Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Matters: Mixed-race pupils discuss school and identity

Troubador Publishing
March 2011
128 pages
198×127 mm
ISBN: 9781848765719

Denise Williams

Mixed Matters responds to the dearth of literature about the experiences of mixed-race pupils in British schools. It seeks to examine how much credence schools should give to pupil identities when one parent is white British and the other is of black British/Caribbean heritage, as well as offering practical advice on how to improve the educational outcome of mixed-race children.

More often than not, mixed-race pupils are simply referred to as black and tend to be encompassed in a larger, more diverse group of black pupils, but the increased presence of mixed-race pupils in schools needs to focus the efforts of education professionals to address issues of race, ethnicity and culture.

Mixed Matters is essential reading for all educational professionals who want to get to grips with the issues that face mixed families and the pupils themselves as they share their personal experiences of what it is like to be them in the British schooling system. The young people featured in this book challenge some of the commonly held assumptions made about them – especially regarding their aspirations.

This book contains some resources that can be used to support work with mixed-race pupils as well as initial training and professional development of teachers. The book also details the approach of Mix-d, formerly the Multiple Heritage Project, in organising youth conferences and training youth facilitators of mixed-race to lead their peers in discussions about school and identity.

Neither Black nor White: The Saga of an American Family

The New World Africa Press
2006-03-03
252 pages
8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
ISBN-10: 0976876124; ISBN-13: 978-0976876120

Joseph E. Holloway, Professor of Pan African Studies
California State University, Northridge

Historical novel, which traces the history of the Hadnot family from Gloucester, England in 1585 to New Orleans and the birth of Lucille Catherine (Celia) Hughes Hadnot the matriarch of six families that traced their descent from her. It is the true story of a black family, who were never enslaved, but owners of slaves. A tale about a people from indentured servitude, slavery, the Colfax riots, segregation and Jim Crow to Civil Rights. It is the story of a people who did not regard themselves as “neither black nor white.” It is a story of a family—one black and the other white. Both related sharing a common ancestor by the named John Hadnot. This novel by Joseph Holloway is compelling reading that explores black culture, history, Jim Crow and issues of colorism.

Identifications and cultural practices of mixed-heritage youth

Paper presented in the eConference on “Mixedness and Mixing: New Perspectives on Mixed-Race Britons”
Commission for Racial Equality
2007-09-04 through 2007-09-06
4 pages

Martyn Barrett, Professor of Psychology
University of Surrey

David Garbin, Research Fellow
Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism
University of Surrey

John Eade, Professor of Sociology & Anthropology
Roehampton University

Marco Cinnirella, Senior Lecturer in Psychology
Royal Holloway University of London

This paper summarises findings from a research study which investigated how 11- to 17-year-old mixed-heritage adolescents living in London negotiate the demands of living with multiple cultures. The study also explored how these adolescents construe themselves in terms of race, ethnicity and nationality. It was found that these individuals had multiple identifications which were subjectively salient to them, and that they were very adept at managing their various identities in different situations. There was no evidence of a sense of marginality, or of being ‘caught between two cultures’, and there was no difference in the strength of British identification exhibited by these mixed-heritage adolescents and white English adolescents of the same age. However, the identities and cultural practices of the mixed-heritage adolescents were fluid and context-dependent, and they appreciated the advantages of being able to negotiate and interact with multiple ethnic worlds.

…Findings from the quantitative phase

The quantitative questionnaires revealed that, in the full mixed-heritage sample of 126 youth, British identification was weaker than both ethnic and religious identification; ethnic and religious identifications were of equal strength. It is noteworthy that there was no difference in the strength of British identification exhibited by the mixed-heritage and white English participants. When the black Caribbean-white mixed-heritage participants were analysed as separate group, it was found that they had the highest levels of identification with Britishness out of all the minority ethnic groups, and there were no significant differences in the strength of these participants’ ethnic, British and religious identifications. However, for the black African-white participants, ethnic identification was stronger than British identification, with religious identification being between the two. Analysed individually, neither of the two black-white mixed-heritage groups differed from white English children in their strength of British identification…

Read the entire paper here.

‘Land of our Mothers’: Home, Identity, and Nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India, 1919–1947

History Workshop Journal
Volume 54, Issue 1
pages 49-72
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/54.1.49

Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London

This paper explores the symbolic and material intersections of home, identity and nationality for Anglo-Indians (previously known as ‘Eurasians’) in the period between the Montague Chelmsford Reforms and Indian Independence. Community claims for a legitimate heritage were articulated through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and were closely tied to political attempts to gain a legitimate stake in national life. The paper examines public debates about home, identity and nationality with reference to the two main Anglo-Indian leaders of the twentieth century, Henry Gidney and Frank Anthony. While a British imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, political debates about home, identity and nationality largely erased the figure of an Indian maternal ancestor and instead focused on Mother India and on the domestic roles of Anglo-Indian women. The political recognition of both women and the home was an attempt not only to domesticate Anglo-Indian women, but also to domesticate a new national identity that regarded India more than Britain as home. But the home life of Anglo-Indians remained more British than Indian and political attempts to foster national loyalty to India as motherland were contested on a domestic scale. The mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was thus both manifested and erased in public debates about the future and status of the community.

…This paper is about India as ‘land of our mothers’ at a time when questions of home, identity and nationality were bound together in complex and contested ways for Anglo-Indians and other minority communities in India. Through my focus on a distinct community of mixed descent, I examine the ways in which national identity was embodied in gendered and racialized ways that reflected and reproduced a dual affiliation to both Britain and India as home. Community claims for a legitimate heritage were articulated through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and such claims were closely tied to political attempts to gain a legitimate stake in national life. For this reason, I analyse public debates about home, identity and nationality, drawing on political representations by Anglo-Indian leaders and on articles and letters published in the Anglo-Indian Review. I focus on the period from the Montague Chelmsford Report of 1919, which laid the foundations for Indianization in government employment and political representation, to independence in 1947. This also allows me to contrast the policies of the two main Anglo-Indian leaders of the twentieth century. Henry Gidney led the community from 1919 until his death in 1942, when he was succeeded by Frank Anthony, who served as president of the [All-India Anglo-Indian Association] AIAIA and as a nominated member of parliament representing community interests from 1942 until his death in 1993. Rather than render spaces of home as more symbolic than actual in forging a national identity, I argue that political attempts to foster a greater national loyalty to India as motherland rather than Britain as fatherland were contested on a domestic scale. Anglo-Indian homes continued to be imagined as more British than Indian despite political attempts by Gidney and Anthony to identify the community as a nationalist minority. Rather than explore the home merely as a feminized space, I am interested in how it also came to be shaped by a masculine imperial heritage. While a British imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, political debates about home, identity, and nationality largely erased the figure of an Indian maternal ancestor and instead focused on Mother India and on the present and future political roles of Anglo-Indian women within and beyond the home. While ideas of home and identity were potent sites in shaping ideas of nationality, the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was thus both manifested and erased in public debates about the future and status of the community…

Read the entire article here.

Every mixed race marriage is building a better Britain

The Independent
1999-03-04

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Lynchings, imprisonment and social exclusion will never stop individual s breaking racial barriers

WE HAVE looked, for a good many days, at the poisonous worms of racism as the Lawrence inquiry team turned over the soil. The coverage of this event has been unprecedented. Usually black issues have their small, insignificant place in the scheme of things. Suddenly what happened to one young black man became a statement of who we are as a nation.

The only other event that provoked similar levels of engagement was the Satanic Verses saga. The white elite has never tried harder to understand how racism, crude as well as subtle, violent as well as polite, is an abomination…

…But by far the biggest story is that this country has almost the highest rate of interracial relationships and number of young, mixed-race people anywhere in the Western world. More than half of British-born black men have a white partner, as do a third of Asian men. The rates for black and Asian women are rising. And prominent people in mixed marriages include Mr McDonald himself, Michael Caine, Lenny Henry and Dawn French, Baroness Scotland, Lord Taylor, Bernie Grant, Jemima Goldsmith, Salman Rushdie, Zeinab Badawi, Madhur Jaffrey, Sayeed Jaffrey, Jung Chang, Frank Bruno, Ainsley Harriot, Sharron Davies, Oona King, Hanif Kureishi, Sade…

…Read Titus Andronicus and you get the most modern debates on the identity of a mixed-race child. And in this country this has been going on since the 16th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries fashionable rich ladies liked to have slaves as ornaments, and black lovers in their beds. One of these, Soubise from St Kitts, was adored by the Duchess of Queensberry and was the toast of fashionable London. Some of the earliest race riots in this country, at the start of the 20th century, were over the number of white women having sexual relationships with black men. In 1930 an official report said: “[Mixed race] families have a low standard of life, morally and economically. It is practically impossible for half-caste children to be absorbed into our industrial life.”

There will never be a speculative film made about what Queen Victoria really did with her handsome Indian servant Abdul Karim, but she did have his portrait painted; their letters were burnt by fusty officials after her death. In the Sixties, when free sex and false Indian gurus co-existed with rampant racism, mixed race relationships became the obsession of the media and others.

Last night I spent a glorious evening with Earl Cameron and Harry Baird, two black movie actors of that period. They talked about their roles in Sapphire, one of the first feature films about mixed-race relationships, and how “carefully” the intimacy between the two lovers had to be presented, and how nevertheless the audience left the cinema as if they had been at a funeral.

Well, it is not like that any more. Young mixed-race Britons are challenging all those who would rather they did not exist. They include the writer Jayne Ifekwunigwe, who has just written a marvellous book called Scattered Belongings, and stylish Chris Cleverly, the youngest barrister in this country with his own chambers, who cannot even understand my questions about the problems of being half-English and half African. His heritage has been, he says, one of his biggest assets…

Read the entire article here.

A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy

Duke University Press
December 2010
328 Pages
57 b&w photos, 3 figures
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4876-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4900-6

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

A White Side of Black Britain explores the racial consciousness of white women in the United Kingdom who have established families and had children with black men of African Caribbean heritage. Filling a gap in the sociological literature on racism and antiracism, France Winddance Twine introduces new theoretical concepts in her description and analysis of white “transracial” mothers raising their children of African Caribbean ancestry in a racially diverse British city. Varying in age, income, education, and marital status, the transracial mothers at the center of Twine’s ethnography share moving stories about how they cope with racism and teach their children to identify and respond to racism. They also discuss how and why their thinking about race, racism, and whiteness changed over time. Interviewing and observing more than forty multiracial families over a decade, Twine discovered that the white women’s racial consciousness and their ability to recognize and negotiate racism was derived as much from their relationships with their black partner and his extended family as it was from their female friends. In addition to the white birth mothers, Twine interviewed their children, spouses, domestic partners, friends, and extended families members. Her book is best characterized as an ethnography of racial consciousness and a dialogue between black and white family members about the meaning of race, racism, and whiteness. It includes intimate photographs of the family members and their community.

Table of Conents

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Class Analysis of Interracial Intimacy
2. Disciplining Racial Dissidents
3. The Concept of Racial Literacy
4. Antiracism in Practice
5. Written on the Body: Ethnic Capital and Black Cultural Production
6. Archives of Interracial Intimacies: Race, Respectability, and Family Photographs
7. White Like Who? Status, Stigma, and the Social Meanings of Whiteness
8. Gender Gaps in the Experience of Interracial Intimacy
Conclusion: Constricted Eyes and Racial Visions
Notes
References
Index

Researching mixed race in education: perceptions, policies and practices

Race Ethnicity and Education
Volume 10, Issue 3 (September 2007)
pages 345-362
DOI: 10.1080/13613320701503389

Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Jo Haynes, Lecturer in Sociology
University of Bristol

Leon Tikly, Professor in Education and Deputy Director of Research
University of Bristol

 Although the ‘Mixed’ primary and secondary school population is rapidly growing in both size and recognition, pupils from mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds are largely invisible in current educational policies and practices regarding minority ethnic pupils. In light of initial Local Education Authority-level data which suggested that pupils from Mixed White/Black Caribbean backgrounds were significantly underachieving and over-represented in school exclusions, the authors of this article conducted a research project which, through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, explored the educational attainment, experiences and needs of this group of pupils. Drawing on the qualitative data from the project, this article will discuss three key areas of findings. Firstly, by presenting data from the case study interviews with pupils, parents, teachers and specialist educational (local Ethnic Minority Achievement Service) advisors, the authors will discuss how the perceptions of the White/Black Caribbean pupils they encountered in the schools encompassed both traditional constructions of ‘mixedness’—which conceptualise mixed identities as inherently problematic—and emerging ‘new wave’ constructions—which conceptualise mixed identities not only as unproblematic, but as positive and celebratory. Secondly, the authors discuss the extent to which these perceptions and their potential impact on pupils’ achievement are supported or challenged by existing educational policies and practices. They conclude by highlighting some of the methodological and theoretical challenges encountered in researching mixedness in the educational context and discuss the implications of these for both their research project and the field of ‘mixed race studies’ as a whole.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed ethnicity, identity and adoption: research, policy and practice

Child & Family Social Work
Volume 14, Issue 4 (November 2009)
pages 431–439
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2206.2009.00614.x

Marsha Wood, Research Associate
Centre for Family Policy and Child Welfare at the School for Policy Studies
University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Mixed ethnicity children are over-represented in the care system and constitute a significant group of those seeking adoption placements. Social workers are presented with a specific set of concerns in seeking to find adoption placements for mixed ethnicity children as they come from two or more cultural backgrounds. Practitioners face uncertain principles concerning how to respond to these issues, especially in light of social and political pressures, and within the realm of existing debates around ‘transracial’ adoption. There is a danger that among these uncertainties the individuality of the child will be lost as his or her identity needs become viewed narrowly. Social workers may seek to simplify and classify the identities of mixed ethnicity children in the adoption process through pressures that they feel to find ‘matched’ placements. This paper explores how theories concerning identity can provide some insight into the difficulties practitioners face and may help to inform social work practice in this area.

Read or purchae the article here.

Ambiguous Ethnicity: Interracial Families in London

Cambridge University Press
January 1982
184 pages
216 x 140 mm, 0.24 kg
Paperback ISBN: 9780521297691

Susan Benson

In a society where race is a significant component of social identity and exerts an important influence on social relationships, the problems faced by couples who enter into ‘mixed’ marriages are especially difficult. The book is a study of the personal histories and everyday lives of a small number of interracial families living in and around Brixton, south London, in the early 1970s. Dr Benson sets the circumstances that confront these families within the context of wider British attitudes about race, colour and miscegenation as they developed over time. She argues that couples are obliged to make a continual series of choices between ‘black’ and ‘white’ in the course of their everyday lives. Through a discussion of these choices and of the factors which lead individuals to enter into a marriage which could be regarded with some disapproval, the book explores how people in London thought and felt about race, colour and social identity. It will be of interest to all teachers and students studying race relations, as well as to social and community workers, school teachers and administrators concerned with race relations and the inner city.

Table of Contents

• List of maps and diagrams
• Preface
• 1. Racial intermarriage in England
• 2. The pattern of interracial unions in England today
• 3. Introducing Brixton and the borough of Lambeth
• 4. The social world of Brixton
• 5. The dynamics of interracial marriage choice
• 6. Coping with opposition: the reactions of family and friends
• 7. The construction of a domestic world
• 8. The construction of a social universe
• 9. Living in a divided community
• 10. Parents and children
• 11. Concluding remarks
• Appendix 1. The research project: development and methodology
• Appendix 2. The calculation of births by parental ethnic origin
• References
• Index

Immigration, Intermarriage, and the Challenges of Measuring Racial/Ethnic Identities

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1735-1737
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.90.11.1735

Mary C. Waters, M. E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology
Harvard University

This commentary reviews recent demographic trends in immigration and intermarriage that contribute to the complexity of measuring race and ethnicity. The census question on ancestry is proposed as a possible model for what we might expect with the race question in the 2000 census and beyond. Through the use of ancestry data, changes in ethnic identification by individuals over the course of their lives, by generation, and according to census question directions are documented. It is pointed out that the once-rigid lines that divided European-origin groups from one another have increasingly blurred. All of these changes are posited as becoming more likely for groups we now define as “racial.” While it is acknowledged that race and ethnicity will become increasingly difficult to measure as multiple racial identities become more common and more likely to be reported, it is argued that monitoring discrimination is crucial for the continued collection of such data.

Read the entire article here.