Mixed Race Studies

From the University of Kent: ‘Invisible’ history of mixed race Britain becomes the subject of a major study

A major new study, jointly undertaken by Peter Aspinall, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Kent, and Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow at London South Bank University, will investigate who was considered to be mixed race in Britain between 1920 and 1950, and how this population was perceived and treated by officialdom, the media and wider society.

Titled The Era of Moral Condemnation: mixed race people in Britain 1920 – 1950, the study will use first-hand accounts, autobiographical recordings and a range of archival material to understand how these perceptions emerged and the impact they may have had on the conceptualisation of mixed race people in Britain today….

…The ‘mixed’ population is now the fastest growing ethnic group in Britain. While the substantial increase in the size of this group is a recent phenomenon, population mixing has happened throughout the 20th century and earlier. By the 1920s there were settled mixed race populations in a number of British seaports, including Liverpool and Cardiff, brought about in part by visiting African and Asian seamen, and significant communities in other cities including London and Manchester.

University of Kent, “‘Invisible’ history of mixed race Britain becomes the subject of a major study”, News Release, (May 15, 2008).

‘In certain circumstances, race mixing is known to be bad. Further knowledge of its biological effects is needed in order to make it possible to frame a practical eugenic policy.  Meanwhile, since the process of race mixture cannot be reversed, great caution is advocated.’

Records of the Eugenics Society, 1934

Multiracial ideology, like the monoracial ideology it depends on, is a false consciousness. The frustration its adherents feel would be better directed at criticizing the American racial paradigm itself rather than at attempting to modify the paradigm’s configuration.  A modified paradigm, one containing a multi-racial category, would be a fallacious as one without a multiracial category.  As long as the idea of race has legitimacy, and as long as the racial hierarchy remains undisturbed, nothing will really change.

Rainier Spencer, Mixed Race Studies: A Reader, Chapter 29.

Within the United States, ‘mixed race’ has gained currency as a loaded but culturally comprehensible term referencing individuals where one parent is white and the other is of color. Some […] challenge this approach and claim recognition for ‘mixed-race’ identities that were never legally proscribed. It is a strategic but frivolous petition as the explicit legacy of Anglo-European slavery and colonialism, which gave birth to the ominous idea of race in the first place, facilitated the abhorrent notions of miscegenation, hybridity, and mixed race. Efforts to expand the discourse of ‘mixed race’ to include any combination that abridges diverse ethnic/ national origin – e.g., Chinese-Chicano, Southeast Indian and Iranian – seem rather disingenuous given the mating history of humankind. Scholarship on the impact of contemporary demographic changes and their impact on mixed identities per se must not confuse the historical particularity of mixed race. Again – more, not less, clarity and precision is needed and the appealing notion of third-ness, a separate space defined for mixedness, still confuses the challenges of racial ambiguity with panethnic mixing between minority communities.

Azoulay, K.G. 2003. “Rethinking ‘mixed race’ (review),” Research in African Literatures. 34(2):233-235