingly the dominant usage across all media, with 66% of all uses of the word in the United States English corpora he examined being in the ethnoracial sense, 12% being in the politico-cultural sense, and only 22% being in the historical sense. He found that works of fiction were the most likely to use the word in the ethnoracial sense, with 87% of all uses of the word Anglo-Saxon in fiction being ethnoracial.
Although Wilton did find that academic books and journal articles were somewhat less likely to use the word in the ethnoracial sense, 54% of all uses of the word in academic texts were still ethnoracial. Only 22% of uses of the word in academic texts were in reference to the English people prior to the Norman conquest. Clearly, then, for academics in the United States, the ethnoracial meaning of the word Anglo-Saxon is still very much the primary meaning.
ABOVE: Figure from Wilton’s paper showing the overwhelming dominance of the ethnoracial use of the term Anglo-Saxon in contemporary United States English
Moreover, Wilton found that the ethnoracial use of the term Anglo-Saxon was actually even more dominant in works written by Canadian authors than works written by authors from the United States. Fully 74% of all uses of the word Anglo-Saxon in the Canadian English corpora Wilton examined were in the ethnoracial sense. An additional 12% were in the politicocultural sense. Only 14% of uses of the word were in the historical sense.
ABOVE: Figure from Wilton’s paper showing the overwhelming dominance of the ethnoracial use of the term Anglo-Saxon in contemporary Canadian English
The same principle held true for Australian English and New Zealand English. In Australia, 54% of all uses of the term Anglo-Saxon were in the ethnoracial sense, compared to only 19% in the historical sense. In New Zealand, 38% of uses were in the ethnoracial sense compared to only 24% of uses in the historical sense.
In Ireland, India, South Africa, Singapore, Pakistan, and Nigeria, the majority of uses of the word Anglo-Saxon were in the politicocultural sense, usually followed closely by the ethnoracial sense, with the historical sense nearly always coming in dead last as the least common use of the word.
ABOVE: Figure from Wilton’s paper showing the frequency of different uses of the term Anglo-Saxon in other English-speaking countries
Of all the countries Wilton examines in his paper, there is only one country in which the historical use of the term Anglo-Saxon to refer to the English people prior to the Norman conquest is actually the most common use. Unsurprisingly, that country is the United Kingdom itself.
Wilton found that, in the United Kingdom, 76% of all uses of the term Anglo-Saxon overall and 87% of all uses of the term in academic texts were in the historical sense. By sharp contrast, only 9% of all uses overall and only 5% of all uses in academic texts were in the ethnoracial sense.
This clearly marks the United Kingdom as quite an aberration among English-speaking countries. I’m sure that British people will try to insist that they are the only ones who are using the term “correctly,” but this doesn’t change the fact that the United Kingdom is literally the only place on earth where the historical use of the word is the most common.
ABOVE: Figure from Wilton’s paper showing the overwhelming dominance of the historical use of the term Anglo-Saxon in contemporary British English
A national divide
Given Wilton’s findings, it should probably come as no surprise that, in the debate over the use of the term Anglo-Saxon, there is a notable division between scholars who grew up in the United Kingdom and scholars who grew up outside the United Kingdom.
Generally speaking, scholars who grew up in the United Kingdom are far more likely to insist that it is not problematic at all to use the term Anglo-Saxon in a historical context to describe the English people prior to the Norman conquest. Meanwhile, scholars who grew up outside the United Kingdom—especially scholars who grew up in North America—are far more likely to say that using the term in this way is problematic, because it inherently calls to mind the racist myth that the early English were a racially homogeneous and innately superior people.
This division is probably a result of the fact that scholars who grew up in the United Kingdom are more likely to have first heard the term Anglo-Saxon in history class when learning about the early English and to have heard the ethnoracial use of the term later. Scholars who grew up outside the United Kingdom, on the other hand, are more likely to have heard the ethnoracial use of the term first and the historical use of the term later. The history of a person’s own experience with the term therefore has a considerable impact on how that person is likely to view it.
My personal experience
At this point, I would like to make a bit of an aside about my personal experience. I grew up in a rural area outside a small town in Indiana. I don’t remember exactly when the first time I ever heard the word Anglo-Saxon was, but the first time I distinctly remember hearing it was when I was in maybe fifth or sixth grade and I watched a documentary series with my mother about the history of England. The first episode of the series was about the early medieval English and I distinctly remember that the presenter—who was, somewhat unsurprisingly, an older white British man—consistently referred to them as “Anglo-Saxons.”
That, however, was outside the classroom and, unfortunately, I don’t remember precisely when the first time I heard the word Anglo-Saxon in the classroom was either. I do remember that, when I was in seventh or eighth grade, we read a play in English class that was based on Beowulf, but I do not recall whether the teacher in that class specifically used the word Anglo-Saxon. If she did, it was already a term I was familiar with, so it didn’t particularly register.
ABOVE: Illustration of Beowulf battling the dragon, drawn in 1908 by the English illustrator Joseph Ratcliffe Skelton
The first time I vividly, distinctly remember hearing the precise word Anglo-Saxon in the classroom was when I was in tenth grade English class. We were reading the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and, to prepare us for the novel, our teacher showed us a video about the murder of Emmett Till.
Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old Black boy from Chicago. In August 1955, he was staying with relatives who lived near the town of Money, Mississippi. On 24 August, he and his cousin Curtis Jones went with some local boys to buy candy at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, a small local grocery shop.
There is dispute about what happened while he was in the store, since the accounts given by eyewitnesses at the time contradict each other and multiple eyewitnesses later changed their testimony, but it is clear that Till said or did something that somehow gave Carol Bryant, the white female proprietor of the store, that he was sexually interested in her.
ABOVE: Photograph of Emmett Till, taken by his mother Mamie Till Bradley on Christmas Day 1954
When Carol Bryant’s husband Roy heard about what happened, he was furious. Very early in the morning on 28 August 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam—who was a much larger man with reportedly more violent inclinations—broke into the home of Till’s great-uncle Mose Wright, armed with pistols.
They forced Wright to show them to Till and threatened to kill him if he told anyone. They abducted Till, tied him up in the back of their pickup truck, and took him to a barn, where they beat him and tortured him. Then they took him down to the river and shot him in the head. They mutilated his corpse and dumped it into the Tallahatchie River, weighing it down with a fan they had removed from a cotton gin.
Wright refused to call the police because he was afraid for his life and he didn’t think the police would be of any help, but Jones called both the sheriff and Till’s mother. The police arrested Bryant and Milam for kidnapping. On 31 August, two boys fishing in the Tallahatchie River discovered Till’s naked corpse, which was completely mutilated beyond all hope of recognition. The body was only eventually identified as that of Emmett Till because a silver ring Till had worn with the initials “L.T.” and the date “May 25, 1943” was on the corpse’s finger.
Bryant and Milam admitted during interrogation that they had abducted Till, but claimed they let him go without killing him. The two men were brought to trial in September in the face of national media attention. There was no shortage of witnesses to various stages of the murder, since the murderers had had no fear of being caught and they had made no efforts to be discrete; they knew perfectly well that violence against Black people was effectively legal and that they would never be convicted of anything.
The legal system, however, was thoroughly biased in the white murderers’ favor and the jury was composed entirely of white Southern men. In his closing statement, the defense attorney John W. Whitten Jr. explicitly appealed to the jurors’ racism, telling them:
“Your fathers will turn over in their graves [if Milam and Bryant are found guilty] and I’m sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the face of that pressure.”
When all the arguments had been made, the jury went out for only sixty-seven minutes before they returned to acquit Milam and Bryant of all charges. When one of the jurors was asked why he and his fellow jurors returned so quickly, he replied they would have returned even sooner if they hadn’t stopped to pick up soda.
In 1956, Milam and Bryant, having already been acquitted, openly admitted that they murdered Till in an interview with the journalist William Bradford Huie for Look magazine. Milam explicitly defended the murder, declaring that he wanted “to make an example of” Emmett Till “just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.”
ABOVE: Photograph of the men who murdered Emmett Till—J. W. Milam (left) and Roy Bryant (right)—smiling with their wives immediately after being acquitted for the murder they later confessed to having committed
Learning about Emmett Till’s murder for the first time in tenth-grade English class left me absolutely shocked. I had, of course, previously been vaguely aware that lynchings had taken place in the South during the Jim Crow Era, but I had had no idea of the sheer extent to which the American legal system had protected white people who murdered Black people. It was not a topic that had ever really been covered in any of my history classes up to that point.
And there, in the middle of it all, was the word Anglo-Saxon. I think that it was when I heard about John W. Whitten Jr.’s use of the word in his closing remarks at the trial of Bryant and Milam for the murder of Emmett Till that I first had some inkling of a realization that Anglo-Saxon was not the perfectly neutral historical term for the English people before the Norman conquest that I had previously always thought it was.
Even after that lesson in English class, however, I assumed that John W. Whitten Jr. was simply misusing the phrase Anglo-Saxon and that it was still an appropriate term to use in historical studies. I continued to use the term for years. In fact, in an article I wrote on my blog as recently as September 2019, I refer to Ēostre as an “Anglo-Saxon goddess.” It was only in around late 2019 or early 2020 that I stopped using the term Anglo-Saxon in my articles. You’ll notice that, in an article I wrote in April 2020, I refer to Ēostre as “Old English,” rather than “Anglo-Saxon.” I did that deliberately.
ABOVE: Illustration from 1884 by the German illustrator Johannes Gehrts, representing the goddess Ēostre as the artist imagined her
Ethnic and cultural diversity in early medieval England
The fact that so many historians and medievalists continue to use the term Anglo-Saxon to refer to the English people before the Norman conquest, even though the same term is so widely used to mean “white people,” only reinforces the inaccurate impression that England before the Norman conquest was a completely racially homogeneous, white society.
In reality, no one in early medieval England ever thought of themself as “white” in the contemporary racial sense. As I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2020 about race in ancient Greece and Rome, the concept of a “white race” is a modern social construct that is based on extremely superficial external physical features—not any kind of objective biological reality.
This construct did not exist in the ancient world. No one in ancient Greece or Rome ever considered themself racially “white.” In fact, believe it or not, ancient Greek and Roman visual artists often used skin color to differentiate gender, rather than race. In ancient Greece and Rome, men were expected to be outside in the sun and become tanned, while women were expected to stay indoors and remain pale. Therefore, it was a common convention for artists to portray men as having very dark skin and woman as having very pale skin.
Geraldine Heng, an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, provides an excellent discussion of how modern conceptions of race determined by skin color developed in her book The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Chapter Four, “Color.” Heng argues (convincingly in my opinion) that the conception of western European Latin Christians as racially “white” first began to emerge in around the twelfth century CE or thereabouts and developed over the course of the later Middle Ages. Thus, for the entire period before the Norman conquest, the concept of a “white race” did not really exist.
ABOVE: Ancient Roman fresco from the House of Mars and Venus in Pompeii depicting the goddess Venus with pale skin and the god Mars with dark skin as a way of distinguishing gender
Moreover, even if we apply modern conceptions of race to pre-modern history, England has always been inhabited by people of diverse ancestries and ethnicities. As I discuss in my article about race in ancient Greece and Rome, even before the English arrived in Britain, during the time of the Roman Empire, there were already people living in Britain who came from all over North Africa and the Middle East.
Forensic skeletal analyses have tentatively identified multiple individuals from Roman Britain as having most likely been of African ancestry, including the Ivory Bangle Lady, a young woman of elite status who lived in the Roman city of Eboricum (which is now the city of York) in around the fourth century CE.
Meanwhile, the Arbeia Museum in South Shields, England, displays a tombstone dating to the late Roman imperial period that was erected by a Syrian man named Barates for his wife, a British freedwoman named Regina. The inscription on the tombstone is written in both Latin and Aramaic, a Semitic language that was spoken in Syria in antiquity.
ABOVE: Tombstone of a British freedwoman named Regina erected by her husband, a Syrian man named Barates, bearing an inscription in Aramaic
The Roman Empire lost control of its territories in Britain in the fifth century CE as various Germanic peoples from what is now Denmark arrived and took control. After arriving in Britain, these Germanic peoples became the early English. Despite the arrival of the English, however, the ethnic diversity of Roman Britain did not disappear.
Additionally, during the early medieval period itself, many people came to England from Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, and other parts of western Europe. In fact, people continued to come to England from places even further afield, including North Africa and the Middle East. Some of these people attained very important positions of ecclesiastical and political authority.
An Amazigh man named Hadrian was born somewhere in North Africa sometime before 637 CE. Hadrian became a Biblical scholar and commentator and eventually moved to Italy. When the position of Archbishop of Canterbury fell vacant in 667 CE, Pope Vitalian offered it to Hadrian twice. Hadrian refused, but he introduced the Pope to his friend Theodoros of Tarsos, a Greek man who had been born in the city of Tarsos in southeastern Asia Minor in around 602 CE. Theodoros agreed to accept the position as the new Archbishop of Canterbury in 668 CE under the condition that Hadrian would accompany him to England.
The two men arrived in England in 27 May 669 CE. Theodoros became the Archbishop of Canterbury and Hadrian became the abbot of Saint Peter’s Church. Together, they founded a school at Canterbury, which provided instruction in the Latin and Greek languages and also produced some of the most noteworthy scholarly work in early medieval England.
People living in early medieval England not only came from many different backgrounds; they also spoke many different languages. For one thing, during the Early Middle Ages, many Celtic people in Britain, including parts of England, still spoke various Brittonic and Goidelic languages. English people themselves spoke many different dialects of Old English, with the main ones being West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian, and Kentish.
Many educated people throughout different parts of Britain, including most members of the clergy, also spoke Classical Latin. During the early periods of early medieval English history, many speakers of various dialects of Vulgar Latin lived in England as well. During the later periods of early English history, there were speakers of Old French. Even more notably, the Norse, who began arriving in Britain in the late eighth century CE and eventually came to occupy large swathes of the country, spoke Old Norse.
Early medieval England was not a monoethnic monolingual monocultural society by any stretch of the imagination.
ABOVE: Modern icon showing what the artist imagined Theodoros of Tarsos might have looked like
How use of the term Anglo-Saxon sends an implicit message that only white people belong in early medieval English studies
The use of the term Anglo-Saxon to describe the early medieval English reinforces the false notion that early medieval England was a homogeneous white society. This, in turn, sends a message to people of color who might otherwise have had an interest in the field that the field is not for them. It also reinforces the belief among white people who are already in the field that people of color do not belong in it.
This article from The Washington Post discusses the experiences of Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm, a female scholar of color, in the field of early medieval English studies. The article notes that, while Rambaran-Olm was a student, her teachers constantly expressed astonishment that she had any interest in early medieval English studies. Unfortunately, it seems that some people saw Rambaran-Olm’s involvement in the field as not only unusual, but outright wrong. The article says that, on one occasion, a person who turned her down for a job told her: “We couldn’t figure out how to justify to our students that you are an Anglo-Saxonist.”
Rambaran-Olm further discusses the racism that is endemic to the field of early medieval English studies in this post on Medium from June 2018. In her post, she says that she has repeatedly witnessed talented scholars of color leave the field of early English studies. She says that she has talked to some of these scholars and asked them why they chose to leave the field. The overwhelming response seems to have been that they felt they were not welcome because of the color of their skin:
“Over the past eight months I talked to several scholars of color about their choices to pivot out of early English studies. Choosing to stay anonymous for professional reasons, several told me racism was their deciding factor. They told me things like: ‘I had no choice. There was no room for me,’ and ‘in my interactions with medievalists, I always felt ostracized and pushed out.’”
“Another said that skin color was a constant distraction to their scholarship. ‘It’s beyond difficult to jockey your way in and continue to try and justify your work when your currency and worth is based on your skin color. As a brown “Anglo-Saxonist” I had no currency, so I realized I needed to switch course.’ Another told me about facing racist harassment from their supervisor in graduate school.”
Rambaran-Olm seems to have grown increasingly disillusioned with the entire field of medieval studies in more recent years. In a video posted on YouTube on 9 September 2020, she denounces the field, saying that it has done almost nothing to address the white supremacist narratives it was founded upon and that the field as it currently exists is so extraordinarily hostile to students of color that she does not recommend that young students of color even try to get involved in the field, because it will only cause them suffering and heartache. She warns:
“Until we start grappling with these issues and start dismantling institutional bullshit, we’re not going to change anything. Until then, I do not recommend students of color to join. And, students of color, don’t kid yourselves: you are not going to fix anything. We have to dismantle and burn to the ground the field in order for something better to emerge. White people need to quit trying to save this field and make it relevant until you are old enough to retire.”
I cannot speak from personal experience here, because I am white and I am not a medievalist. Nevertheless, it seems to me from what I have read and seen of Rambaran-Olm’s work that white medievalists in general don’t realize just what an incredibly toxic environment their field apparently is for students and scholars of color.
Just for the record, I’m sure that my own field of ancient history is probably every bit as toxic for students and scholars of color as medieval studies—perhaps even more toxic—but that’s a conversation for another time. The point I’m trying make here is that use of the term Anglo-Saxon only reinforces the implicit racist message that early medieval English studies is a field exclusively for white people.
ABOVE: Screenshot of Mary Rambaran-Olm from the beginning of her YouTube video about medieval studies and white supremacy
“Reclaiming” the term Anglo-Saxon?
Many white scholars—especially white scholars who live in the United Kingdom—have tried to argue that it is imperative to “reclaim” the name Anglo-Saxon from white supremacists. For instance, Howard Williams, a professor of archaeology from the University of Chester in the United Kingdom, wrote an essay for Aeon in May 2020 in which he argues:
“When archaeologists refer to ‘early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries’, ‘middle Anglo-Saxon settlements’, ‘Anglo-Saxon great square-headed brooches’, ‘late Anglo-Saxon coins’ and so on, the term tells us about the objects and sites, when they were made or found. The term has no racial connotation whatsoever. Spurious modern racial categorisations are simply inexplicable and inapplicable for the early medieval period.”
What I think Williams fails to realize is just how widely the term Anglo-Saxon is used to mean “white English-speaking people of British ancestry.” The term cannot realistically be “reclaimed.” Archaeologists may very well write about the “Anglo-Saxons” and think that the term is racially neutral, but, when other people read what they’ve written, they will inevitably interpret “Anglo-Saxon” to mean “white people.”
In this case, it doesn’t especially matter what scholars mean in their heads when they use the term; what matters is what people will actually read on the page.
Conclusion
At this point in our discussion, I think that several facts remain clear:
- Anglo-Saxon is not the primary term that the early medieval English would have used to refer to themselves. In fact, they rarely ever used it.
- In most countries today where the majority of people speak English, the term Anglo-Saxon is primarily used to refer to white English-speaking people of British ancestry—not the historical English people prior to the Norman conquest.
- Using the term Anglo-Saxon to describe the early medieval English reinforces the false notion that early medieval England was a racially homogeneous society in which everyone was a white English-speaker.
- This misperception of early medieval England drives scholars of color away from the field of early medieval English studies and reinforces the belief among white scholars that people of color don’t belong in the field.
- There are other, perfectly acceptable terms that we can use to refer to the early medieval English, aside from “Anglo-Saxon.” For instance, we can call them “Old English,” “early medieval English,” “English people before the Norman conquest.” Indeed, if it’s already clear which period we’re talking about, we can just call them “English.”
Given these facts, I think that the term Anglo-Saxon is best avoided—especially in the names of departments and scholarly organizations.
I’m sure that some people will accuse me of trying to “cancel” the name Anglo-Saxon, but that’s really not what I’m doing. I’m just saying that, in general, when referring to the early medieval English people, there are other names people can use that are more accurate and less harmful. I acknowledge that there are some specific contexts in which using the name Anglo-Saxon may be necessary, such as when translating an early medieval Latin text that uses it or when talking about Alfred of Wessex and his title Rex Anglorum-Saxonum. Generally speaking, though, it’s not a term that people need to be using.
I also want to clarify that I do not think that anyone who uses the term Anglo-Saxon is automatically racist. There are plenty of perfectly well-intentioned people who use the term to refer to the English people before the Norman conquest simply because they either aren’t aware of or haven’t considered the contemporary racial use of the word. As I have already mentioned, I myself used the term for years without fully realizing its racial implications.
In September 2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, a highly eminent scholarly organization devoted to the study of early medieval England, voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. I think this was a wise decision and a step in the right direction—and perhaps the first step along the long road to making the field of early medieval English studies have a bit less in common with the “America First Caucus.”
“This division is probably a result of the fact that scholars who grew up in the United Kingdom are more likely to have first heard the term Anglo-Saxon in history class when learning about the early English and to have heard the ethnoracial use of the term later. Scholars who grew up outside the United Kingdom, on the other hand, are more likely to have heard the ethnoracial use of the term first and the historical use of the term later. ”
It’s not just people in the UK who find this very American take on the term weird. It’s the whole “rest of the English-speaking world”. This is why I and many others outside the US find this insistence that the term has to be abandoned so grating. It’s another example of a form of American cultural imperialism where things that have specific meanings in an American context (“Anglo-Saxon”, blackface, dreadlocks) have dictates pronounced about them by American academic culture warriors and then these specifically local American things suddenly take on a (supposed) universal nature.
Sorry, but you Yanks have a bad tendency to assume that the way *you* understand things is the “right” or only way and every other meaning can be dismissed or, worse, condemned as “ignorant” or, in this case, “racist”. We out here in that big place called “the rest of the frigging world” get tired of insular Yanks assuming they are the centre of the cosmos.
Sorry if this sounds grumpy, but this American cluelessness and/or arrogance makes this Aussie grumpy. And I’ll keep using Anglo-Saxon given it is a perfectly sensible term with a totally non-racial and well understood meaning in the context of historical discourse.
If you want to keep using the name Anglo-Saxon, I won’t stop you. I don’t expect to convince everyone. I’m also not arguing that anyone who uses the name Anglo-Saxon is automatically racist; I am only arguing that it is generally better for people who write about early medieval England to avoid applying this particular name in most contexts, especially since the early English usually just called themselves “Englisc” or “Anglecynn,” not “Anglo-Saxon.”
I am, of course, not Australian and I have never had to opportunity to go to Australia, so I am not in a position to give a personal assessment of how words are used there. I will, however, note that Wilton’s study found that around 54% of uses of the word Anglo-Saxon from Australia were in the ethnoracial sense. In fairness, Wilton only examined Australian uses of the word that were included in the NOW Corpus, so his sample size for Australian English was much smaller than his sample size for United States, Canadian, and British English. Nonetheless, it seems to me that his survey indicates that the ethnoracial use of the word Anglo-Saxon is not nearly so foreign to Australia as you might assume.
Given that the Anglo-Saxons spoke and wrote Old English, of course they used Old English words for themselves. But you yourself gave examples of Latin forms of the term being used in the period, including by Anglo-Saxon writers. So that argument doesn’t really work. It also doesn’t make too much sense, since we regularly use terms for medieval peoples, cultures and polities that were rarely or even never used by them at the time. So the idea that there’s some rule that we should use terms commonly used at the time by the people in question is pretty much a fantasy. So long as who or what is being referred to is clear, we can and often do use anachronistic or modern terms for medieval things.
I can assure you that “Anglo-Saxon” is not a term in common discourse in any context in Australia, ethnoracial or otherwise. But even if that small sample of usage is accurate, the fact that it is sometimes used that way here is not a good reason for *other* uses of the term to therefore be restricted. As I said, “it is a perfectly sensible term with a totally non-racial and well understood meaning *in the context of historical discourse*”. That last part is the key point. Context matters.
Indeed, the weird tendency for this kind of doctrinaire policing of language to almost completely ignore things like context, intent, idiom, cultural differences etc. and to anathematise certain words and phrases in *all* instances is just another reason I have a problem with these culture warrior dictates from the US. Nuance and context are swept aside by a rigid blanket condemnation based on things that are largely specific to US politics, particularly US race politics. Words and terms are used differently in different cultures and mean different things in different contexts. If “Anglo-Saxon” has specific resonances in the US, then by all means choose not to use it. But please don’t project your local politics onto the whole world. Americans do this far too often.
And then there is the extremely strange Australianism Anglo-Celt, which cannot possibly be anything but ethnoracial.
I suppose it may sound strange to a non-Aussie, but in a multicultural country like Australia with a history of waves of migration, it makes quite a bit of sense. I can say I have an Anglo-Celtic background the way my friends identify as having a Greek, Vietnamese or Lebanese background, even though all of us were born here and most of us are several generations removed from any migration here. “Anglo-Celtic” doesn’t have the racist implications of the American (mis)use of “Anglo-Saxon” and it sure as hell makes a lot more sense than that very odd American term “Caucasian”.
I didn’t say anything about the origin of Old English, just that they spoke it. Though – like all books by amateurs who “reveal” the “amazing hidden true story” somehow missed by all actual experts – the one you recommend here looks absolutely awful.
It’s not worth engaging with Harriet Vered. This same commenter seemingly believes in all seriousness that there is no evidence for the existence of Greek people until the fifteenth century, that historians can only use a source if we have the complete, original, autograph manuscript in the original author’s own handwriting, and that we must automatically assume that the oldest surviving copy of any given work is the original. Harriet is obviously so confused that there’s really no point in trying to reason with them.
Hi Harriet,
It is a common conception that Old English derives mainly from Anglo-Saxon, but whether it is a misconception or not is another matter. I thank you for drawing Michael Harper’s book to my attention: I shall certainly read it, but I have to say that its cover, its reviews, and the fact that in the fifteen years since its publication its proposition appears to have sunk without trace does not inspire confidence in its veracity. I agree with you that it seems surprising that “a few boatloads of people can change a national language.” It has seemed surprising for many years, since long before Harper wrote his book, so naturally has been studied particularly carefully. Remarkably, and throughout the course of over a hundred years of investigation, the evidence continues to point to that conclusion. Harper is far from the first to challenge it, but the evidence against it is not, currently, adequate to support a different conclusion.
“Sorry, but you Yanks have a bad tendency to assume that the way *you* understand things is the “right” or only way and every other meaning can be dismissed or, worse, condemned as “ignorant” or, in this case, “racist”. We out here in that big place called “the rest of the frigging world” get tired of insular Yanks assuming they are the centre of the cosmos.”
This! This so very very much!
It is, ironically, a form of colonialism and I’m sick of it.
Most thought provoking and noteworthy article, Spencer! Thank you!
I am not sure, however, if “cleaning our language” will “clean our culture” of racism.
You write,
“No one in ancient Greece or Rome ever considered themself racially “white.” ”
That is probably right!
However, “racism” is different from “race”!
A very long bit if navel-gazing here, by one (American) “Anglo Saxon” for other (American) Anglo “Saxons”.
Anglo Saxon is the conventional name for the period in British history roughly between 430 AD and 1066. Or, used as a synonym for the Old English language.
As all of us here know, it doesn’t refer to any specific ethnic or racial group.
That it was appropriated by some modern racists is not really very interesting.
Trolling the right wing political swamps for topics is maybe not a great idea, eh mate? Catch ya later!
Hi Spencer,
Thanks for your article. I agree with the commenters who think that most educated Englishmen only use the word Anglo-Saxon to apply to pre-Conquest England, and not to any modern white supremacist culture, but am aware that there are increasing few of us.
[I was hesitant even to use the word Englishman. Sexist? Supremacist? Should I have said Britons? That sounds almost as bad. Citizens of the United Kingdom then – not that I want to upset republicans….. But I digress. I’m English, and a man, and Englishman will have to do. Scots women will have to speak for themselves.]
Anyway, as a medieval History teacher in the Welsh Marches, the term Anglo-Saxon for the people who immigrated to this area as the Romans left has always bothered me, as no doubt it would have done the people themselves. My area, like most of the middle of this country, was occupied by people originally from ‘Anglia,’ who thought of themselves as Angles. They were not Saxons, who were people originally from ‘Saxony’ who occupied most of the south of England. No doubt individuals from France or Germany would object to being lumped into Franco-Germans. People from part of Northern Europe can validly be grouped as Scandinavians, and from part of Southern Europe as Iberians, without the indignity of being called a Nord0-Swede or a Hispano-Portuguese.
No doubt Paul the Deacon, in trying to refer to the inhabitants of Southern Britain found himself in a quandary. The Britons (I suppose we would call them Romano-Britons) were the indigenous people of the country who had been largely culturally and linguistically (if not wholly physically) displaced by the invaders and immigrants from the continent, including Angles and Saxons (and Jutes, as we were always taught in my youth, but who seem to have gone out of fashion!).
Having arranged itself more or less into the Heptarchy, with a High King over subordinate kings, the ‘united kingdom’ (to coin a word) was ruled successively by both Angles (such as Offa) and Saxons (such as Alfred), who could style themselves king of the combined ethnic groups (Anglo-Saxons) or of the geographical place (Britain) – the latter including the descendants of the indigenous people, which the former didn’t., so was more inclusive. Perhaps that’s why it was adopted.
In the nineteenth century, when Walter Scot was re-inventing the Middle Ages for his time, and they required an “us and them,” then the conquerors were the Normans and the underdogs were just the Saxons. While Historians, as you point out, were using the word Anglo-Saxons, it may have sounded a bit too academic for fiction writers, and Angles sounded too mathematical! In fact, I guess, the majority of the immigrant people were Angles, not Saxons, which is why I live in Angle-land not Saxon-land.
Keep up the good work!
Hugh
Hi Harriet,
Thank you for agreeing, although I’m not sure what you’re agreeing with!
I’m also not sure what you mean by New Saxony having to be invented. Do you mean Old Saxony? And why did it need to be invented, and who invented it? As for Anglo-Saxons not existing anywhere but England, that’s a bit confusing too. It’s a name that was specifically coined to define the more or less unified blend of immigrant tribes in England. The various manifestations of their tribal territories on the continent invented their own names, as necessary.
It seems that you have queried some of Spencer’s articles before. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that provided you can supply evidence for why he may be wrong. Different blogs operate to different criteria, but this one is valuable to me mostly because of the extensive sources given by both Spencer and his commenters, which give foundations to the discussion. If you have any evidence that “New Saxony … had to be invented” or that ‘Old English’ was spoken in Britain in Roman or pre-Roman times, it would be good to hear it.
Much depends on the definition of a “discrete” language, I suppose. There are certainly clear linguistic similarities between “Old English” and “Old Saxon” literature (from what is now Germany), and there are also clear linguistic differences between different pieces of “Old English” written in different parts of the kingdom. On the other hand, Welsh, and for that matter, Irish, Scots Gaelic and Breton, all have a similar linguistic relationship which seems to be rather different from the ‘Germanic’ family..
Your suggestion that “surely the people they left behind, the vast majority after all” should have left some literature of their own, is sensible, but does not appear to be answerable. We have vanishingly little of their literature, but that, in itself, does not permit us to say that their language – or some of the dialects of their languages – can not have been closely related to what we now call Anglo-Saxon or Old English. What little we do have seems to suggest that it was.
It seems the Jutes rest upon a single source.
“Bede tells us it’s . . . the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. . . . The Jutes we know nothing about.”
There are some great debates about the nature of the cultural changes that followed the end of the Roman occupation .
From this perspective just how Anglo Saxon society was is an interesting question.
The term is seldom used in any other sense in Britain .
If there is a problem then it is an American one, but one that very few care about, and those that have some knowledge of history are no doubt sophisticated enough to understand the different cultural context between USA and UK without having their hand held or being protected by the language police.
Diversity in language use is a strength.
Trying to simplify things is condescending.
The term “Anglo-Saxon” is attached to many of the medieval maps we’ve been studying. The first map to show North America is the 1025-1050 Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi Cotton World Map.
https://www.academia.edu/44455549/Was_North_America_Illustrated_on_the_c_1025_1050_Cotton_World_Map
I’m not suggesting Anglo-Saxons discovered America. This is just the term attached to the map. The same area shows continued habitation for centuries to come.
https://www.academia.edu/44494087/c_1100_1199_Sawley_Mappa_Mundi_Corpus_Christi_College_Cambridge_EN_MS_66_Icon_Analysis
https://www.academia.edu/44552862/1275_Mappamondo_di_Saint_Denis_Vinland_Boundaries
In an attempt to understand the symbols used on tiny flags, shields, and various other iconography on medieval maps, I began studying Heraldry. According to what I’ve read, Englishmen(Anglos) and Saxons are the only two groups without beards. Bearded heads represented Barbarians. The main question is always left unanswered. Was the act of shaving what separated these two groups from everyone else, or were they capable of growing a beard in the first place??? Were the Englishmen(Anglos) and Saxons of Asiatic stock??? There is a slim chance of another source.
What’s really funny…All of these self proclaimed White Supremacists with full beards claiming to be “Pure Anglo-Saxon”.
I find it galling that American irrationalists can determine how language is used and that giving in to them is considered a sensible response.
Isn’t the best way forward to challenge the lunacy of the people who misuse the term Anglo Saxon? Rather than retreating into a safe academic bubble and handing over the term, use it to expose them for what they are and reclaim the meaning.
Anything else will only be perceived as a victory for the extremists; who already ridicule language correctness.
It’s interesting how different people see the word Anglo-Saxon. I am British, and the only time I heard Anglo-Saxon growing up was in relation to the Angles and Saxons. with it not being until later when we did US history (at around 16) that I heard it used in relation to being a race term. I don’t know anyone that would consider themselves Anglo-Saxon rather than English/British so it’s interesting that others would think so.
We were always taught that Anglo-Saxon referred to the descendants of the Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain in the fifth century, whether or not they were actually Angles or Saxons. It was really just used to differentiate between them (Anglo-Saxons) and the Britons and the Vikings. I was also taught that Anglo-Saxon was used as they were the largest groups, and it was in part to separate the Saxons in England from the Saxons on the Continent.
I also find WASP odd, as the Anglo-Saxons were not Protestant, as Protestantism didn’t exist. They were also definitely not all ‘white’ as well, although the meaning of white has changed in even the last 100 years.
Think in UK we’ll probably always use Anglo-Saxon as to us it has nothing really to do with the present day and if normally used in relation to history.
if Old Englishists were interested in directly using their expertise and position for maximal effect, they’d go after the rampant misinformation every Easter that Passover was “stolen” from a Germanic not-really-goddess mentioned once, centuries later
“In Ireland, India, South Africa, Singapore, Pakistan, and Nigeria, the majority of uses of the word Anglo-Saxon were in the politicocultural sense.”
This is unsurprising, considering these are ex-colonies of Britain (much more recently than the USA) with a legacy of institutions and customs directly deriving from this experience. The term “Anglo-Saxon” in these places refers mostly to culture and institutions rather than race. Certainly that’s true in Ireland (where I live), and it appears to be also true in India and Nigeria.
(The French use the term “Anglo Saxon” to refer to English-speaking peoples of all races, usually — quelle surprise! — in a derogatory manner.)
Of course the British are more likely than others to use “Anglo-Saxon” in terms of history — it is part of their history! Of course other countries are less likely to use this term in teaching history because — it is not part of theirs! It is hardly an “aberration” for a country to be more aware of its own history than of others!
How many people outside India, for example, would ever talk about “the Vedic civilization”, or even know what it meant? If the word “Vedic” suddenly became a racial dog-whistle in the USA, should Indian historians stop using that word avoid trampling on American sensitivities? What if commonly-used term in the USA has a less-than-savory meaning in Nigeria — do Americans need to stop using that term, or does this sensitivity only go one way?
It is ironically colonial for the USA to impose its own idiosyncratic understanding of language and race upon the rest of the world.
Probably the most hilarious aspect of this article was that you claimed the term Anglo-Saxon inaccurately homogenizes the diversity of Mediaeval England while also using the term “X of color” to describe the hugely diverse swath of humanity that has more melanin than you.
Please, for the love of God Spencer, develop some self-awareness.
“Using the term Anglo-Saxon to describe the early medieval English reinforces the false notion that early medieval England was a racially homogeneous society in which everyone was a white English-speaker.”
No, it really doesn’t, not anymore than the terms you suggested.
“This misperception of early medieval England drives scholars of color away from the field of early medieval English studies and reinforces the belief among white scholars that people of color don’t belong in the field.”
Provide evidence for this. Your article merely convinced me that Dr. Rambaran-Olm and her friends suffer from an extreme case of emotional neuroticism and quite possibly persecutory delusions.
“There are other, perfectly acceptable terms that we can use to refer to the early medieval English, aside from “Anglo-Saxon.” For instance, we can call them “Old English,” “early medieval English,” “English people before the Norman conquest.” Indeed, if it’s already clear which period we’re talking about, we can just call them “English.””
As you elucidated in your article, many residents of Mediaeval England did not even speak English no had their ethnic origins anywhere in Britain or England. Those terms are just as imprecise.
The field of history will continue to slowly die as long as its practitioners are mired in this kind of neurotic minutiae. But of course, it seems that many of its practitioners want that to happen, sadly.
Perhaps Dr. Rambaran-Olm et al. need to review what we all learned in kindergarten “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
“Probably the most hilarious aspect of this article was that you claimed the term Anglo-Saxon inaccurately homogenizes the diversity of Mediaeval England while also using the term “X of color” to describe the hugely diverse swath of humanity that has more melanin than you.”
It really is quite daft, isn’t it? I can see that the term “people of color” has some limited use in certain contexts regarding the USA or other white-majority countries. But when talking about the world as a whole, it loses any real meaning. Ironically, it centres white people as the “norm”, when on a worldwide basis we are a *minority*. What do the typical inhabitants of Ghana and of Taiwan (for example) have in common that they don’t have with the typical inhabitants of Denmark? Why should someone in Pakistan or France *care* about the racial hangups of the USA, instead of focusing on their own problems? Why should British historians get entangled in a foreign culture war and drop a harmless and useful term from their vocabulary?
There are plenty of ways for historians to expand the bandwidth of cultural understanding and make history accessible to a greater variety of people. This is not one of them.
People of color sure is a term that makes no sense but it is used in the US as a polite way to call all non-whites so I don’t really have any problem with it. Though you know very well why the british could stop using the term, because it hurts people. Plain and simple. The world is becoming more globalized and it is a certainty that british authors will be read in America and in plenty other parts of the world. If something you say hurts someone it doesn’t cost any effort to stop using it, you just don’t wanna, you’d rather keep hurting people because you don’t care about them. Also I had to read Giuseppe and he’s just a bitter bitch that has never felt the real weight racism has on the lifes of non-white people to say that. Racism is not just “words” but those words do contribute to the systemic violence non-white people suffer. If you’re so hung up on stop using a word maybe you’re either just too lazy to reevaluate your perspective or you’re just a fucking psychopath. Arguably, you should probably not be a scientist in either case.
>The world is becoming more globalized and it is a certainty that british authors will be read in America and in plenty other parts of the world.
So maybe Americans should take the opportunity to learn about global perspectives, instead of expecting the world to bend to their whims.
>If something you say hurts someone it doesn’t cost any effort to stop using it…
It does cost something to lose a term that is useful in certain contexts e.g. the history of early medieval Britain, or the institutional legacy of colonialism in Africa and India (but I guess Nigerians and Indians are the wrong “people of color”).
> you’d rather keep hurting people because you don’t care about them.
I care very much about racial and economic justice. I think that tinkering with vocabulary would do nothing to alleviate this, and is actually distracting people from finding real solutions.
>If you’re so hung up on stop using a word maybe you’re either just too lazy to reevaluate your perspective or you’re just a fucking psychopath.
Or maybe I have evaluated it, and decided that word usage should not be determined by the (largely white) grievance seekers of American academia.
I won’t read any of the other comments because I’m expecting quite a lot of racist backlash and I simply have no time for racists, but I want to comend you on talking about this. Often white scientists and students shy away from race issues and racism saying “it’s not their place to talk about that”. Still you did a wonderful job on talking about it and uplifting voices of real people of color, not shifting the focus to yourself. Also to give an insight on how the term anglo-saxon is used outside english-speaking countries: in my country(Brazil) anglo-saxon is not a racial term but instead a cultural term used to denote countries that have been colonized by Britain and their cultures, usually excluding african countries but sometimes also including South Africa. For example, Canada and the US will be referred as Anglo-Saxon America to differentiate it from Latin America(a term that is also object of debate) and Québec and Haiti, which have a very special status inside America being sometimes included or not in Latin America.
“I won’t read any of the other comments because I’m expecting quite a lot of racist backlash and I simply have no time for racists”
Then you’ll be happy to learn that the “racist backlash” you assumed is nowhere to be found in the other comments. I usually find actually reading things is a better way of judging them. Try doing that.
“in my country(Brazil) anglo-saxon is not a racial term but instead a cultural term used to denote countries that have been colonized by Britain and their cultures”
Yes. Which is more evidence that the term is used in a number of ways and the best way to deal with it is to look at things like context and intention to determine its meaning in any particular case and then respond to that meaning. The objections here are not any defence of the racist usage of the term or any denial that can and is used racially in some cases. It is to the weird idea that because this (largely American) usage, the whole term is to be abandoned. And the equally weird idea that if you object to this you are either a racist or aiding racists. This American cultural imperialism whereby some local political conditions are assumed as universals is pretty annoying to many of us out here in the rest of the world. And the unnuanced idea that we can and should totally ignore context and intention and impose some Manichean ideological condemnation on a term because of one way it can be (mis)used is clumsy and pretty stupid. It seems to appeal to idealists who like to impose simple, blanket solutions to complex things. Most of us grow out of that level of naivete.