Mixed Race Studies

The half-Chinese children on growing up find little difficulty in obtaining work or in entering into marriage with the surrounding white population. The girls in particular are attractive and good-looking. On the other hand, the Anglo-negroid children when grown up do not easily get work or mix with the ordinary population.

Maurice Broody, “The Social Adjustment of Chinese Immigrants in Liverpool,” The Sociological Review, Volume 3, Issue 1 (July 1955) pages 65-75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1955.tb01045.x.

Loudoun Square: A Community Survey-I (An Aspect of Race Relations in English Society)

The Sociological Review
Volume a34, Issue 1-2 (January 1942)
pages 12–33
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1942.tb02744.x

K. L. Little

Recent research in North America has brought more clearly to light certain facets of urban and contemporary social life, more particularly in the shape of the urban community, which have been ascribed and limited hitherto to the much smaller and less complicated social configuration, such as the village, or even the so-called primitive folk society. The Coloured community of Cardiff, of whose anthropology this paper offers a preliminary description, certainly brings to the quarter of the town which it inhabits something of that distinctive quality which Park finds in different areas of the modern city.But the interest the anthropologist has in this community lies not only in its uniqueness in terms of racial hybridity, and its manifold diversity of language, religion, and even of culture, but in the curious reflection it throws on “normal” English society, and on the wider cultural values which appertain to the latter.

The account of these anthropological investigations in the dockland of Cardiff durring August and September 1941 has been styled a “community-survey.” By convention the social survey, or survey of a community, is concerned exclusively with modern civilized and usually urban society. Ideally, it may be defined as a study of the sociology, i.e. of the social institutions and activities, of people living in a particular locality. On the other hand, as Ginsberg has pointed out, the study of contemporary social conditions in this country, at any rate, has been inspired by direct interest in practical reform, and has not in general been guided by…

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The American Negro and Race Blending

The Sociological Review
Volume a2, Issue 4 (October 1909)
pages 349–360
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1909.tb01972.x

Frances Hoggan

The problem of the colour population of America is many-sided. Perhaps the most vital question to be considered is that of the amalgamation of the races: how far it has reached or may reach, and what good or bad results it has produced or may be expected to produce.

It may be affirmed unhesitatingly, that no two races of men can live side by side in the same country without more or less race blending. The question therefore narrows itself to one of amount and incidence. In the Southern United States, practically all mixed unions during the period of slavery were irregular unions between white men and Negro women, using the term Negro in its legal sense to include all degrees of intermixture down to one-sixteenth only of coloured blood. Comparatively few mixed marriages took place, although a few of the higher class Mulattoes belonging to Northern families are the offspring of married parents and bear no stigma of bastardy. In the Southern States marriage was hardly ever thought of, and even had it been the enactments against it, passed in different years in the various States, were so uncompromising and drastic as effectually to prevent its occurrence. The race blending of slavery was therefore one-sided, the fathers only being white, and it was outside of legal marriage. When the resulting offspring is studied the inferiority of the mother socially and culturally cannot fail to reveal itself in the child, and in addition to the maternal inferiority, the upbringing and general conditions of slave life were such as to render it next to impossible to emerge from servile habits and modes of thought. When, as was often the case, the master and the father were one and the same man, his paternity was ignored to an extent unparalleled in other countries where slave mothers were common. In contrast with the more humane Mahommedan law and customs, the American slave child was seldom freed, and he could be sold away from the mother, in which case he became a mere waif, with no trace of natural relationships, without recognised kindred, and without even the semblance of a home.  It would be difficult to find elsewhere such loose family ties as prevailed among the slave population of the United States, or a more unnatural conception of the role of the white father. When he was not at the same time the…

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The Social Adjustment of Chinese Immigrants in Liverpool

The Sociological Review
Volume 3, Issue 1 (July 1955)
pages 65-75
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1955.tb01045.x

Maurice Broody

Some of the most urgent social problems of a cosmopolitan seaport city like Liverpool are problems of adjustment between ethnic minorities and the indigenous society into which they have migrated. This adjustment is often very difficult, and many immigrant communities suffer acutely as a result of prejudice and discrimination. Their problems have been the concern of both administrators and sociologists, and the research which has hitherto been undertaken in Liverpool into problems of race-relations has been related to the Negro communities, since it is they which are most adversely affected by racial discrimination.

The Chinese community, on the other hand, it interesting precisely because its adjustment is not regarded as a problem. In a report, which was published in 1930, Miss M.[uriel] Fletcher came to the conclusion that the Chinese, unlike the West African community, did not present a serious social problem. That judgment was confirmed four years later by Caradog Jones, whose comment on the Negro and Chinese communities still appears to be substantially true: Each community comprises about 500 adult males. In both cases, there has been widespread inter-marriage and cohabitation with white women. Here the resemblance between the two groups ceases. The Chinese appear to make excellent husbands and there is little evidence of any of their families falling into poverty, but the same cannot be said of the negroes and their families. The half-Chinese children on growing up find little difficulty in obtaining work or in entering into marriage with the surrounding white population. The girls in particular are attractive and good-looking. On the other hand, the Anglo-negroid children when grown up do not easily get work or mix with the ordinary population.

The comparatively untroubled adjustment of the Chinese may be explained partly by the fact, that local residents do not discriminate…

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The genealogical imagination: the inheritance of interracial identities

The Sociological Review
Volume 53, Issue 3 (August 2005)
pages 476–494
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2005.00562.x

Katharine Tyler, Lecturer in Race and Ethnicity
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey

The aim of this article is to examine ethnographically how ideas of descent, biology and culture mediate ideas about the inheritance of racial identities. To do this, the article draws upon interviews with the members of interracial families from Leicester, a city situated in the East Midlands region of England. The article focuses upon the genealogical narratives of the female members of interracial families who live in an ethnically diverse inner-city area of Leicester. Attention is paid to the ways in which the women mobilise and intersect ideas about kinship, ancestry, descent, belonging, place, biology and culture when they think about the inheritance of their own and/or their children’s interracial identities. The article’s emphasis upon the constitution of interracial identities contributes to the sociological study of race and genealogy by exploring the racialised fragmentation of ideas of inheritance and descent across racial categories and generations.

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What’s in a name? An exploration of the significance of personal naming of ‘mixed’ children for parents from different racial, ethnic and faith backgrounds

The Sociological Review
Volume 56, Issue 1, February 2008
pages 39–60
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2008.00776.x

Rosalind Edwards, Professor in Social Policy
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

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

This article is concerned with how and why parent couples from different racial, ethnic and faith backgrounds choose their children’s personal names? The limited literature on the topic of names often focuses on outcomes, using birth name registration data sets, rather than process. In particular, we consider the extent to which the personal names that ‘mixed’ couples give their children represent an individualised taste, or reflect a form of collective affiliation to family, race, ethnicity or faith. We place this discussion in the context of debates about the racial and faith affiliation of ‘mixed’ people, positing various forms of ‘pro’ or ‘post’ collective identity. We draw on in-depth interview data to show that, in the case of ‘mixed’ couple parents, while most wanted names for their children that they liked, they also wanted names that symbolised their children’s heritages. This could involve parents in complicated practices concerning who was involved in naming the children and what those names were. We conclude that, for a full understanding of naming practices and the extent to which these are individualised or affiliative it is important to address process, and that the processes we have identified for ‘mixed’ parents reveal the persistence of collective identity associated with race, ethnicity and faith alongside elements of individualised taste and transcendence, as well as some gendered features.

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