Names (wizarding world and empire)

[GulPlum <hp@plum.cream.org>]

No: HPFGUIDX 50970

Amy Miller wrote:
> I think that "we Yanks" forget that other cultures do not encourage 
> the "melting pot" theory of social structure.   Great Britain still 
> has royalty, and probably will for a long time.  

I'm not sure what being a monarchy has got to do with whether or not 
Britain has a melting pot social structure, and I'm curious why 
anyone would make the connection. 

As it happens, I feel that in day-to-day terms, we're a better 
integrated society than most. Being a small island and everyone 
having to live in close proximity to each other (something Americans 
don't seem to appreciate very often is that we have approx. one sixth 
the population of the USA living on approx. one fortieth the 
territory) forces more contact between cultures. Sure, some 
communities are (voluntarily) more ghettoised than others and some 
don't participate in general social or political life as much as 
others, and some areas of the country or individual cities 
are "whiter" than others, but generally speaking it's rare that 
people go to school or work with people of only one race. 

For instance, I can count within a ten-minute walking radius of my 
home a mosque, two Catholic churches, two Church of England churches, 
a synagogue, a Sikh temple, a Hindu temple, a Buddhist temple and a 
couple of Baptist churches. Perhaps interestingly, partially because 
its base is more multi-ethnic than most religions, I know that the 
Catholic churches between them have services conducted in English, 
Vietnamese, Polish and French for the sizeable communities in the 
area of those natonalities. Some services are even multi-lingual with 
elements provided by each community. 

Or on another level and a different example, the dental practice I 
attend has two Indian, one Vietnamese, one Italian, one Polish and a 
couple of black dentists (one Jamaican and one Nigerian) all working 
together and it's not as if they each only serve patients of their 
own ethnicity (my own dentist is the Vietnamese one). 

Sure, this particular area is more mixed than most in Britain, but 
it's a fairly good example of life in a large city. 

> It might not be "acceptable" to put an Anglicized first name with 
> an ethnic surname in their culture.  In the USA we do this all the 
> time, because we want to be accepted, to be like everyone else.  I 
> don't think that JKR's omission of ethnic names is a lack 
> of "political correctness."    It's possible that  people in Great 
> Britain don't name their children anything they like, but what they 
> are expected to name them.  

It's very, very varied, and is down to individual familes. Although 
it's true that most Indian families, for instance, give their 
children Indian names, it's by no means universal. Besides, this 
country has been multi-ethnic for long enough, and the English 
language is flexible enough, to accept a lot of non-traditional names 
into the mainstream. 

As far as black ethnic names go, we should bear in mind that most 
black people in Britain came here from the Caribbean, and thus do not 
have African names or surnames. There isn't a huge immigrant 
community from African countries anyway (for colonial reasons, black 
African immigrants tend to gravitate towards France rather than the 
UK), and those who are here are mainly from Ghana or Nigeria. 

Even so, most black immigrants to Britain tend to be Christians of 
one denomination or another, and so for religious rather than ethnic 
reasons, are likely to have first names which may be 
considered "European", although again this far from universal. 

Purely on a probability basis, Angelina Johnson and Dean Thomas are 
more than likely to have Caribbean forebears, and thus it would be 
normal for them to have Europeanised names (yes, thanks to the Empire 
and slavery!) rather than ethnically African ones. I really don't see 
what all the bother is about.