Mixed Race Studies

Black/white mixed-race experiences of race and racism in Poland

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online 2020-02-25
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2020.1729390

Bolaji Balogun
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Presidential Fellow in Ethinicty and Inequalities
University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

Whilst literature on race and ethnicity in Poland is growing, it has yet to fully grapple with the diverse range of racial identities in Poland. Simultaneously, despite calls for Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) to develop into a more global field, there remains a paucity of literature focusing on racial mixedness in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), and no substantive consideration of the lived experiences of mixed-race people in Poland. Taking these absences as our entry point, we bring Critical Mixed Race Studies into conversation with pieces of literature on race and ethnicity in Poland in order to extend the theoretical and empirical terrain of both fields. Drawing upon data from interviews conducted with black/white mixed-race people in Poland, this article casts light on the lives of this nascent group, and specifically on their experiences of racism and exclusion in a society imagined as homogenously white.

Read or purchase the entire article here.

Racism ‘won’t go away’ even if we’re all mixed-race in the future

METRO.co.uk
2019-06-18

Natalie Morris, Senior lifestyle Reporter

The idea of ‘divide and conquer’ harks back thousands of years.

Whether it is by gender, class, wealth or race, humans love walling themselves into distinct categories then using those categories to create hierarchies.

In the case of race, this hierarchical distinction ended up with slavery, countless programmes of ethnic cleansing and the retention of ‘othering’ based on the colour of skin even to the present day.

But what happens if we take away these racial categories that divide us into subgroups?

If, instead of defining as black, white, Asian or any other singular category, we defined ourselves as a little bit of everything, would it herald the dawn of a more accepting, ‘post-racial’ age?

And would that mean racism would end?…

Read the entire article here.

Black mixed-race men’s perceptions and experiences of the police

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 42, 2019 – Issue 2
pages 198-215
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1417618

Lisa J. Long, Senior Lecturer in Criminology
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Senior Lecturer in Education Studies
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

For black people in Britain, policing has long been a site of oppression and resistance. Whilst substantive change has been lacking, institutional racism within the British police has at least been acknowledged. Concomitantly, Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) has shown that much of the race and ethnicity literature ignores the experiences of mixed-race populations. In this paper, we utilize two studies to consider black mixed-race men’s perceptions and experience of policing in Britain. In total, we draw upon interviews with 17 black mixed-race men. Whilst we recognize that their experiences are often homogenized with blackness, in the context of police contact, we show that many black mixed-race men believe they are seen as part of a black monolith. We conclude that, in this context, mixedness does not bring about clearly differentiated experiences from that of black men. The absence of clear particularities to mixedness is of significance to CMRS.

Read the entire article here.

Black Mixed-Race Men: Transatlanticity, Hybridity and ‘Post-Racial’ Resilience

Emerald Publishing Limited
2018-08-06
230 pages
152 x 229mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781787565326

Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Senior Lecturer in Education Studies
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

Whilst scholarship has increasingly moved to consider mixedness and the experiences of mixed-race people, there has been a notable lack of attention to the specific experiences of mixed-race men. This is despite growing recognition of the particular ways race and gender intersect. By centring the accounts of Black mixed-race men in the United Kingdom and United States, this book offers a timely intervention that extends the theoretical terrain of race and ethnicity scholarship and of studies of gender and masculinities.

As it treads new and important ground, this book draws upon theories of performativity and hybridity in order to understand how Black mixed-race men constitute and reconstitute complex and multiplicitous identities. ‘Post-racial’ conditions mean that Black mixed-race men engage in such processes in a context where the significance of race and racism is rendered invisible and denied. By introducing the theoretical concept of ‘post-racial’ resilience, this study strives to capture and celebrate the contemporary, creative and innovative ways in which Black mixed-race men refuse the fragmentation and erasure of their identities. As it does so, the author offers a corrective to popular representations that have too readily pathologized Black mixed-race men.

Focusing on the everyday through a discussion of Black mixed-race men’s racial symbolism, experiences of racial microaggressions, and interactions with peers, Black Mixed-Race Men: Transatlanticity, Hybridity and Post-Racial Resilience offers an in-depth insight into a previously neglected area of scholarship.

Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Multiplicitous Black Mixed-Race Men and ‘Post-Racial’ Resilience: Double-Consciousness, Hybridity and the Threat of Racial Mismatch
• Chapter 2. Constituting and Performing Black Mixed-Race Masculinities: Hybridizing the Exotic, the Black Monster, and the ‘Light-Skin Softie’
• Chapter 3. Racial Symbolism and the Stylization of Identities: Dress, Speech, Hair and Music
• Chapter 4. Black Mixed-Race Men and PRR in the Face of Racial Microaggressions
• Chapter 5. Black Mixed-Race Men, Friendships, Peer Groups, and Black Regulatory Ideals
• Conclusion. A Critical (Mixed) Race Theory of ‘Post-Racial’ Resilience (PRR)

“We Were All Just the Black Kids”: Black Mixed-Race Men and the Importance of Adolescent Peer Groups for Identity Development

Social Currents
First Published online 2018-09-19
DOI: 10.1177/2329496518797840

Jennifer Patrice Sims, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Alabama, Huntsville

Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Senior Lecturer in Education Studies
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

While critical Mixed-Race studies (CMRS) has paid attention to the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in sampling and analysis, most studies disproportionately focus on women. This means that generalizability of findings and theories to men should not become axiomatic. Regarding black Mixed-Race people, for example, the theory that rejection from black people is influential for many black Mixed-Race individuals’ identity development is derived from interviews with mainly women. Explicitly noting that these processes are not as applicable for men, yet offering no accompanying theorizing as to the influence of gendered interactions on men’s racial identity development, appears to have become the standard. Therefore, bringing together data from two studies that explored black mixedness in the United States and the United Kingdom, this article joins a nascent literature on the gendered experiences of Mixed-Race men. Our analysis shows that, unlike black Mixed-Race women, black Mixed-Race men’s mixedness is often constructed as compatible with the heteronormative gender identities that are constituted in racialized peer groups. As such, black Mixed-Race men are able to cultivate a sense of strategic sameness with same gender black peers. This and other findings are discussed in light of their implications for CMRS’s intersectional theories of identity development.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black mixed-race men, perceptions of the family, and the cultivation of ‘post-racial’ resilience

Ethnicities
First Published 2017-11-02
DOI: 10.1177/1468796817739667

Remi Joseph-Salisbury
School of Education and Childhood
Leeds Beckett University, Headingley Campus, Leeds, United Kingdom

Historically and contemporarily, popular discourses have pathologised Black mixed-race men as the embodiment of a ‘clash of cultures’. In centring the voices of Black mixed-race men in the UK and the US, this article offers a refutation to these discourses. With a specific focus on secondary schooling, the article draws upon accounts from semi-structured interviews in order to demonstrate how Black mixed-race men perceive their families as offering a source of strength and support. In order to understand how the family supports Black mixed-race men in overcoming the challenges posed by a hostile, ‘post-racial’ white supremacist environment, I develop a conceptualisation of ‘post-racial’ resilience. Through this concept, I highlight the creative and innovative ways Black mixed-race men and their families respond to the lived realities of pervasive racial inequities that are occluded by ‘post-racialism’. The article considers the role that parents play in three, inextricably linked, aspects of Black mixed-race men’s lives: schooling, identity formation, and experiences of racism.

Read or purchase the article here.

Locating black mixed-raced males in the black supplementary school movement

Race Ethnicity and Education
Published online 2016-11-08
pages 1-14
DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2016.1248838

Remi Joseph-Salisbury
School of Ethnicity and Racism Studies, School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

Kehinde Andrews, Associate Professor of Sociology
Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

This article draws upon data from semi-structured interviews conducted with black mixed-race males in the UK and the US, to argue that a revival of the black supplementary school movement could play an important role in the education of black mixed-race males. The article contends that a strong identification with blackness, and a concomitant rejection of the values of mainstream schooling, make black supplementary education a viable intervention for raising the attainment and improving the experiences of black mixed-race males. Whilst blackness was important to participants’ understandings of their lived experiences, this did not engender a disregard for their mixedness. Supplementary schools must therefore find ways of recognising black mixedness within their practice.

Read or purchase the article here.

Book Review: Mixed-race youth and schooling: the fifth minority

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2016-06-01
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2016.1190852

Remi Joseph-Salisbury
University of Leeds

Mixed-race youth and schooling: the fifth minority, by Sandra Winn Tutwiler, Abingdon, Routledge, 2016, xv + 241 pp., £29.95 (paperback), ISBN-13 978-1138021938

Mixed-race youth and schooling offers a welcome contribution to a sparse area of academic inquiry. Making the case that as a group mixed-race individuals are constitutive of the ‘fifth minority’ in the United States, the book is interested in the schooling of children of ’minority/non-minority’ and ‘minority/minority’ parents.

With a primary target audience of school teachers and educationalists, the book of nine chapters is divided into three sections. Section one considers how race constitutes a determinant factor in lived experiences in the United States, and how this implicates mixed-race individuals particularly. In section two, Winn Tutwiler turns to look at how mixed-race children interact with their families, peers, communities and schools and how these interactions impact upon schooling experiences. The third and final section of the book focuses on how mixedness is constructed in the school, and by teachers. This section concludes by outlining how schooling environments can be supportive of mixed-race students.

Chapter one looks at the emergence and permanence of race, white supremacy, and the racial stratification of society. The chapter refutes notions that race is reducible to class before beginning to probe how mixedness impacts upon race discourse and stratification.

Building on this, the second chapter considers how, historically, white supremacist power structures have responded to the potential challenges mixed-race people present to ’societies wanting uncomplicated divisions by race’ (28). This chapter considers different responses to mixedness and explores interesting distinctions between different mixed-race groups. Winn Tutwiler shows that white America has a deep-rooted and abiding moral aversion to racial mixing and historically this engendered a proliferation of anti-miscegenation laws and morals.

In Chapter three, Winn Tutwiler seeks to provide a knowledge base for educators on the processes of racial identity formation for mixed-race youth. This endeavour, Win Tutwiler explains, is essential to countering teachers’ ideas that may be based upon stereotypes and misinformation. Emphasizing the importance for the ‘social, emotional and academic well—being’ of mixed-race youth, this chapter gives an overview of some of the (predominantly) psychological literature on racial identity (57). Winn Tutwiler unpicks what she sees as some often fundamental inadequacies in the application of theories developed for monoracial identities to mixed-race children. Although perhaps understandable due to the predominance in existing literature, this chapter seems to focus heavily on Black-white mixed-race identity and thus it is unclear how widely applicable some of the cited research is to other mixed-race groups.

As the focus shifts slightly to look at how these identities are constituted and lived, chapter four considers the role of the family in the lives of mixed-race…

Read or purchase the review here.

No, Bill Clinton, we’re not ‘all mixed race’ – and you of all people should know that

The Independent
London, United Kingdom
2016-02-15

Remi Joseph Salisbury

If you’re claiming you’re ‘colour-blind’, you’re not being progressive. You’re part of the problem

In a seemingly fear-fuelled attempt to halt the rapidly growing popularity of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has once more turned to her husband – her “secret weapon” – to move along the discussion. Except it’s all gone terribly wrong.

At a rally in Memphis on Friday, Bill Clinton demonstrated his ineptitude in offering any meaningful contribution to political debates about racial equality when he argued that “we are all mixed-race people”.

This comment – an attempt to downplay the significance of race – represents a lack of respect towards, and disregard for, the lives of people of colour living in the United States.

Bill Clinton has had a lot of opportunities to think about race. He might have thought about the centrality of race to prejudice in US society when his “tough on crime” stance saw him introduce the 1994 crime bill. When this bill supported a burgeoning prison-industrial complex that disproportionately incarcerates African Americans, often for non-violent and petty crimes, he might have stopped to think about race…

Read the entire article here.

Biracial males wanted to take part in research project

Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom
2014-12-21

Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Doctoral Researcher
R.Salisbury@leeds.ac.uk

• Are you a biracial male of black and white parentage?
• Are you aged between 16 and 21 and went to school in the U.S.?
• Would you like to take part in a discussion group or one-to-one interview considering the educational experiences of black/white biracial males?

Interviews can be conducted in person (I will be situated in Pennsylvania), using Skype, E-mail or an Instant Messaging program.

Participants will be offered a $15 gift voucher as a thank you for their participation.

To take part or for an informal chat about the project, please contact me, Remi Joseph-Salisbury, by e-mail. I look forward in hearing from you.