Mixed race children and young people are individual nation states. They defy classificationPosted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2012-12-14 18:27Z by Steven |
Mixed race children and young people are individual nation states. They defy classification
The Independent
2012-12-012
This week we learned that the number of mixed race people in the UK has doubled to 1.2 million. I’m adding my children to the arsenal of weapons for change
n the late 1940s, the Eurasian poet Cedric Dover wrote a poem about his racial identity. Entitled The Brown Phoenix, it includes the lines: I am tomorrow’s man/ Offering to share/Love, and the difficult quest,/In the emerging plan.
How fitting that in the week that a post-war musical, Privates on Parade, opened with a Eurasian love interest—“Welsh Bombay”—rejected on the grounds of her colour, we learn that in the 2011 census, the number of mixed-race people in the UK has doubled to 1.2 million. On the same day, the On the same day, the think-tank British Future reported that only 15 per cent of people oppose mixed-race relationships. Among the under-25s, that drops to under 5 per cent. British Future calls it The Melting Pot Generation. The Sun proudly declared: “We Are the World.”
Should we be surprised by this after a summer of sporting magic in which so many British Olympians, including the poster girl Jessica Ennis, were golden-hued – an event masterminded by Lord Coe whose father is white English and mother Indian? London has a mayor with a mixed-race wife. Half the X Factor contestants, from Leona Lewis to Marvin and Aston from JLS and this year’s Jahmene Douglas, have black fathers and white mothers. The one thing – possibly the only thing –that Rupert Murdoch and Vince Cable have in common is mixed-race children…
Read the entire article here.