Mixed Race Studies

What Constitutes Intermarriage for Multiracial People in Britain?

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 662, Number 1, November 2015
pages 94-111
DOI: 10.1177/0002716215595387

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom

Intermarriage is of great interest to analysts because a group’s tendency to partner across ethnic boundaries is usually seen as a key indicator of the social distance between groups in a multiethnic society. Theories of intermarriage as a key indicator of integration are, however, typically premised upon the union of white and nonwhite individuals, and we know very little about what happens in the unions of multiracial people, who are the children of intermarried couples. What constitutes intermarriage for multiracial people? Do multiracial individuals think that ethnic or racial ancestries are a defining aspect of their relationships with their partners? In this article, I argue that there are no conventions for how we characterize endogamous or exogamous relationships for multiracial people. I then draw on examples of how multiracial people and their partners in Britain regard their relationships with their partners and the significance of their and their partners’ ethnic and racial backgrounds. I argue that partners’ specific ancestries do not necessarily predict the ways in which multiracial individuals regard their partners’ ethnic and racial backgrounds as constituting difference or commonality within their relationships.

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We also call multiracial and biracial community members to interrogate the ways in which we are complicit in the erasure of Native and Indigenous people. Moreover, multiracial, biracial and Indigenous identities are not separate—there are multi- and biracial people who hold Indigenous identity. We, as a community that experiences multiple histories of racism and colonization while often being heralded as a signal of the end of racism, must evaluate, address, and decolonize our own actions.

Multiracial and Biracial Students at Brown, “A Statement from a Collective of Multiracial and Biracial Students,” bluestockings magazine, October 10, 2015. http://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/10/12/a-statement-from-a-collective-of-multiracial-and-biracial-students/.

The Year We Obsessed Over Identity

The New York Times
2015-10-06

Wesley Morris, Critic at Large

2015’s headlines and cultural events have confronted us with the malleability of racial, gender, sexual and reputational lines. Who do we think we are?

A few weeks ago, I sat in a movie theater and grinned. Anne Hathaway was in ‘‘The Intern,’’ perched on a hotel bed in a hotel robe, eating from a can of overpriced nuts, having tea and freaking out. What would happen if she divorced her sweet, selfless stay-at-home dad of a husband? Would she ever meet anybody else? And if she didn’t, she would have no one to be buried next to — she’d be single for all eternity. And weren’t the problems in her marriage a direct result of her being a successful businesswoman — she was there but never quite present? ‘‘The Intern’’ is a Nancy Meyers movie, and these sorts of cute career-woman meltdowns are the Eddie Van Halen guitar solos of her romantic comedies.

But what’s funny about that scene — what had me grinning — is the response of the person across the bed from Hathaway. After listening to her tearful rant, this person has had enough: Don’t you dare blame yourself or your career! Actually, the interruption begins, ‘‘I hate to be the feminist, of the two of us. … ’’ Hate to be because the person on the other side of the bed isn’t Judy Greer or Brie Larson. It’s not Meryl Streep or Susan Sarandon. It’s someone not far from the last person who comes to mind when you think ‘‘soul-baring bestie.’’ It’s Robert freaking De Niro, portrayer of psychos, savages and grouches no more.

On that bed with Hathaway, as her 70-year-old intern, he’s not Travis Bickle or the human wall of intolerance from those Focker movies. He’s Lena Dunham. The attentiveness and stern feminism coming out of his mouth are where the comedy is. And while it’s perfectly obvious what Meyers is doing to De Niro — girlfriending him — that doesn’t make the overhaul any less effective. The whole movie is about the subtle and obvious ways in which men have been overly sensitized and women made self-estranged through breadwinning. It’s both a plaint against the present and a pining for the past, but also an acceptance that we are where we are…

…In June, the story of a woman named Rachel Dolezal began its viral spread through the news. She had recently been appointed president of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. in Spokane, Wash. She had been married to a black man, had two black sons and was, by most accounts, a black woman. Her white biological parents begged to differ. The ensuing scandal resurrected questions about the nature of identity — what compelled Dolezal to darken her skin, perm her hair and pass in reverse? She might not have been biologically black, but she seemed well past feeling spiritually white.

Some people called her ‘‘transracial.’’ Others found insult in her masquerade, particularly when the country’s attention was being drawn, day after day, to how dangerous it can be to have black skin. The identities of the black men and women killed by white police officers and civilians, under an assortment of violent circumstances, remain fixed.

But there was something oddly compelling about Dolezal, too. She represented — dementedly but also earnestly — a longing to transcend our historical past and racialized present. This is a country founded on independence and yet comfortable with racial domination, a country that has forever been trying to legislate the lines between whiteness and nonwhiteness, between borrowing and genocidal theft. We’ve wanted to think we’re better than a history we can’t seem to stop repeating. Dolezal’s unwavering certainty that she was black was a measure of how seriously she believed in integration: It was as if she had arrived in a future that hadn’t yet caught up to her…

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Boxes and Mixed Race Problems

SophiaandStuff
2015-07-29

Sophia Leonie

“Oh” the hairdresser paused “Your hair is very curly”. “Yes” I gritted my teeth, water dripping down my neck “I said it was”. The consultation earlier that week, it seemed, had meant nothing. “It’s OK” she went on “I’m sure we’ll be able to manage”. Trapped in the chair, too far in this to go back, I feigned a tight smile. “So where are you from?” She went on “You look…different…” And so it started. Questions about my heritage; questions about Africa, then of course Jamaica; “Can I tell the where people are from by their appearance?” Comments on my hair “It’s actually quite nice”, “Do I ever wear an Afro?” comments on my features “Your lips are black but your nose is more white…” laced with the occasional “how exotic”. It was exhausting. As I left the salon that evening with a more than satisfactory keratin blow dry, I was annoyed. Not just because I had described my hair type before I had arrived; not just because I had been asked personal questions during a long day when I really didn’t feel like answering; but because I had left work excited about the little ‘me time’ I had managed to squeeze in my busy day and was then confronted this. Their ignorance was a slap in the face. I was again ‘The Other’. Reminded that I was different.

With over a million people in the UK now being identified as mixed race, according to the 2011 census, it’s important to ask what impact this is this having on British culture. Are we finally becoming a country that fully embraces different races? I would argue perhaps not. Instead we seem to be celebrating multiculturalism whilst at the same time ignoring the fact that we are still putting people into boxes based on their race. And it’s these boxes which highlight our hidden prejudices…

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