Mixed Race Studies

White supremacy remains intact despite the increase in interracial relationships

Media Diversified
2014-07-08

Huma Munshi
London, United Kingdom

It’s been a strange tale of race relations of late. On the one hand, research indicates that one in ten relationships are between people from different ethnic backgrounds. Yet on the other hand, the effects of institutional racism are as potent ever.

It can come as no surprise that we are seeing more people in relationships from a different ethnic background. In cities with a high population density, mixing within diverse communities is very much the norm. In London, the 2011 Census showed that the BAME population outnumbered White British for the first time. Within that, however, there are pockets where there is significant segregation of communities. The groups that are least likely to be in mixed relationships are Bengali and Pakistani. So even within the context of mixed race relationships there are anomalies.

But this is just one small piece of a complex jigsaw.

PC Carol Howard’s case of race and sex discrimination against the Metropolitan Police Service was upheld last week, the employment tribunal ruled that the MPS “directly discriminated” against her. Moreover, it cast a light on the practice of “systematically destroying evidence of sexual and racial discrimination within its ranks”. Officers within the MPS clearly had great difficulty with a black woman in a senior position…

…In some respects the increase in relationships between different ethnic groups does not make the slightest difference to white supremacy in society. The latter not only exists but has such a profound and all pervasive impact on society. People may mix, they may marry and have children but what of the structures of racism that prevail?…

Read the entire article here.

Intermarriage and Integration Revisited: International Experiences and Cross-Disciplinary Approaches

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 662, November 2015

Guest Edited by:

Dan Rodríguez-García, Associate Professor
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Intermarriage has been a subject of study in the social sciences for more than a century.  Conventional wisdom (and some scattered research) holds that intermarriage is important to the  social integration of immigrants and minority peoples in majority cultures and economies, but we still have a great deal to learn about dynamics of intermarriage and integration. Which groups are  more likely to intermarry? Does crossing racial, ethno-cultural, national, religious or class  boundaries at the intimate level lead to greater integration of individuals and groups that have not  been considered part of the societal mainstream?

This special issue of The ANNALS investigates the intermarriage/integration nexus. The  research within shows the extent to which intermarriage is related to pluralism, cultural diversity,  and social inclusion/exclusion in the twenty-first century; we also evaluate the impact that mixed  marriages, families, and individuals have on shaping and transforming modern societies. We  identify patterns and outcomes of intermarriage in both North America and Europe, detecting  boundaries between native majorities and ethnic minorities.

Obviously, intermarriage and mixedness are often deeply entwined with immigration, so we also  scrutinize the relationship between intermarriage and various aspects of immigrant integration,  whether legal, political, economic, social, or cultural. Does intermarriage, in fact, contribute to  immigrant incorporation? How and to what degree? Findings – whether quantitative, qualitative,  or both – are presented in this volume for a wide variety of national contexts: Canada, the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden.

Specific findings include:

• Race and religion remain significant barriers to societal integration, and deep social cleavages exist even in countries with higher rates of intermarriage. Race is a significant barrier in the United States, and religion – Islam in particular – is a prominent barrier in Western Europe, where even “looking Muslim” is automatically a low-status attribute, making some basic social integration, from housing to employment, automatically more difficult.
• Diversity has never been greater in the United States, but social integration is context-bound and conditional:
  • White immigrants have an easier time with various forms of integration (e.g. educational attainment, housing, and labor), but the opposite is true for black immigrants, who are less likely to marry black natives or out-marry with other groups.
  • Asian Americans have become the most “marriageable” ethnoracial minority in America. Boundaries to integration in the U.S. for Asians have not disappeared, but the rising multiracial Asian population faces fewer social hurdles. This is particularly true for Asian women, who are seen as more desirable than Asian men, likely because of persistent ethnic stereotypes.
  • The earnings gap between immigrants who marry natives and those who marry other immigrants has increased over time in the U.S.
• In the U.S. and France, immigrants with high levels of education are more likely to marry natural born citizens.
• British multiracial people with part white ancestry and their children do not necessarily integrate into the white mainstream.
• EU citizens generally have a strong identification with Europe – they tend to feel “European” and take pride in being so; this is particularly true of those with a partner from a different EU27 country.
• The key to integration can lie in children who are products of mixed unions and the role that these families have in shaping societies where plural identities are normalized. In Quebec, for example, parents in mixed unions tend to make decisions that transmit identity, values, and culture to their children in ways that contribute to the “unique social pluralism” of the Quebecois.
• Immigrants in Canada with Canadian-born partners have similar levels of political engagement as the third-plus generation with Canadian-born partners; however, immigrants with foreign-born partners have lower political participation.
• The regulation of mixed marriages in the Netherlands has historically been gendered, to the detriment of Dutch women.
• The link between intermarriage and immigrant integration in Spain is complex and varied: outcomes for some aspects of integration may show a direct connection, while other results indicate either no relationship or a bidirectional association; further, the outcomes may be moderated by factors such as country of origin, gender, or length of residence.
• The social, cultural, and achievement outcomes for children of mixed marriages in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden are always in between the outcomes for immigrant children and native children, suggesting that mechanisms of both integration and  stigmatization, among other possibilities, play a role.

Together, these studies suggest a more complex picture of the nexus between intermarriage and integration than has traditionally been theorized, composing a portrait of what some scholars are calling “mixedness” – an encompassing concept that refers to intermarriage and mixed families, and the sociocultural processes attendant to them, in the modern world. We find that mixedness can be socially transformative, but also that it illuminates the disheartening persistence of ethnic and cultural divides that hinder inclusion and social cohesion.

Read or purchase this special issue here.

Interracial relationships and the ‘brown baby’ problem: black GIs, white women and their mixed race offspring in World War II Britain

University of Cambridge
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Seminar Room 1
Tuesday, 2015-11-17, 17:00-18:30Z

Lucy Bland, Reader in History
Anglia Ruskin University

For more information, click here.

Academia and the Identity of Mixed-Race Women

Ain’t I A Woman Collective
2015-11-10

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Image: Vox Efx

I am a 35-year old mixed race woman (Black Jamaican, Nigerian and White British), born and living in Leeds, Yorkshire the UK and I recently completed a counselling diploma. As part of the work I had to do to achieve my diploma I had to do a great deal of work around examining my racial and cultural identity. It was also part of the course requirements that I had to do 20 hours of personal counselling.

I didn’t know it when I started the diploma but I had a massive amount of work that I needed to do around exploring my identity as a mixed race woman. This emerged when I started my personal counselling. I began to realise I had a lot of unresolved feelings around past experiences of racism and the lack of understanding and acknowledgement I had met as a mixed race female. I also needed to look at issues to do with race within my family as well as ancestral baggage…

Read the entire article here.

“My life has gotten white”: Zadie Smith’s Erotics and Ethics of Upward Mobility

C21 Seminar Series 2015-16
Centre for Research in Twenty-first Century Writings
University of Brighton
Falmer Campus
101 Mayfield House
Brighton, United Kingdom
2015-11-09, 17:00-18:30Z

Sarah Brophy, Professor of English and Cultural Studies
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

In a 2011 Guardian article “Where are Britain’s black authors?,” novelist Catherine Johnson discusses the boom in white-authored stories about “other races and cultures,” suggesting that “the words of a white author are a comfortable buffer, a reassurance that nothing in the story will be too shocking, too hard to understand; the author is like you, and you can trust him or her to tell you this story in familiar terms.” Conspicuously absent from Johnson’s discussion is Zadie Smith, the young mixed race author from North London who burst on to the literary scene with a historic advance contract for the manuscript of the acclaimed White Teeth (2000). How does the case of Smith potentially reroute Johnson’s critique? Building on Zadie Smith’s comments in a publicity interview for her latest novel NW (2012) that “my life has gotten white compared to the life I grew up with. Because of the world I work in—it’s white,” this paper considers the dilemmas of upward mobility and whiteness as they have come to bear on Smith, who articulates and negotiates these pressures in a range of life writing modes (especially personal essays and autobiographical fiction)…

For more information, click here.

I Am Mixed And I Am Whole

Ain’t I A Woman Collective: Centring the Voices of Women with African Ancestry
2015-10-19

Sekai Makoni

When I heard the theme for this month was ‘identity’, the word crisis as an appendage kept coming to mind. As a mixed person it, it seems as though the word “crisis” is constantly attached to identity, as though there is confusion somewhere. This is problematic. Other phrases that have become synonymous with “mixed race” include: ‘unsure of themselves’, ‘in-between’, ‘not one, not the other’, etc. It becomes a little exasperating, especially if, like me, you don not relate to such notions of bi- and multi-racial identity. It sometimes seems alien to some that an identity crisis is not an inevitable part of your coming of age. I’d like to take this opportunity to say that identity crises are not a universal truth for those of mixed heritage…

Read the entire article here.

Diversity and cohesion in Britain’s most mixed community

Financial Times
2015-10-14

John McDermott

At the Barking Road Community Centre in Plaistow, dancers sway and twirl to calypso beats. If the music hints at the centre’s past as an Afro-Caribbean club, the mix of elderly boppers suggest how the composition of this pocket of east London is changing. As well as women with Nigerian and Jamaican heritage, there are those with roots in India, Pakistan, Colombia, Poland and the Philippines. They show why Plaistow is the clearest example of what researchers describe as London’s “super-diversity”.

“If London is the most diverse city in the world, and Plaistow is the most diverse part of the city, Plaistow might be the most diverse place in the world,” says Forhad Hussain, a local councillor. When Hussain came to the area in 1983 with his Bangladeshi-born parents, this part of the city was mostly white and working-class, home to dockers and their families who had stayed put as Plaistow was rebuilt after the devastation wrought by the Blitz…

Read the entire article here.

Black History Month Firsts: Lilian Bader

Black History Month 2015
2015-10-13

Omar Alleyne Lawler, Editor

Lilian Bader, Photo Credit courtesy of the Imperial War Museum

The contributions and efforts of Lilian Bader to World War Two for the Caribbean community actually starts before her birth, with her Fathers contribution in World War One.

Marrying in 1913, Marcus Bailey was a Barbadian born migrant who found himself in England, coupled with an English born, Irish raised woman^* on the outbreak of war. The possibility of a happy family was postponed as war broke out in 1914 and Marcus would find himself serving in the Royal Navy as a Merchant Seaman until the war finished.

However, upon the wars end, the Baileys would parent three children, one of which would be Lilian Bader. Born in 1918, she would go onto be quite possibly the first Black woman to join the British Armed Forces…

…The reality of being a Mixed Raced Woman, in Britain in the early 1930’s, would be one her intelligence and popularity would never be able to escape and at the age of twenty, Lilian would still be at the Convent she joined as a nine year old, simply because nobody was willing to hire her for work…

Read the entire article here.

Hanif Kureishi: ‘We’re all mixed-race now

The Independent
2011-10-23

James Kidd

Immigration, Islamism, multi-culturalism – as his new collected stories attests, the hottest topics of the day have long been the bedrock of Hanif Kureishi’s fiction. Just don’t get him started on the joys of ‘Big Brother’…

Hanif Kureishi is, by some accounts, a hard man to interview. In the days before our meeting, any number of people insist that the author of My Beautiful Laundrette, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album is cantankerous, sarcastic and prone to lengthy lacunae in the middle of conversation. This portrait is corroborated by some of those closest to Kureishi: his sister and more than one ex-partner have complained of literary parasitism, that their lives have been exploited in the service of Kureishi’s art. It is a charge that he doesn’t exactly refute: “If [your writing] doesn’t upset your family, you must be doing it wrong.”

Perhaps the problem is that no one got him on to the subject of Celebrity Big Brother. This not only sparks his enthusiasm, it proves that Kureishi speaks like he writes – an entertaining mix of irreverent humour, personal revelation and social critique. So a relatively grave discussion about “the psychotic exhibitionism of our time” (or “the age of Jordan”) triggers a lengthy dissection of the recent reality series.

“My missus says Jordan chooses really nice men then destroys them. It seems a good way to pass the time. The cage-fighter [Alex Reid] is a nice bloke – thick, but nice. Unlike Vinnie [Jones]. He was quite hardcore – a naughty, tough daddy. I think Vinnie had an evil edge. People were afraid of him.”…

…What he does remember is the urgency to become a writer. Growing up in Bromley in the 1960s, surrounded by racist teachers, skinheads and the National Front, it was his means to self-expression and political empowerment. “Being a writer was a counter-force to people saying I was a half-caste, a Paki, a mongrel. It was a real thing in the world, an identity. I needed to call myself a writer back then because they were calling me a fucking Paki.” He pauses. “We are all mixed-race now – me, Obama, Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton.”

Kureishi says he was fortunate that the themes which distinguished his seminal works – race, immigration, Islam and multi-culturalism – have so profoundly defined 21st-century global culture. “You are lucky if you hit it for five years. I suddenly saw that the story of my father, a Muslim man coming to Britain, was not only his story, it was the story of the West. It was gold dust. No one else was writing about it, and people didn’t welcome it. ‘This is very good, Hanif, but do they have to be Indian in a cornershop?'”

Twenty years after The Buddha of Suburbia helped change the landscape of British fiction, and society, Kureishi continues to have plenty to say. He is certainly still politically engaged and enraged. “My dad’s family always thought that power rendered white people unsophisticated. Look at the stupidity of invading Iraq. Every Muslim would think that was hilarious stupidity. It has destroyed American power in the world. They aren’t going to invade anywhere else now. The Iranians aren’t afraid of them. The Koreans aren’t afraid. How stupid was that strategically, let alone morally? They have, as it were, shot their bolt.”…

Read the entire article here.

Leading Aircraftwoman in the WAAF and one of the first black women to join the British Armed Forces

The Independent
2015-04-06

Stephen Bourne

Lilian Bader (1918-2015)

Bader trained as an instrument repairer, became a Leading Aircraftwoman and soon gained the rank of Acting Corporal.

I first met Lilian Bader at the Imperial War Museum in 1991 at the launch of Colin Douglas and Ben Bousquet’s book West Indian Women at War. She was the only black Briton interviewed in the book. Feisty, outspoken but not without a sense of humour, Bader was proud of the fact that, by the end of the 20th century, three generations of her family had served in the British Armed Forces.

She was born in 1918 in the Toxteth Park area of Liverpool to Marcus Bailey, a merchant seaman from Barbados who had fought for the British in the First World War, and Lilian, her British-born mother, whose parents were Irish. The Baileys had married in 1913 and Bader was the youngest of their three children. In 1927, Bader and her older brothers, Frank and James, were orphaned – and she was raised in a convent where she remained until she was 20, because no one would employ her. However, she was determined to overcome racial prejudice.

She found employment in domestic service, but, when the war broke out, she joined the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) at Catterick Camp, Yorkshire. She was enjoying herself until she was asked to leave when her father’s West Indian heritage was discovered by an official in London. For weeks her supervisor avoided informing her of this decision – but eventually he had to tell her the truth, and release her…

Read the entire article here.