Mixed Race Studies

Eurasians: The First British Born Chinese?

DimSum: The British Chinese community website
2007-06-30

Yvonne Foley

I am a Eurasian.  I am the daughter of an English mother and a Shanghai father.  In traditional Chinese culture, having a Chinese father, I am regarded as being Chinese.

I am part of a community that has been around for over 100 years.  We pre-date by many decades what many people seem to think is the point at which Britains’ Chinese community came into being.  The 1950s, when people from Hong Kong’s New Territories started to come to the UK.

Our fathers’ origins

Chinese men started to settle down in Britain in the last years of the nineteenth century. Right from the start they seemed to have few problems in getting partners amongst the working class girls of the cities in which they settled. Not very surprising when up to World War Two and even beyond it marriage for a young woman could mean violence and the most desperate poverty.  John Chinaman, as he was called at the time, was clean, sober, hard working and a good father. And, of course, more often than not he was quite a handsome man!

But where did these men come from?  For many, the answer they gave to any official who asked was ‘Hong Kong’. But that tells us little.  A Chinese seaman had to take an English language test – unless he was from Hong Kong.  So there were few who were prepared to say that they were not from Hong Kong unless they had confidence in their English language skills!  Where they were actually from ranged from Hainan Island to Fukien and Tientsin.  But since Shanghai was by far the most important commercial city in China and its major port, it seems that many were recruited there and in the nearby city of Ningbo…

Read the entire article here. For more information about Liverpool’s early Chinese Community, see http://www.halfandhalf.org.uk

Mixed heritage voices – Multiple identities, varied experiences, diverse views

British Association for Adoption & Fostering
Woburn House Conference Centre
20 Tavistock Square
London WC1H 9HQ
2012-11-29, 10:00-16:00Z

One in ten people in the UK define themselves as mixed heritage, and it seems that young people think it is ‘cool’ to be ‘mixed’. But what meaning do young people and their families give to their mixed heritage identities and how do these identities develop in mixed adoptive and foster care families?

The profiles of children in ‘Be My Parent’ (BAAF’s family finding service) and the Adoption Register demonstrate the multiple and complex ethnicities of children waiting for placements and this brings challenges to practitioners making decisions for mixed heritage children in the public care system. There are also challenges for adoptive parents and foster carers who need to value and promote the child’s heritage and help them achieve a positive identity, alongside an ability to cope with racism to make their way in the world.

This conference will bring together mixed heritage young people, families and researchers to share their experiences and perspectives on identity, and will look at the implications of these issues for practice.

Aims

• to understand the experiences of mixed heritage children, young people and their families
• to identify how adoptive parents and foster carers might help their mixed heritage child develop their identities
• to explore how practitioners can make better decisions for mixed heritage children in the public care system

Chair & Speakers

• Professor Ann Phoenix, Co-Director, Thomas Coram, Research Unit (Invited)
• Dr. Suki Ali, Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics
• Dr. Vicki Harman, Lecturer, Centre for Criminology & Sociology, University of Royal Holloway
• Dr. Daniel McNeil, Lecturer in Media & Cultural Studies, University of Newcastle
• Dr. Fiona Peters, Consultant Perspectives from Adoptive Parents & Foster Carers, Sheffield City Council

Who should attend

Children’s services social workers and managers, family placement practitioners, independent reviewing officers, decision-makers, panel members, health and education professionals, youth services, CAFCASS children’s guardians, social work students, adopted adults, adoptive parents and foster carers.

For more information, click here.

The Politics of Loving Blackness in the UK

University of Birmingham
March 2010
336 pages

Lisa Amanda Palmer

A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham For the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Department of American and Canadian Studies)

Can ‘loving blackness’ become a new discourse for anti-racism in the UK and the broader black diaspora? This thesis will critically assess the concept of ‘loving blackness as political resistance’ as outlined by the African American feminist bell hooks (1992). The thesis will show the ways in which blackness has been both negated and denigrated in western cultures and thus constructed in opposition to notions of love and humanness. Conversely, love and blackness are also rehabilitated in different ways by Black diasporic populations in Britain through the transnational space. The transnational space can provide opportunities for constructing, networks of care, love and anti racist strategies that affirm the value of blackness and Black life. However, the transnational space can also be fraught with risks, dangers and exclusions providing Black and migrant populations with uneven forms of citizenship and belonging to western neo-liberal states. Loving blackness within a transnational context can help to create a dynamic space to affirm blackness against racial exclusions and dominations whilst providing a lens to suggest alternative ways of being human.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: The Politics of Loving Blackness in the UK
  • Background
  • Black feminist methodologies and personal narratives
  • The transnational space and personal narrative as a methodological reflection
  • Love and Black feminism
  • Love as a means for social change
  • Thesis outline
• Chapter one: Racism and the denigration of blackness
  • Introduction
  • Loving dialogue and the affirmation of Black humanity
  • The politics of love and blackness
  • Is loving blackness possible in a white supremacist context?
  • Blackness as a discursive location
  • ‘Race,’ racism and pseudo science
  • Whiteness lost – the ‘origins’ of blackness in sixteenth century England
  • Plantocracy racism and slavery
  • Early black presence in England
  • Pathological configurations of blackness in the Western environment
  • Internalised narratives of racism
  • Blackness falling out of love with Britishness
  • Conclusion
• Chapter two: A love that binds the nation: race memory and the politics of Forgetting
  • Introduction
  • Navigating race and blackness in Obama’s ‘post-racial’ America
  • Forgetting racial horrors and imperial terror
  • ‘The white, white West’ – white hegemony and social amnesia
  • ‘The forgetting machine’
  • De-colonial fantasies within liberal democracies
  • Conclusion
• Chapter three: ‘We don’t want the hate mongers’: Multicultural love and anti-colonial politics in the making of Black Britain
  • Introduction
  • Are we all British now? Love and the multicultural nation
  • ‘Tea drinking, hokey cokey’ and other projections of monocultural Britain
  • Multicultural blackness in Britain
  • Post-colonial paradigm of blackness in Britain
  • The dialogic paradigm of blackness in Britain
  • Symbols and memory in the making of ‘Black Britain’
  • Windrush
  • Why Manchester 1945?
  • Before ‘Black Britain’
  • Conclusion
• Chapter four: Diminishing Blackness: Transnational Blackness Beyond the ‘Black British’ paradigm
  • Introduction
  • Mixed futures/mixed histories
  • ‘Absorbing’ blackness
  • Invasion and the Black presence in Britain
  • The ‘mongrel nation’
  • Keeping racism in the mix
  • Disappearing blackness
  • Blanqueamianto – ‘The gradual whitening of blackness’
  • Troubling terms of race
  • Reframing Black Liverpool and that moment of optimism
  • Transnational blackness and Liverpool
  • Conclusion
• Chapter five: Slipping and Shifting: The changing parameters of Blackness in Britain
  • Introduction
  • ‘It’s Grimey’ – Black Popular Culture in Britain
  • Black Boys and Eski Beats
  • New migration and new racisms
  • No more saris, no more steel bands, no more samosas
  • ‘The deportation machine’
  • ‘Ethnic’ hierarchies and the new blackness in Britain
  • Racial excesses of white privilege
  • Constant Contestation
  • Conclusion – Loving blackness within a transnational context
• Chapter six: The Cultural Politics of Loving Blackness
  • Introduction
  • ‘Loving Justice’ – Malcolm and Martin
  • Cornel West and the nihilistic threat to Black America
  • Neoliberal nihilism, Katrina and the (in)visible Black American underclass
  • Nihilism and the Katrina catastrophe
  • hooks and ‘loving blackness’
  • Loving Native Indianess
  • Love and philosophy
  • Spirituality and politics
  • Caribbean transnational bonds of kinship and loving blackness
  • Conclusion
• Chapter seven: ‘Ladies a you’re time now’ Erotic Politics, Lovers’ rock And Resistance in Britain
  • Introduction
  • Black sexuality and erotic corruptions
  • Historical legacies
  • Lovers’ rock and its transnational emergence in Britain
  • A femminised sanctuary
  • Blocking Jah vibes
  • Conscious lovers’
  • Love as a discourse for liberation
  • Conclusion
• Conclusion
  • Conclusion
  • Future research – ‘Black Europe’
• Bibliography

…Chapter 4: DIMINISHING BLACKNESS: Transnational Blackness beyond the ‘Black British’ paradigm

Introduction

There are a number of reasons why the nomenclature ‘Black British’ has remained a tenuous and contested political location for Black populations in Britain. In this chapter I will explore why our contemporary transnational situation destabilises this notion further. I am suggesting that the continuing disavowal of blackness and racism specifically in media discourses and amongst wider political and social fields in Britain continues to undermine what I will call the ‘optimistic moment of Black Britishness.’ That moment occurred between the mid 1980s and early 1990s where a ‘veritable renaissance’ of ‘Black British’ cultural representation had created a new form of Black visibility in Britain and beyond (Mercer 1994). This new visibility came into existence through the representation and cultural production of Black British film, visual arts, poetry, literature, music and television as well as through the academic writing of Black British scholars during this period such as Kobena Mercer (1994), Paul Gilroy (1987;1993) and Stuart Hall (Dent 1992; Owusu 2000). At the height of this moment, Stuart Hall (1992) suggested that ‘blacks in the British diaspora must, at this historical moment, refuse the binary of Black or British’ (Hall 1992, p.29). For Hall the ‘or’ represented a site of ‘constant contestation.’ In his view the aim of the struggle was for ‘a new kind of cultural positionality, a different logic of difference’ which he argues was encapsulated by the cultural historian Paul Gilroy. According to Hall, Black people in Britain should replace the ‘or’ with ‘and’, thus refusing the essentialising binary of Black or British. Instead the preferred ‘and’ could help us to realise the potentiality or possibility of this hybrid location (Hall 1992). For Hall the logic of coupling rather than binary opposition meant that,

You can be Black and British, not only because that is a necessary position to take in 1992, but because even those two terms, joined now by the coupler ‘and’ instead of opposed to one another, do not exhaust all of our identities. Only some of our identities are sometimes caught in that particular struggle (Hall 1992, p.29).

However, after nearly two decades since Hall’s discourse on being both Black and British, has the optimism of this moment gone? Has the expectant ‘and’ deployed by Hall to heal this ‘constant contestation’ delivered the desired end to the entangled struggle of being Black British? I will attempt to answer these questions more specifically in this chapter in relation to the predicted ‘mixed race’ future and ‘mixed race’ histories of Britain and the changing transnational formation of blackness in contemporary British life. I will approach this analysis through the lens of a less than remarkable documentary text, The Great British Black Invasion which charts the changing face of Black Britain in the 21st centaury. I will explain that this documentary works as a micro representational text to the larger continuing omission of specific forms of regional blackness found in Britain in cities such as Liverpool, a city with one of the longest settled Black populations in the UK (Brown 2006). I will further discuss the political implication of Invasion’s discourse on racialised absorption blackness and ‘diminishing blackness’ as well the configuration of blackness as a transnational cultural and political framework. ‘Mixing’ and ‘absorption’ are terms that describe the faux embrace of racial intermixture. And at the same time these terms actually, and somewhat paradoxically, also work to reinforce deeply racist ideas about British racial ‘purity.’ I will conclude by suggesting that the transnational space for Black communities in Britain defined as ‘mixed race’ or otherwise remains a critical yet complex location to build alternative concepts of blackness. Through the dynamic utilisation of diasporic resources, transnational notions of blackness can act as revolutionary interventions ‘that undermine the practice of domination’ (hooks 1992, p.20) helping marginalised human beings to recover their human worth.

Mixed futures/mixed histories

Within the UK, the ‘racial’ forecast for African Caribbean populations suggests that this particular ethnic group will eventually decline as a distinct ethnic category from Britain’s multicultural map (Platt 2008). According to the report, Ethnicity and Family- Relationships within and between ethnic groups: An analysis using the Labour Force Survey (Platt 2008), Britain is facing a ‘mixed race’ future:

At the other end of the spectrum, Black Caribbean men and women were the most likely of any group to be in an inter-ethnic partnership (48 per cent of men and 34 percent of women in couples were in an inter-ethnic partnership); and this increased between first and second (or subsequent) generations and between older and younger men and women. Rates were also higher among couples with children. For 55 per cent of Caribbean men living with a partner and children under 16, and 40 per cent of Caribbean women, that partner was from a different ethnic group. It therefore appears a trend that is set to continue and that will result in an increasing number of people with diverse identities of which Caribbean heritage forms a part. It also means that those who define themselves as singularly Caribbean are likely to decline over time, as increasingly complex heritages emerge among those with some element of Caribbean descent (Platt 2008, p.7).

For many yeas now, it has been suggested that the fastest growing population in the UK will be of ‘mixed origins.’ For example, in the early 1990s, it was reported that around 53 per cent of African Caribbean men age 16-24 and 36 percent of Caribbean women of the same age were married or cohabiting with white partners (Modood et al., 1997). In our increasingly globalised societies, where diverse mobile populations move around the globe for temporary or permanent settlement, patterns of sexual interaction across racialised, national, religious and linguistic borders are set to continue (Bhattacharyya, et al. 2002). However, it is worth pointing out that the practice of ‘race mixture’ is not new to British soil. The long historical presence of Black populations in Britain, in particular African, Caribbean and Asian populations has been documented in the social histories that trace the Black presence in Britain back to the Roman era (Fryer 1984, Walvin 1994, Christian 1998, Ramdin 1987). Since the rise of the British Empire, the continuity of this presence has been directly linked to transatlantic slavery and the expansion of British imperial and colonial endeavours (Fryer 1984, Ramdin 1987). Metropolitan cities such as London, Cardiff, Liverpool and Bristol were some of the major British seaports involved in the transatlantic slave trade. It was at these ports that many Africans enslaved and in servitude first glimpsed British soil and began to make an impact upon local white populations (Christian 1998). During the nineteenth century, amongst the Black settler communities and visitors that emerged within the major British slaving ports, the practice of interracial marriage became widespread between Black males and white females (Fryer 1984, Christian 1998). The most common explanation for intermarriage suggests that on the whole the Black population during this period (numbering approximately 10,000 in total) had largely consisted of young African males who heavily out numbered the presence of African women (Fryer 1984, p.235). The practice of interracial marriages and the integration of African men into to larger white populations became a common practice amongst earlier noted individual Black settlers to Britain such as Olaudah Equiano, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and others who came before them (Fryer 1984). Early Black radical figures to emerge onto the British scene were of ‘mixed origins.’ Personalities such as William Davidson one of the infamous Cato Street conspirators who attempted to blow up the entire Cabinet of the British Government in 1820 alongside Robert Wedderburn a working class hero who advocated press freedom in Britain whilst proclaiming that slaves had the right to kill their masters, both had fathers from Scotland and Black mothers from Jamaica (Fryer 1984). The Jamaican nurse and healer Mary Seacole the celebrated heroine of the Crimean War (1853-1856) who risked her life to nurse wounded and dying soldiers in the British Army also shared a ‘mixed’ Jamaican and Scottish ancestry (Fryer 1984). In the early twentieth century, in port cities such as Liverpool, Black male settlers to the city whether as students, seamen or factory workers inevitably formed intimate interracial relationships and families with local white women (Christian 1998). What I am referencing here is that the idea of a ‘mixed race’ future in Britain is neither novel nor without historical continuity. Indeed we cannot consider the possibility and implications of mixed futures without considering the living contextual legacy of mixed heritage communities in Britain. Thus as Peter Fryer (1984) had noted in response to the question as to what actually happened to Britain’s earlier nineteenth century Black populations, it would appear that the decedents of ‘interracial’ couplings no longer thought of themselves as constituting a distinct Black community and over time became part of the British poor (Fryer 1984, p.235). As such it would be reasonable to suggest that a significant number of ‘white’ families in Britain share a hidden history of Black ancestry. As Fryer explains,

The records of their lives are obscure and scattered, and they have for the most part been forgotten by their descendents. But there must be many thousands of British families who, if they traced their roots back to the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, would find among their ancestors an African or person of African descent (Fryer 1984, p.235).

Increased awareness of the historical continuity of early Black settlers would enable twenty first century Black populations in Britain to form more complex discursive engagements with the notion of blackness and its emergence within the British Isles. Furthermore, a more complex rendering of the pre-twentieth century Black experience in Britain would further contribute to debunking the implausible myth of a racially sealed pure white Anglo Saxon race as synonymous with being British…

Read the entire dissertation here.

African-Scottish families

A North East Story: Scotland, Africa and Slavery in the Caribbean
2008

This exhibition has been organised by an Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire Bicentenary Committee to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Britain’s outlawing of the African slave trade in 1807. It follows on from a service of commemoration and a series of public lectures sponsored by the Committee in 2007.

Many of the commemorative events in the UK in 2007 explored the big history of transatlantic slavery and the fight of British and African activists to end it. This exhibition seeks to show how that big history links to the history of North East Scotland.

Table of Contents

• Slave names
• Colour consciousness in the Caribbean
• John Shand and Frances Brown
• Frances Batty Shand
• Jonathan Troup

Few Scottish women went to the Caribbean. Their menfolk had relationships instead with women of African origin or descent. Thousands of children were born from these interracial relationships.

The men almost never married their African partners, although sometimes a man would buy the freedom of his enslaved lover. If he did not, he would have no rights over his children. By law, a child born to an enslaved woman belonged to the woman’s owner, regardless of who the father was.

Often it was the custom for the children to use their father’s surname. If they were born free and had a fairly light skin colour, their fathers often sent them to Scotland for education.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

The Forgotten Diaspora

The Official Gateway to Scotland
2008

Geoff Palmer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Life Sciences
Heriot-Watt University

I was born in Jamaica in 1940, the largest British island in the Caribbean. I emigrated to London in 1955 to join my mother and earn a living. She had emigrated in 1948.

In 1967 I completed a PhD at Edinburgh University. Now retired, I was a cereal grain scientist and lectured at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh on the science and technology of brewing and distilling. I have had the good fortune to represent Heriot-Watt and Scotland in these disciplines all over the world. A most memorable visit was to Africa to help with the growth and processing of the tropical grain, sorghum. Before a lecture a young African spoke to me in a local language believing I was a company representative. He was angry! Now, although my ancestors may have come from that part of Africa, I had no idea what was being said to me. One of my African ex-students over-heard the young man, laughed and explained he was asking, “Why is the company sending a Scotsman to speak to us?”

During a visit to Register House, Edinburgh last year I noticed a poster referring to “The distribution of Scottish people around the world”. With a smile I said to my host that I hoped people of Scottish descent in the Caribbean were included in this survey of the Scottish Diaspora. He turned and said goodbye quickly to get away from a Jamaican who had suddenly taken leave of his senses. Talking about Scottish-Caribbean history elsewhere in Scotland elicited similar responses.

In 2007, the British government decreed that the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade should be commemorated, a trade which had started in 1562. Many commemorative events took place and I was asked to give lectures to Scottish historical societies and various organisations in Scotland and England.

In contrast to my knowledge of brewing, distilling and cereal grains, my knowledge of the history of British/Scottish slavery in the Caribbean was limited. To prepare myself for the lectures I did some research and completed a small book on the consequences of British slavery, especially with regard to Jamaicans…

…It is estimated that 20,000,000 African people were bought or captured in Africa and transported into New World slavery. Only about half survived to work on the plantations. However, even Adam Smith was impressed by the profitability of this free land, free labour, business called Chattel slavery. The terrible and unique feature of this slavery was that legally slaves had “no right to life”. The working life of a field slave was about five years. Those who compare this slavery with other kinds of inhuman behaviour such as trafficking are being unfair to all such terrible activities…

…How did the Scots join the slave business? Originally officially excluded from the English slave trade, Scots such as Colonel John Campbell left the failed Scottish colonial experiment in Darien, Panama and arrived in Jamaica between 1697 and 1700. He had a large family in Jamaica and died there in 1740, initiating the spread of the name Campbell all over the island. Today there are many more Campbells in Jamaica per acre than in Scotland. In 1707 Scottish politicians signed 25 Acts to unify the parliaments of Scotland and England. The Act that was signed first was Act 4 which allowed the Scots to join the English slave business. Young Scotsmen rushed to the Caribbean to make quick fortunes as slave masters, slave doctors and administrators. The great economic benefits of Caribbean slavery to Scotland were clearly apparent to Robert Burns who wrote a toast honouring the “Memory of those on the 12th that we lost’, commemorating one of the most gruesome and crucial naval battles fought between the French, Spanish and the British. The prize was Jamaica. Like other young Scotsmen who wanted to change their lives making money from slavery, Burns bought his ticket for Jamaica in 1786, intending to sail from Greenock with Highland Mary but his new book of poems sold well and he did not sail. Later, Burns’ new lady friend, Clarinda (Mrs McLehose), sailed to Jamaica to discuss the state of her marriage with her husband, a slave master. On her return she told Burns her husband told her to return to Edinburgh as he was quite happy in Jamaica with his “ebony woman and mahogany children”.

Many Scottish and English slave masters had children with their slaves. Robert Wedderburn (abolitionist) was the Jamaican mixed race son of Scottish slave master James Wedderburn and his black slave Rosanna. Many Caribbean people are of mixed race and many of us are descended from Scottish slave masters. It is therefore enlightening that the national motto of Jamaica is: Out of Many One People. My late mother’s family name is Larmond a mis-spelling of Lamont. The issue of surnames has been a matter of debate between the descendants of slaves but I feel that our lost African names and our present Scottish/British surnames are all part of a history that cannot be changed. My ancestors came out of a cruel slavery and chose the family surnames. I see no reason why I should alter the choice they made. I am proud that our slave ancestors endured and produced proud nations of black people in the New World. My mother’s forefathers, like others who gained a small piece of land after slavery, described themselves as “planters” the same name used to describe white slave-plantation owners. A small but significant statement of ‘equality in position’…

Read the entire article here.

Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs

Routledge: Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora
2009-12-15
204 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-87226-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-89391-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-203-85736-6

Daniel R. McNeil, Associate Professor of History
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

This is the first book to place the self-fashioning of mixed-race individuals in the context of a Black Atlantic. Drawing on a wide range of sources and a diverse cast of characters – from the diaries, letters, novels and plays of femme fatales in Congo and the United States to the advertisements, dissertations, oral histories and political speeches of Black Power activists in Canada and the United Kingdom – it gives particular attention to the construction of mixed-race femininity and masculinity during the twentieth century. Its broad scope and historical approach provides readers with a timely rejoinder to academics, artists, journalists and politicians who only use the mixed-race label to depict prophets or delinquents as “new” national icons for the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

1. New People?
2. An Individualistic Age?
3. “Je suis métisse”
4. “I. Am. A Light Grey Canadian.”
5. “I’m Black. Not Mixed. Not Canadian. Not African. Just Black”
6. “Yes, We’re All Individuals!” “I’m Not.”
7. Conclusion

Plaque honour for ‘first black star’ Elisabeth Welch

BBC News
2012-02-27

The singer Elisabeth Welch is to be commemorated with an English Heritage blue plaque in south-west London.

She is the second black woman to be honoured with a blue plaque in London.

It will be unveiled in Ovington Court, Kensington, which was her home during the 1930s when she rose to fame on the cabaret circuit.

The performer died aged 99 in 2003 and has been described as “Britain’s first black star”.

Paul Reid, Director of Black Cultural Archives said it was “an important moment for black heritage”.

Welch was born in New York in 1904, but lived in London for 70 years…

…The first black woman to be honoured with a plaque was the nurse Mary Seacole in 2005…

Read the entire article here.

In Conversation with Mix-d

the mixed project
2012-04-13

First to enter is Jeanette. Attired in an elegant blouse, she is ready for her close-up. Her sweet smile and murmur of ‘good morning’ gets immediate replies from the rest of us in the studio. Jeanette’s blue eyes will not get completely accustomed to the dim lighting, they are not as sharp as they used to be. Bradley Lincoln, her son, standing a few inches taller is leading her from behind and with a tender hand on her waist, he guides her to turn left into the studio.

The pair make their way to the sofas. After a long train excursion from Manchester, tea with milk for Bradley and water for Jeanette puts everyone at ease. Mother and son sit with the warm sun on their backs, facing Rhoda and Andy. Angela, Andy’s assistant is away from the studio today. Andy’s younger daughter, Emilia and I are sat parallel to the group, excited for the discussion to begin. Faint music can be heard playing from a distance. Bradley is usually the one asking the questions. In 2006, he founded Mix-d, an organisation that aims to elevate discussions on mixed race identity. Mix-d is today a place where all people of multiple heritage are able to express their feelings on the subject. This fantastic organisation has several ongoing projects, including an information pack offering helpful advice for parents and imminent parents of mixed race children. Last year they held the second Mix-d Face, the UK’s first modelling competition for people of mixed race and judged by Jade Thompson, the winner of Britain’s and Ireland’s Next Top Model.

Today, it’s Rhoda who will be asking the questions. Andy explains the project originated from several questions that kept resonating in his mind. “What impact, if any, does having an English father and a mother of Afro-Caribbean descent have on my children? How does the world’s view of my three children affect the way they see themselves?” Bradley nods in between Andy queries. “Okay, I get that.”

Andy concludes, “and it would be interesting to have a project where we could get people from different mixed backgrounds to share their life experiences and bring new faces and a new dimension to the discussion.” Bradley is the ideal candidate for this project. He has spent his life negating his own racial identity and brings this determination to helping others at various stages in their own understanding…

…Excerpts from Bradley and Jeanette’s testimony.

Rhoda Where are your parents from?

Bradley My Mum is white English, my Dad is black Jamaican.

Rhoda And how would they describe themselves?

Bradley My Dad describes himself as Jamaican. My Mum, how would you describe yourself?

Jeanette White English.

R How did you meet Bradley’s dad?

J I used to work in a pub. I worked at the bar and he came in quite often with his friends. I’d already been married. I already had three sons. I met Lloyd then.

B It’s all right, we can be honest. My Mum and Dad are not still together…

…R When you were growing up was there anybody or any media personality with whom you identified or were particularly proud of?

B Not necessarily proud of, but I remember going to my Dad’s and he used to have the Ebony magazine and I’d read it. And maybe I just felt more attuned to that styling, and thought I can’t bring it home because my brother is going to think that it’s racist so I didn’t bring it home but I used to look at it and see black people in a certain way. it was a very mild sensation, but…

R So it wasn’t anyone in particular, it was the notion of there being a clandestine black elite.

B Yeah, somebody who wasn’t white. I lived in a predominantly white environment and in school I remember not being represented in the curriculum even though I couldn’t articulate it. the small bit of work we did around black history which was very minimal. I didn’t feel like I could authentically be with this because I’m not fully black. I felt quite absent from lots of things but because I had a happy home life in lots of other ways I think that counter balanced it, but given the personality I have I was always searching for what truly represented me without having to give up my Mum or my Dad.

J I think also when Bradley’s father came over here from Jamaica he tried to pursue another lifestyle, he didn’t want to be seen as black. He tried to fit in into the white…to assimilate. So I think this is maybe why he didn’t navigate Bradley through some of the Jamaican culture because he himself had come from that and he didn’t want that any more, he didn’t want that in his background. He just wanted to be seen as someone who had lived in England for years and years. He didn’t want to take Bradley through all this, he just wanted to push all the Jamaican things to the background. Cos it was later on wasn’t it, when you got older started to investigate your Grandma and everything. It wasn’t up to your Dad that instigated that…

…R Are there are any personal thoughts you’d like to see included in the debate?

B I’d certainly like to see the discussion handed over to more younger people. Cos I’ve done some work in Europe, in the States and here and I find we can get locked into that victim or blaming other people, or victimhood, or looking for a problem. I find that lots of people seem to be looking for a problem. So they want to have a conversation but not to the end of finding an issue. Creating a space that gives them permission to talk about it. It seems that lots of academics enable the conversation by looking at the sociological and the psychological. Sociological is how it’s introduced in schools and how governments see mixed race. The psychological is the disconnect between the two, but the larger voice is the sociological voice. What I’d like to see is people who are mixed race from different backgrounds and experiences just talking about things from their own point of view, to kind of balance out the academic discussion. Cos the academic discussion is a different language. When I went into this project I wanted to look at the academic route but they’re actually just saying the same things. You can codify it and break it down. And they’re moaning and complaining and being intellectually superior to each other, which doesn’t actually involve the individual. It’s more of a cerebral exercise that they pass between each other. I’m more interested in nurturing the emotional side of this discussion, which then leads to the vocabulary of the psychological and the sociological so they can talk about it…

…R The things that define these kids is that they all sound the same.

B Yeah, that’s true. I was tired of academics talking in a certain way so I didn’t start this project til I was 36 so I’d seen lots of different discussions and I thought this is boring, everyone was saying much of the same things. I was trying to find a way to have this conversation with young people in a way they wanted to have this conversation. And that was quite freeing because nobody was doing that and people criticised it, academics criticised it and that’s what they do, but they critique to the point where they somehow find problems that aren’t there. But there is a way of still having this conversation, to have it in a way where being seen as mixed isn’t victimised. It’s a very middle line, that some will resist, but it exists and people say, yeah, that’s where I live, that’s how my mind works. But academics don’t like that.

Read the entire interview here.

A Longitudinal Study of Migration Propensities for Mixed Ethnic Unions in England and Wales

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Bonn, Germany
Discussion Paper No. 6394
February 2012
21 pages

Zhiqiang Feng, Research Fellow
University of St. Andrews

Maarten van Ham, Professor of Urban Renewal
Delft University of Technology and IZA

Paul Boyle, Professor of Geography and Sustainable Development
University of St. Andrews

Gillian M. Raab, Research Fellow
University of St. Andrews

Most studies investigating residential segregation of ethnic minorities ignore the fact that the majority of adults live in couples. In recent years there has been a growth in the number of mixed ethnic unions that involve a minority member and a white member. To our knowledge, hardly any research has been undertaken to explicitly examine whether the ethnic mix within households has an impact on the residential choices of households in terms of the ethnic mix of destination neighbourhoods. Our study addresses this research gap and examines the tendencies of migration among mixed ethnic unions in comparison with their co-ethnic peers. We used data from the Longitudinal Study for England and Wales. Our statistical analysis supports the spatial assimilation theory: ethnic minorities move towards less deprived areas and to a lesser extent also towards less ethnically concentrated areas. However, the types of destination neighbourhood of minority people living in mixed ethnic unions varied greatly with the ethnicity of the ethnic minority partner.

INTRODUCTION

Residential integration is regarded as a measure of structural assimilation of ethnic minority populations and has drawn long-standing interest from academic studies (Park and Burgess 1969; Lieberson 1963; Massey 1985; Allen and Turner 1996). Residential integration is not only an indicator of the degree of ethnic assimilation, but also further enhances social and cultural integration. Conversely, ethnic segregation is deemed to hinder social interaction with majority populations, and to marginalise ethnic minority populations. Hence the British government has increasingly promoted community cohesion and residential integration.

While a body of research has examined aggregate levels of residential segregation of ethnic minority groups and the cross-sectional residential locations of ethnic minority populations at the individual level, few studies have examined the determinants of the actual residential migration of ethnic minorities in relation to characteristics of neighbourhoods of origin and destination (Finney and Simpson 2008). Little is known about how ethnic minority people move between neighbourhoods with different levels of concentration of their own groups and with different levels of deprivation. Most existing studies of ethnic segregation ignore the fact that the majority of adults live in couples. In recent years there has been a growth in the number of mixed ethnic families that involve a minority member and a white member (Feng et al, 2010). However, to our knowledge, almost no research has been undertaken to explicitly examine whether the ethnic mix within households has an impact on tendencies of residential migration between different types of neighbourhood. In the US, a few studies which examined the residential locations (but not mobility) of ethnic populations, have taken the ethnic mix within households into account. Ellis et al. (2006) used cross-sectional data in the US and came to the conclusion that mixed-ethnic households are less likely to live in minority ethnic neighbourhoods. White and Sassler (2000) also used US census data and found that Latinos and blacks who married a white spouse were more likely to reside in higher status neighbourhoods, while in contrast the marriage of a white person to a non-white person seemed to result in them residing in a lower-status neighbourhood than they might otherwise have done. Although Ellis et al (2006) argued that their results are more likely due to mixed-ethnic couples choosing to live in mixed-ethnic neighbourhoods, rather than mixed neighbourhoods ‘creating’ these couples, it is difficult with cross-sectional data to come to any firm conclusion about this. The same is true for the study by White and Sassler (2000) due to the use of cross-sectional data. In their review of geographies of mixed ethnic unions, Wright et al (2003) called for further research on migration of mixed ethnic unions in a longitudinal perspective.

With this study we fill this gap, and use longitudinal data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS LS), to explore whether minority people in mixed ethnic unions were more likely to move to areas which are less concentrated in their own group than ethnic minorities living in mono ethnic unions. In our analyses we also take the level of deprivation of neighbourhoods into account…

…In the past decades Britain has witnessed a growing ethnic diversity in populations. In England, for example, the percentage of ethnic minorities has risen from 4.6 % to 8.6 % between 1981 and 2001 (Rees and Butt 2004). It is estimated that nearly a million people report themselves as having a mixed-ethnic identity in Britain today (CRE 2006). Along with the trend in diversity the number of marriages and partnerships between people of different ethnic groups is also on the rise (Aspinal 2003; Coleman 1985; 2004; Voas 2009; Song 2010). The one per cent census sample from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Longitudinal Study (LS) reveals that the total number of mixed ethnic unions reached 5,139 in 2001 in England and Wales, a 46 Per cent increase from 1991 (Feng et al. 2010)…

…The ONS LS was a unique and very rich dataset. However, we acknowledge that the data has some limitations. We did not have information on migration between two censuses. Some couples might move more than once between 1991 and 2001. The British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) is a panel dataset which provides annual information for sample couples. However, the number of mixed ethnic unions in the BHPS is too few for a meaningful statistical analysis. The other limitation is the self reported ethnicity can change over time. It is not a big problem for South Asians as they reported their ethnic identity very consistently over time. But the consistency was not high for Black Others who were part of the Black group in our analysis (Platt et al 2005). Therefore our results here should be treated with caution…

Read the entire paper here.

Black people ‘least satisfied of UK population’

BBC News
2012-02-28

Black and mixed-ethnic Britons are less satisfied with their lives on average than the UK population as a whole, a survey suggests.

Some 80,000 people across the UK, polled by the Office for National Statistics, produced an average life satisfaction rating of 7.4 out of 10.

But black Britons averaged 6.6, while mixed-ethnic Britons scored 6.9.

The survey, in April to September 2011, was part of the ONS’s ongoing Measuring National Well-being Programme.

The average rating for life satisfaction was also lower than the national figure for those of Pakistani origin – 7 out of 10 – and Bangladeshis – 7.1.

The four questions posed by the survey also included one seeking ratings for people’s overall happiness, with answers nationwide producing an average of 7.3 out of 10.

Again, black Britons reported the lowest level of happiness – 6.9 on average – followed by mixed-ethnic and Pakistani respondents, with both of those groups averaging 7 out of 10…

Read the entire article here.