Jason Okundaye’s piece on defining Englishness mirrored my own experiences as a member of an ethnic minority (Of course you can be English if you’re not white. So why can’t the right leave the question alone?, 26 September).
As a child, growing up in multicultural Leicester in the 1990s and 2000s, I was “corrected” by adults in positions of authority – the vast majority of whom were white – for wanting to call myself English. It was a descriptor that I could not claim and, implicitly, was not my right because of my skin colour. I learned very quickly that referring to myself as British was the better, less objectionable option.
