Nationality? Certainly. Race / ethnicity? With extreme caution. Most Black people in the US have enough of a shared history that it's a useful label, for exampl

Nationality? Certainly. Race / ethnicity? With extreme caution. Most Black people in the US have enough of a shared history that it's a useful label, for example. But Ghana, Eritrea and Eswatini share almost none, even if their people might be superficially lumped together as ethnically Black African. But even if you can successfully draw a boundary around a people (Brits? White Brits? And that's before we even get into the whole Welsh-English-Scots thing), which stories do we tell? And how do we update them as - for example - it has become more and more apparent that Britain's relative prosperity during the 18th & 19th centuries was largely at the expense of conquered peoples and Empire territories - many of whose descendants (Indian, Irish, Jamaican or Ghanaian) are now an integral part of society here? How do we avoid crude re-tellings of WW2 where the Nazis are cast as certain and irredeemable baddies from the beginning, when the greatest of their atrocities - the one that marked them out forever as a greater monster than any of the Western allies, who had a far from unblemished record - wasn't actually known to our leaders until very late on in the war, by which time the Nazis were facing almost certain defeat? (I'm not saying, to be clear, that the Nazis were anything other than utterly evil - but up until the scale and nature of the Holocaust became apparent, the story did not resolve so cleanly into "good vs evil" as the way it's commonly told today).