Mixed Race Studies

Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America

Harvard University Press
April 2013
250 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674045835

François Weil, Chancellor and Professor of History; former president of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Universities of Paris

The quest for roots has been an enduring American preoccupation. Over the centuries, generations have sketched coats of arms, embroidered family trees, established local genealogical societies, and carefully filled in the blanks in their bibles, all in pursuit of self-knowledge and status through kinship ties. This long and varied history of Americans’ search for identity illuminates the story of America itself, according to François Weil, as fixations with social standing, racial purity, and national belonging gave way in the twentieth century to an embrace of diverse ethnicity and heritage.

Seeking out one’s ancestors was a genteel pursuit in the colonial era, when an aristocratic pedigree secured a place in the British Atlantic empire. Genealogy developed into a middle-class diversion in the young republic. But over the next century, knowledge of one’s family background came to represent a quasi-scientific defense of elite “Anglo-Saxons” in a nation transformed by immigration and the emancipation of slaves. By the mid-twentieth century, when a new enthusiasm for cultural diversity took hold, the practice of tracing one’s family tree had become thoroughly democratized and commercialized.

Today, Ancestry.com attracts over two million members with census records and ship manifests, while popular television shows depict celebrities exploring archives and submitting to DNA testing to learn the stories of their forebears. Further advances in genetics promise new insights as Americans continue their restless pursuit of past and place in an ever-changing world.

Who are we? Census 2011 reports on ethnicity in the UK

Runnymede Trust: Intelligence for a multi-ethnic Britain
2012-12-11

Dr. Omar Khan, Head of Policy Research

Every ten years the Census provides us with multiple insights into the state of modern Britain. In today’s release of the 2011 Census, we find that the Black and minority ethnic (BME) population has reached nearly 8 million – roughly the population of Scotland and Wales combined.

Overall, the BME population is now 14.1% of the overall total in England and Wales, rising from 7.9% in 2001. This doesn’t include the significant ‘White Other’ population which is now 2.5 million, or 4.4% of the overall population. Much of this growth has been through immigration, and many will assume that the ‘White Other’ population is primarily Eastern European. However, this population also includes White French, White Australian, White Argentinian and White American people, which explains why this disparate ‘group’ is now some 12.6% of the population of London.

Combined with the 40% of the population that is Black and minority ethnic, a minority of London’s residents are now ‘White British’ (46%). While this is indeed a striking development, it masks an arguably more significant development – the greater dispersal of ethnic minorities across the UK. Contrary to much received wisdom, Britain is becoming less ‘segregated’ every year.

Between 2001 and 2011, the regions whose BME population has grown the fastest are those that had the fewest ethnic minorities in 2011. So Wales, the North East and South West have all doubled their proportion of BME people (from just over 2% to over 4%), while London and West Midlands, which had the most BME people in 2001, have grown the slowest. There are more BME people living across the UK, including in villages and the countryside, and this phenomenon can be expected to continue.

One of the striking findings of the census is the reduction in the overall number of ‘White British’ people by over half a million people. So one reason the BME proportion of the population is rising is because the White British population is shrinking. In most regions of England and Wales this decrease or growth was actually quite minimal (with the White British population growing by more than 2% over the decade only in the South East), but London was notable because there were 600,000 fewer White British people living there in 2011 compared to 2001. This clearly points to the phenomenon of White British people leaving the capital, and explains much of the rise in London’s proportion of BME people…

…Inevitably much coverage of the census will focus on the rising ‘Mixed’ population, which now is the second largest, at some 1.2 million people. While the rise in the number of people categorized as mixed has been quite remarkable, so too has the overall BME growth, meaning that the ‘Mixed’ population is only 1% more (15.6%) of the total BME population than it was in 2001 (14.6%)…

…On most social outcome measures, the ‘Mixed’ population shows enormous variation, with Black Caribbean-White and Black African-White people more likely to have outcomes similar to Black people generally. In other words, rather than viewing the ‘mixed’ population as a single group with shared social experiences, we should rather focus on the continued salience of race, and in particular how the racial background of parents affects the social outcomes of children…

…It is also significant that many of these categories have large and growing populations. This raises the final important question – how identity shifts over people’s lifetimes and indeed across generations. While the overall share of Black people within the BME population remained about a quarter, there was a sharp decrease in the proportion who identified as ‘Black Caribbean’. However, the ‘Black Other’ group saw the steepest rise, suggesting that some children of Black Caribbean parents are happier with this ethnic identity.

Depending on how identity and social experiences change, we might expect further development of the current census categories. For example, the children of White Polish parents may plausibly identify as ‘White British’, as many of the grandchildren of Irish and Italian migrants now do, while many ‘Mixed’ people may rather identify as one of their parents. Here it’s worth emphasizing again the importance of social experiences and social outcomes in understanding race and ethnicity. That Barack Obama self-identifies as African American rather than ‘Mixed’ has probably little to do with a rejection of his mother’s heritage or a radical kind of separatist politics. Rather, Obama’s identity is informed by his social experience, and the reality of racism is evidenced not simply in his experiences in the 1970s or 1980s, but in the continued focus on his place of birth and by the fact that over 90% of White American voters in Mississippi and Alabama voted for his opponent.

So while it is important to understand self-identification in thinking about race and ethnicity, people cannot simply choose an identity of their own making, nor can they escape the views and prejudices in others in navigating the world. In the UK, the unemployment rate for Black young men is now 55%, Chinese graduates with better results have lower earnings than their White colleagues and Black and Asian women face such difficult experiences in the labour market that some of them change their names on their CVs…

Read the entire article here.

“Mongrel nation”: How is the face of Britain seen now?

British Future
2012-12-10

Shamit Saggar, Professor of Political Science
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

Twenty years ago Time magazine put a composite photograph on its front cover. It was generated by an IBM 486 computer and fused together the phenotypical features of the world’s six main racial groups. The face that emerged was that of a woman with a striking, yet blended, appearance. The purpose was to sneak preview a mid-twentieth century future in which growing global migration and cross marriage would produce Global Woman, writes Shamit Saggar, professor of political science at the University of Sussex.

Many younger people in Britain today would, if scientifically surveyed, probably acknowledge her beauty. A fair slice would perhaps welcome what she represented. But a distinctive group—a minority, I guess—would be alarmed, sensing that something with value had, or was being, lost…

Read the entire article here.

The melting pot generation: How Britain became more relaxed on race

British Future
2012-12-12
26 pages

Rob Ford, Lecturer in Politics
University of Manchester

Rachael Jolley, Editorial Director and Director of Communications
British Future

Sunder Katwala, Director
British Future

Binita Mehta, Intern
British Future

As the 2011 census results show an ever larger number of Britons from mixed race backgrounds, this new British Future report The Melting Pot Generation: How Britain became more relaxed about race examines how these changes might affect the way that we think about race and identity.

When the parents of Olympic champion Jessica Ennis, who are from Jamaica and Derbyshire, met in Sheffield in the 1980s, a majority of the public expressed opposition to mixed race relationships. In 2012, concern has fallen to 15%—and just one in twenty of those aged 18–24. Jessica Ennis is from a generation that worry less about race and mixing than their parents did, and who mostly see mixed Britain as the everyday norm that they grew up with.

Inside this report…

• Rob Ford of the University of Manchester traces how the rise of mixed Britain changed attitudes over recent decades;
• Rachael Jolley explores new Britain Thinks polling on what we think about race and relationships today.
• New Oxford University research reports how media coverage of Olympic medal winners Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah balanced their ethnic origins and local identities.
• Binita Mehta selects ten twenty-something stars who reflect the changing face of their generation.
• Andrew Gimson talks to young Britons about how far being mixed race mattered to their experience of growing up.
• Leading thinkers assess the opportunities and pitfalls of changing how we talk about race.
• Sunder Katwala wonders if his children’s generation will see racial identity as increasingly a matter of choice.

Read the entire report here.

“Chris, are you Greek?” Sheila asked.

“No, I’m black and Irish.”

There was silence in the room. Jermaine’s eyebrows raised above his glasses. Sheila said, “Chris, we know that. I meant, are you in a fraternity?”

I smiled, embarrassed, “No. No, I’m not.”

The whole room burst into laughter, myself included. Kim put a hand up and said, “Yeah, I knew there was some soul in there the minute he walked into the interview.”

Chris “C.T.” Terry, “the greek,” Story Week Reader (2011): pages 31-32.

As my critical contemplative response tempered my emotional one, I saw that the antiblack bias at the core of many multiracial organizations had shaped the larger discourse of mixedness and multiracial identity. While many mixed individuals and organizations are engaged and invested in social justice, discussions about mixed identity the realm of popular culture and mass media tend to frame the presence of black ancestry as a hindrance. While I believe that there is a definite mixed experience, I think that care must be taken not to cleave that experience from the broader historical continuum of how race has been constructed and reconstructed in America and that any analysis of race/identity must begin with defining whiteness and how the construction of whiteness has directly impacted the construction of all other identities in this country. As parents of black/white mixed kids and black/nonwhite mixed kids, we have to address the ways in which we’ve all internalized messages of antiblack bias and how that affects both the identity choices we make for our children and the ones we want them to make for themselves. For those outside the realm of the black/white/black/nonwhite mix, it’s still important to consider how antiblack bias relates to your child’s particular identity construction and how the historical black/white mixed binary informs how all mixed/multiracial identities are understood in our society.

Michelle Clark-McCrary, “Coming Clean About Blackness, Mixed Race Identity and the Multiracial Movement,” Is That Your Child? Thought in Full Color, (December 11, 2012). http://www.isthatyourchild.com/2012/12/coming-clean-about-blackness-mixed-race.html.