Mixed Race Studies

2011 Census: Key Statistics for England and Wales, March 2011 (Ethnic Group)

Office for National Statistics (ONS)
Census 2011
Ethnic Group: Part of 2011 Census, Key Statistics for Local Authorities in England and Wales Release
Release Date: 2012-12-11

Figure 3: Ethnic groups by English regions and Wales, 2011

Ethnicity across the English regions and Wales
Figure 3: Ethnic groups by English regions and Wales, 2011

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Mixed-race Brits rising fast as prejudice wanes

The Sunday Times
2012-12-09

Dipesh Gadher, Deputy News Editor

MIXED-RACE Britons, epitomised by Jessica Ennis, the Olympic heptathlon champion, are among the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic-minority groups, according to official figures.

New data from the 2011 census to be published on Tuesday is expected to show that at least 1m people were born to parents from different ethnicities.

Academics believe the true number of people from a mixed-race background could be twice this amount, because many of them identified themselves in other categories, such as black or white, on census forms.

The findings coincide with new polling that reveals only 15% of people feel uncomfortable about interracial marriages.

Twenty years ago, 40% of Britons expressed concerns about such relationships…

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Jackie Kay and Sebastian Barry: Identity and struggle

The Guardian
2011-08-15

Sarah Crown

In our inaugural podcast from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Sebastian Barry and Jackie Kay talk to us about the themes that power their work

In our first podcast from the 2011 Edinburgh International Book Festival, we explore questions of identity and struggle as played out in the 20th-century…

…The poet and novelist Jackie Kay turned memoirist last year with her book Red Dust Road, an account of her search for her birth parents: a white Scottish woman, and a Nigerian man. Her writing reflects her grappling with the thorny issue of her own identity, and she reveals how this podcast has reconnected her with her family…

[Jackie Kay reads “Burying My African Father.”]

Read the entire article here.  Listen to the audio here. Download the audio here.

Covering Multiracial America Requires Historical Perspective

Maynard Media Center on Structural Inequity
Maynard Institute
2012-11-14

Nadra Kareem Nittle

Although people of mixed races have lived in the United States for centuries, authorities on multiracial identity say mainstream media continue to report on these people as if they are a new phenomenon.

In 1619, the first slaves were brought to Britain’s North American colonies. The following year, says Audrey Smedley, professor emerita of anthropology and African American studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, the first “mulatto” child was born. Thus, mixed-race people have a long history in this country, disproving the notion often mentioned today that miscegenation will somehow magically cure racism.

Most major stereotypes about multiracial people in America historically involved individuals whose heritage was black and white or Native American and white. Such people were largely thought to yearn for the same advantages as whites but found them off-limits because of the “one-drop rule,” which originated in the South and mandated that just a drop of black blood meant they were of color.

In the 21st century, newer stereotypes about multiracial people have gained popularity. Rainier Spencer, founder and director of the Afro-American Studies Program and senior adviser to the president at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, says contemporary media coverage of mixed-race people isn’t filled with tragic mulattoes but with docile symbols of a colorblind America yet to reach fruition.

“Multiracial people are infantilized,” Spencer says. “They [the media] don’t treat them as fully capable agents. Mixed-race people are quiet and happy, and they don’t complain. They’re our postracial future.”

Spencer, author of “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix,” cautions that these notions are dangerous. The stereotype that multiracial people represent a bridge between races that will soon eradicate bigotry ignores the fact that such people were in North America more than a century before U.S. independence and that racism remains a reality.

This idea also lets the establishment off the hook, he says. “If mixed-race people are going to take us to a postracial destiny, then the power structure doesn’t have to worry about it. It’s very convenient.”…

…In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau permitted declaring more than one race on census forms. In the subsequent decade, several published articles reported that the mixed-race population was increasing, especially among young people.

But Heidi W. Durrow, who grew up as the only daughter of an African-American father and a Danish mother, would like to see news stories about multiracial people that don’t revolve around census figures…

…Laura Kina, a founding member of the Critical Mixed Race Studies biennial conference and associate professor of Art, Media and Design at DePaul University, has similar concerns. She considers the idea that mixed-race people are new to be a stereotype. “They go back a very long ways,” she says.

Kina is the daughter of an Okinawan father from Hawaii and a Spanish-Basque/Anglo mother, according to her website…

…Dominique DiPrima, host of Los Angeles radio show “The Front Page,” takes issue with the concept of multiracialism because she disputes the concept of race. “I think the media should differentiate between culture, ethnicity and race,” says DiPrima, daughter of Italian-American poet Diane di Prima and African-American writer Amiri Baraka…

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Is race a ‘salient…’ or ‘dominant identity’ in the early 21st century: The evidence of UK survey data on respondents’ sense of who they are

Social Science Research
Available online 2012-11-07
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.10.007

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

The term ‘master status’, coined by Everett Hughes in 1945 with special reference to race, was conceptualised as one which, in most social situations, will dominate all others. Since then race and other collective social identities have become key features of people’s lives, shaping their ‘life scripts’. But is race still a ‘master’ or ‘dominant identity’ and, if not, what has replaced it? Analyses of recent social surveys show that race has lost its position to family, religion (in the South Asian and Black groups) and (amongst young mixed race people) also age/life-stage and study/work. However, many of these different identity attributes are consistently selected, suggesting the possibility – confirmed in in-depth interviews – that they may work through each other via intersectionality. In Britain race appears to have been undermined by the rise of ‘Muslim’ identity, the increasing importance of ‘mixed race’, and the fragmentation of identity now increasingly interwoven with other attributes like religion.

Highlights

• Race has lost its dominant position to family, religion, age/life-stage & study/work.
• Many selected identity attributes work through each other via intersectionality.
• Race has been undermined by religion, mixedness, & fragmentation of identity.

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Social workers ‘at rock bottom’ over issue of race and adoption

The Guardian
2012-11-06

Hugh Muir, Diary Editor

Professional body to tell Lords committee that political stereotyping has hampered efforts to rehome vulnerable children

Morale among social workers has been driven to rock bottom by cuts, targets and ministers making the issue of race and adoption a “political football”, according to the biggest professional association.

A Lords committee will hear claims that politicians fuelled stereotypes for political gain, hampering the efforts of social workers to assist vulnerable children.

Nushra Mansuri, of the British Association of Social Workers, is expected to criticise the education secretary Michael Gove, who accused social workers of condemning black and Asian children to a life in care rather than see them adopted by white couples…

…Baffour, who sits on adoption panels, said trans-racial adoptions are hard to get right. “Race and heritage and culture are important, but ministers seem totally dismissive. A lot of people think the repercussions are going to be very damaging.”…

…Marlene Ellis, a black Londoner raised for 18 years by white foster parents in the home counties, said the complexities should not be underestimated. “It is impossible to come out really clear and comfortable about who you are in a society that still has very clear classifications for race and culture,” she said. “My parents did the best they could do but there are subtle things that happen that erode your confidence. My real memory is loneliness; of not knowing.”But minsters can say, with justification, that some social work professionals and trans-racial adoptees fully back the government’s stance on race and adoption. Jo Bonnett, a black police officer raised in rural Leicestershire and east London by white English adoptive parents, is one of them. “I didn’t find it a negative experience,” she says “I think I was very lucky. I had an older brother who was their birth son; a brilliant childhood and fantastic friends. My challenges came at 17, but when you get to that age, and have been brought up in a loving household, you are strong enough to deal with racism or any issues you might have.”She said the benefits greatly outweigh the drawbacks. “I don’t think race matters in adoption as long as you have loving parents and have all the things a child needs.”

Bonnett, 40, said she and her husband, who is white, tried themselves to adopt a black child. “But we were told the child must be mixed race. Ridiculous!”…

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Britain’s first black community in Elizabethan London

BBC News Magazine
2012-07-19

Michael Wood

The black trumpeter John Blanke played regularly at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII

The reign of Elizabeth I saw the beginning of Britain’s first black community. It’s a fascinating story for modern Britons, writes historian Michael Wood.

Walk out of Aldgate Tube and stroll around Whitechapel Road in east London today, and you’ll experience the heady sights, smells and sounds of the temples, mosques and curry houses of Brick Lane—so typical of modern multicultural Britain.

Most of us tend to think that black people came to Britain after the war—Caribbeans on the Empire Windrush in 1948, Bangladeshis after the 1971 war and Ugandan Asians after Idi Amin’s expulsion in 1972.

But, back in Shakespeare’s day, you could have met people from west Africa and even Bengal in the same London streets.

Of course, there were fewer, and they drew antipathy as well as fascination from the Tudor inhabitants, who had never seen black people before. But we know they lived, worked and intermarried, so it is fair to say that Britain’s first black community starts here.

There had been black people in Britain in Roman times, and they are found as musicians in the early Tudor period in England and Scotland.

But the real change came in Elizabeth I’s reign, when, through the records, we can pick up ordinary, working, black people, especially in London…

Read the entire article here.

“The Ineffaceable Curse of Cain”: Race, Miscegenation, and the Victorian Staging of Irishness

Victorian Literature and Culture
Volume 29, Number 2 (September 2001)
pages 383–396

Scott Boltwood, Associate Professor of English
Emory & Henry College, Emory, Virginia

THROUGHOUT THE NINETEENTH CENTURY both the English popular and scientific communities increasingly argued for a distinct racial difference between the Irish Celt and the English Saxon, which conceptually undermined the Victorian attempt to form a single kingdom from the two peoples. The ethnological discourse concerning Irish identity was dominated by English theorists who reflect their empire’s ideological necessity; thus, the Celt and Saxon were often described as racial siblings early in the nineteenth century when union seemed possible, while later descriptions of the Irish as members of a distant or degenerate race reflect the erosion of public sympathy caused by the era of violence following the failed revolt of 1848. Amid this deluge of scientific discourse, the Irish were treated as mute objects of analysis, lacking any opportunity for formal rejoinder; nonetheless, these essentially English discussions of racial identity and Irishness also entered into the Irish popular culture.

This paper will examine the dynamic resonance of English ethnography within Irish culture by using Victorian theories of Celtic racial character to inform a reading of a seminal dramatic portrayal of the Irish. The focus of my analysis will be the romantic melodrama The Colleen Bawn, written by the Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault in 1860. This work is the first of Boucicault’s several “Irish” melodramas: plays that celebrated Irish identity, enjoyed the fanatical devotion of Irish audiences well into the next century, and inspired a school of Boucicauldian nationalists at Belfast’s Queen’s Theatre at the turn of the century. Ultimately, though, the artistic impetus for The Colleen Bawn underscores Boucicault’s deep ambivalence over his homeland. Early in 1860, he began working on The Colleen Bawn following his completion of The Octoroon, a play in which he performed each night throughout the period of the Irish play’s composition and rehearsal. Both plays focus on a young landowner who is torn between his love for a poor, local beauty and his financial necessity to marry his wealthy neighbor. Moreover, in both plays the heroes inherit estates teetering on the brink of financial ruin, both intended brides are faithful and wealthy cousins, and both heroines are celebrated for their innocence and purity. Tellingly though, the first heroine is the mulatto freed-slave Zoe, while the second is the Irish peasant Eily O’Connor.

Although avowedly not intended to be an “Irish Octoroon,” The Colleen Bawn anticipates the racial conflation of Irish and African that the English ethnological imagination scientifically argued for beginning in the 1880s. Indeed, the creative genesis of this Irish romance in a melodrama of slavery and miscegenation aptly reveals the status of the Irish within the United Kingdom in spite of the promised equality supposedly conferred on the Irish by the Act of Union in 1800. Whereas the modern reader may argue that the play’s tension arises from the social, religious, and economic disparities between Hardress Cregan and Eily O’Connor, the widespread popularity of Victorian theories of racial identity would have predisposed the play’s audience to recognize the racial difference between Hardress and Eily as the fundamental impediment to their happiness…

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The Biopolitics of Mixing: Thai Multiracialities and Haunted Ascendancies

Ashgate Publishing
October 2012
198 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-7680-5
ebook ISBN 978-1-4094-2502-1

Jinthana Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

Debates over who belongs in Europe and who doesn’t increasingly speak the language of mixing, but how are the figures commonly described as ‘mixed’ actually embodied? The Biopolitics of Mixing invites us to reckon with the spectres of pathologization past and present, placing the celebration of mixing beside moral panics over terrorism and trafficking and a post-race multiculturalism that elevates some as privileged members of the neoliberal community, whilst ghosting others from it. Drawing on a broad archive including rich qualitative interviews conducted in Britain and Germany, media and policy debates, popular culture, race-based research and queer-of-colour theories, this book imagines into being communities in which people and places normally kept separate can coexist in the same reality.

As such, it will appeal to scholars across a range of sociological and cultural studies, including critical race, ethnic and migration studies, transnational gender and queer studies, German and European studies, Thai and Southeast Asian studies, and studies of affect, performativity, biopolitics and necropolitics. It should be read by all those interested in thinking critically on the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability.

Contents

• Introduction: haunted origins
• Where are you from?
• From monster to fashion model: regenerating racialized bodies
• Is it better to be mixed race?
• Hybrid nations, mixed feelings: from marginal man to Obama
• Exceptional cities, exceptional citizens: metronormativity and mimeticism
• Reckoning with prostitutes: performing Thai femininity
• Conclusion: where do we want to go?
• Bibliography
• Index

Ian Thomson: Jamaica was modern before Britain

The Independent
London, England
2012-10-04

Miguel Cullen

To mark Black History Month the author of “Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica” talks to Miguel Cullen about the ways Jamaica is punching above its weight

Jamaica is a country that exceeds its limitations. For example India’s GDP is 180 times that of the West Indian country and Jamaica could fit inside it 300 times. Yet Jamaica won twice as many medals at the London Olympics, 12 to India’s six.

Musically it shines beyond its scope too: between the mid-1950s and 2000 Jamaica had produced one new music recording per 1,000 people each year – making it per capita the world’s most prolific generator of recorded music.

Jamaican culture has long been fashionable and on Google Trends, a means of measuring how highly words feature in the search engine. In the list of most-searched countries “Jamaica” comes a tight second to “Russia,” a country so big it makes Jamaica look like a minnow.

In view of Jamaica’s small financial and physical scale, it’s logical to think of it as a statistical freak of nature, an anomaly, to have such a broad world standing. How could such a tiny island, which is only this year celebrating 50 years of independence from the UK, compete with superpowers like India and Russia?

It was with this question in mind that, on the eve of Black History Month in the UK, I visited the London home of Ian Thomson, the author of the hugely successful (and controversial) Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica…

…The book won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. It combines serpentine, fragile descriptions of Jamaica’s natural beauty with an unafraid look at the horrors of Jamaican violence, in a way that is intransigent and unique.

“Jamaica was modern before Britain was,” Thomson tells me, sitting in his study overlooking the greenery of Alexandra Park. “What fascinated me about these Caribbean countries was that for me they’re the first modern societies – they were the first countries to have intermingling, mixed race people, across the colour bar.”

“When Jamaicans came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, they were often very surprised by the conservative reactions to some of them being mixed race – mixed racing had been going on for centuries in the Caribbean. So in a sense you could say that although Jamaica is in some ways parochial, in other ways it’s incredibly forward-thinking.”…

Read the entire article here.