6 Takeaways on Britain's shock vote

[whatthehey]

5. Well to be honest, it didn't have much

Parochialism, isolationism, jingoistic naive nationalism? Oh yeah it had plenty to do with that, and yes it's pretty reasonable to assume racism correlates highly with these sentiments. Even the most simplistic UKIP supporter (but I repeat myself...) however likely realizes that EU migration policies are connected to EU immigrants, almost all Caucasian, some of them literally and specifically so. Anyone thinking this affects Indian or Bangladeshi immigration is unlikely to be able to spell Brexit, let alone work out how to vote on it. European folks except for a few isolated pockets are mostly mutts of a churn of tribal groups that moved around Europe for centuries. The Celts were most likely originally Belgian. The name England itself comes from a German tribe. The Vikings started Russia as a nation as well as populating a bunch of Britain, France and even Sicily. The Roman Empire was more of a melting pot than the US could ever dream of being (at its zenith it was ruled by a Spaniard for example). About the only way to cite racial differences in Europe is to complain about the Central Asian origin of the Slavic peoples, but they are mixed so much with the Scandinavian settlers (again, Russian is a Viking word) in medieval times and western Europeans in more modern eras that any distinct separate identity is fuzzy to say the least.

And of course, that's with a non-biological understanding of "race", since it doesn't have a biological one really.