desertdudeshj wrote:well you've moaned many a times about many UAE laws etc etc. And yes it doesn't change his roots but doesn't make him not british either.
Just because a person doesn't have a chirstian sounding name and has brown skin does not make him not british. What to do you call the decendants of the african slaves, The jamicans, the european jews who fled in WWII then ?
Like bora asked me once, what excatly is being british then, I don't think its a prerequiste to be floundering around in bikinis, getting piss drunk and wasted on the weekends to be british.
Have your decendants been living on the island for the begning of time ? Are you 1000% pure brit ?
Bores you should understand this more than anyone else as your country almost entirely made up of immigrants, so how come your american then ? You should be Irish, german or where ever your family came from, right ? but no you call yourself an American and have the full right to just as Akmal Shaikh the right to be called british.
At best or worse depending on which side of the debate you stand he would be a brit of Asian or pakistani decent.
wheter anybody likes it or not the world intregrating and as peter russell puts it soon there will be no white black yellow red, everybody will be just beige !
American is a melting pot of nationalities. Even in America when talking about someone, and someone isn't sure who is being spoken about, one might say "the Pakistan woman", or "the Chinese woman" or the "Arab woman". It doesn't take away from the fact that "she" is American.
Yes, I am American, but I am generational American. My ancestry can be traced back to Native American Indian on my great grandfather's side, which people were the first Americans!!!! In the states, when people ask the question "What is your nationality?" we don't say "American", we give our family background.
If you were to put a "face" on America - people expect to see "white". If you were to put a "face" on the British - people expect to see "white". That's the way it is. If I were to get the UAE passport, do you think you would see my "face" as representative of the UAE? Highly unlikely. Same thing if I married an Indian or a Japanese man and obtained the passport - do you think anyone would believe me if asked: "What is your nationality?" and I say "Indian" or "Japanese". The passport doesn't change my ancestry or my identity, it just makes me a citizen of the country that issued the passport.
Different terms are used worldwide. I can only speak for the states. In the states, going back some time, when referring to Asian, it was generally towards people from China and Japan, but for the majority now it is China or Japan. Here, people from India are referred to as Asian, in the US they are referred to as being Indian (from India - get it?
). In the States we generally identify people from the country they came from, not the continent.
My husband is American, but he is a hypenated American: Egyptian-American. He was not born in the US, but he holds the passport. Doesn't take away from the fact that he's Egyptian. He finds it quite convenient actually. He's Egyptian when is serves him best, he's American when it serves him best and he's Egyptian-American when that serves him best.
