Mixed Race Studies

Sun uses it’s Arsenal to divide us

Lester Holloway
2011-08-17

Lester Holloway, Liberal Democrat Councillor, Journalist & Equality Campaigner
London Borough of Sutton

Top footballers are good at what they do but the Government does not turn to Ashley Cole or John Terry for economic advice. By the same token, their views on race shouldn’t set the agenda. That was my first reaction to the full page devoted to Theo Walcott’s experiences in today’s Sun.
 
I have no issue with the Arsenal and sometime England winger–his history and childhood memories are his own–but when a few paragraphs in his new autobiography are plucked out and spun into a full page in Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper you have to ask: ‘what it going on?’…

…Let’s start with the headline:”People call me black but I’m mixed race.” Again, he’s perfectly entitled to that view, but it’s not one shared by all who recognise that being “mixed race” means you are seen as a person of colour just as those who have two black parents. The political term ‘black’ has never excluded the ‘white side’ of the family, but is in part a uniting umbrella term recognising shared African ancestry. That makes it a term of power–power in numbers and from the spiritual and cultural legacy of the continent.
 
Fracturing a united black community by prizing away “mixed race” people is really about breaking up that power, dividing and ruling. Some of the worst apartheid and colonial regimes have been built upon a colour and shading heirachy, while shadism and the caste system still blights the world today. Clearly Walcott wasn’t trying do advance any of these notions! But I strongly suspect The Sun’s aim was to reduce the size, and therefore the influence, of the black community by emphasising “mixed race” as being seperate from black.
 
I’m not entirely clear what “mixed race” is anyway. I am of mixed parentage, and therefore dual heritage, but I am not a member of any distinct “mixed race”; indeed there is no such thing. Pick two mixed people at random, and I will put money on them having less ancestry in common than if you compared them to any randomly picked person with two black parents. If “mixed race” people are grouped together exclusively on grounds of skin shade, that is quite insulting and not a little “racist!”…

…Walcott is not an activist; I have no expectations of him apart from delivering pinpoint crosses from the touchline (and Lord knows, Arsenal will need plenty of them this season!) It matters not that he grew up in a small Berkshire town and is dating a white young woman. What matters is that we have an holistic debate, and that if papers such as The Sun are going to get excited about a footballer declaring himself mixed race as opposed to black, they should give other perspectives an airing too.
 
Failure to do so can only reinforce suspicions that they–or certainly the rich and powerful in Britain–wish to ensure that the rapidly growing numbers of people of mixed parentage do not identify black. After all, creating difference, tension and envy between black people on the basis of skin colour is a tactic that has been tried and tested for many generations…

Read the entire essay here.