Mixed Race Studies

Is racial mismatch a problem for young ‘mixed race’ people in Britain? The findings of qualitative research

Ethnicities
Volume 12, Number 6 (December 2012)
pages 730-753
DOI: 10.1177/1468796811434912

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, UK

Peter Aspinall, Reader in Population Health at the Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, UK

Recent evidence concerning the racial identifications of ‘mixed race’ people suggests growing latitude in how they may identify. In this article, we examine whether mixed race young people believe that their chosen identifications are validated by others, and how they respond to others’ racial perceptions of them. While existing studies tend to assume that a disjuncture between self-identification and others’ perceptions of them is problematic, this was not necessarily the case among our respondents. While a racial mismatch between expressed and observed identifications was a common experience for these individuals, they varied considerably in terms of how they responded to such occurrences, so that they could feel: (1) misrecognized (and there were differential bases and experiences of misrecognition); (2) positive about the mismatch; or (3) indifferent to how others racially categorized them in their day-to-day interactions. Some differences in responses to such mismatch emerged among disparate types of mixed people. This study also found that we need to consider national identity, and other forms of belonging, in making sense of the diverse and often multilayered identifications and experiences of mixed race young people in Britain.

Read or purchase the article here.

Answer Formats in British Census and Survey Ethnicity Questions: Does Open Response Better Capture ‘Superdiversity’?

Sociology
Volume 46, Number 2 (April 2012)
pages 354-364
DOI: 10.1177/0038038511419195

Peter J. Aspinall, Reader in Population Health at the Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, UK

During a period of unprecedented ethnicity data collection in Britain, an almost universal characteristic of this practice has been the mandated use of the decennial census ethnicity classifications. In Canada and the USA a greater plurality of methods has included open response, now recommended for the 2020 US Census. As the ethnic diversity of Britain has increased, driven by immigration dynamics and population mixing leading to ‘superdiversity’, the census is no longer able to capture the new populations. The validity and utility of unprompted open response is examined in several ‘mixed race’ datasets. It is argued that open response can be a modus operandi for large-scale ethnicity data collection and that the lack of consistency in recording of such responses need not necessarily be viewed as a drawback. Open response offers substantial insights into the country’s superdiversity in a way that ethnicity categorization alone cannot.

Read or purchase the article here.

International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing

Routledge
2012-05-25
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-59804-0

Edited by

Suki Ali, Senior Lecturer of Sociology
London School of Economics and Political Science

Chamion Cabellero, Senior Research Fellow
Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology
University of Southampton

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

People from a ‘mixed’ racial and ethnic background, and people partnering and parenting across different racial and ethnic backgrounds, are increasingly visible internationally and often construed in diametrically opposed ways. On the one hand, images of racial and ethnic diversity are posed in opposition to unity and solidarity, creating a crisis of cohesive social trust. On the other hand, there are assertions that the portrayals of segregation and conflict ignore the reality of ongoing interactions between a mix of minority and majority racial, ethnic and religious cultures, where multiculture is an ordinary, unremarkable, feature of everyday social life.

This interdisciplinary volume brings internationally well-respected researchers together to explore the different contexts and concepts underpinning discussions about mixedness and mixing. Moving beyond pathologically focused research about confused identities and a dualistic black-white conception of mixedness, the book includes chapters on:

• Multiraciality and race classification
• Mixed race couples
• Mixedness in everyday life
• Mixed race politics

International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing develops theoretical perspectives and presents intellectually shaped empirical evidence that can deal with complexity and normalcy in order to move the debate onto more fruitful grounds. It is an important book for students and scholars of race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction / Suki Ali, Chamion Caballero, Rosalind Edwards and Miri Song
2. Multiraciality and census classification in global perspective / Ann Morning
3. Mixed race across time and place: an international perspective / Ilan Katz
4. Scaling diversity: mixed-race couples, segregation and urban America / Steven Holloway
5. The geography of mixedness in England and Wales / Charlie Owen
6. From ‘Draughtboard Alley’ to ‘Brown Britain’: the ordinariness of mixedness in British life / Chamion Caballero
7. How mixedness is understood and experienced in everyday life / Peter Aspinall and Miri Song
8. Finding value on a council estate in Nottingham: voices of white working class women / Lisa McKenzie
9. How to find mixed people in quantitative datasets / Anne Unterreiner
10. When ethnicity became an important family issue in Slovenia / Mateja Sedmak
11. Same difference? Developing a critical methodological stance in critical mixed race studies / Minelle Mahtani
12. Mixed race politics / Suki Ali

Mixed race Britain: charting the social history

The Guardian
2011-10-04

Laura Smith

While mixed race is one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the UK, there is nothing new in people from different cultures getting together

Olive was just 15 when she met the man who was to become her husband. It was 1930s Cardiff and the trainee nurse had become lost on her way home from the cinema to the Royal Infirmary. “I stopped and asked this boy the way to Queen Street. And we started talking and I think we fell in love there and then.”

The “boy” Olive met on the street that night was Ali Salaman, a young Yemeni working as a chef in his own restaurant, the Cairo Café, a popular hang-out in the city’s Tiger Bay neighbourhood. Despite being told by her priest that she was marrying a heathen, the Methodist teenager married Ali Salaman when she was 16 and they went on to have 10 children.

With mixed race now measured in the national census and one of the fastest growing ethnic groups, it is often viewed as a contemporary phenomenon. But Chamion Caballero, senior research fellow at London South Bank University’s Weeks centre, says: “There is a long history of racial mixing in the UK that people don’t talk about.”

Caballero has co-authored as yet unpublished research with Peter Aspinall, reader in population health at the University of Kent, that puts contemporary mixing into perspective.

It demonstrates that unions between white British women and men from immigrant communities were commonplace in areas where they were thrown together in the 1920s, 30s and 40s: from South Shields and Liverpool’s Toxteth to Cardiff’s Tiger Bay and London’s Docklands. The Era of Moral Condemnation: Mixed Race People in Britain, 1920-1950, shows that although they faced prejudice from some, mixed race families created new communities in which those from different backgrounds swapped cultural traditions. It also explores how official perceptions of mixed race families contrasted with the way people experienced it…

…Aspinall says the dominance of eugenics during this period was central to such attitudes. “If you look at the aims of the British Eugenics Society in the 1930s there was this explicit statement about the dangers of what they called race crossing,” he says. Marie Stopes, then a prominent eugenicist, advocated that all “half castes” should be “sterilised at birth”. Connie Hoe, the daughter of a Chinese father and white mother, was one of dozens of mixed race children who were experimented on by the eugenics society to test the relationship between physical appearance and intellect…

Read the entire article here.

University of Kent research reveals diversity of multiracial identification and experience in Britain today

University of Kent
Press Office
2010-11-04

Research from the University has revealed that while there is evidence of a growing consciousness and interest in mixed race identities among 18-25 year olds in Britain today, Britain cannot yet speak of a coherent or unified mixed group or experience.

The research, which was conducted by Peter Aspinall, Dr. Miri Song and Dr. Ferhana Hashem from the University’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research (SSPSSR), set out to explore the ways in which mixed race young adults thought about and understood their ethnic and racial identifications.

Key Findings Include:…

• …In a ‘forced choice’ question (where respondents were forced to choose the group, or ‘race’, which was most important to them), many were not able (or unwilling) to prioritise only one group. This suggests the growing prominence of ‘mixed’, hybrid identification. Furthermore, some respondents who refused to choose claimed to transcend racial identification and categorization completely.
• In general, the identity options perceived and experienced by Black/White mixed young people were more constrained than those of other mixes involving ‘White’, such as ‘Chinese and White’ , ‘South Asian and White’, and ‘Arab and White’. Many, though not all, part-Black respondents reported that they were seen as monoracially Black. This finding is interesting, since Britain has never had a codified ‘one-drop rule’ (in which anyone with a known Black ancestor was known as Black) as in the USA. The differences were statistically significant…

Read the entire article here.

The Future of Ethnicity Classifications 

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Volume 35, Issue 9
November 2009
pages 1417 – 1435
DOI: 10.1080/13691830903125901

Peter J. Aspinall, Senior Research Fellow
Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, ‘diversity’ has emerged as a key value in its own right, celebrated through human rights and similar policies promoting identity and providing an additional focus to that of the more traditional equalities agenda and its concern with ‘statistical proportionality’. It has been conjectured that classifications rooted in diversity policy will either propel data collection practices into the use of finer-grained distinctions or that these measurement systems will collapse under their own weight. In Britain pressure to increase the number of categories in ethnicity classifications highlights the tension between the validity of granular categories and their utility (in terms of practicality of data collection). Similarly, the interest in identity evokes a trade-off between the selective attribution of such measures and the greater stability of operationally defined ethnicity. In meeting the challenge of the diversity agenda, a number of approaches—innovative for Britain—are now being debated to accommodate greater numbers of categories in census collections. These include multi-ticking across categories (thereby capturing multiplicity) and the shift from classifications framed by colour to those privileging ethnic background (but attended by category proliferation). Conceptually, the measurement of the multiple dimensions of ethnicity has found favour but not so far encompassing ethnic origin/ancestry collected in US and Canadian Censuses. While some have argued that ethnicity classifications are already unwieldy and that retrenchment is needed, validity—increasingly insisted upon by the collectivities themselves and other non-state organisations—is seen as winning out. The demands of inclusiveness and identity visibility indicate that classifications are headed in the direction of greater complexity. 

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed Race in Britain: A Survey of the Preferences of Mixed Race People for Terminology and Classifications (Interim Report)

Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent at Canterbury
July 2006

Peter Aspinall, Senior Research Fellow
Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

Ferhana Hashem, Research Fellow
Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent

…This research project into the preferences for terminology and classifications was initiated in 2004 and put into the field in summer 2005.  Its main purposes were: (i) to help inform terminology and classifications for ethnic group for the upcoming 2011 Census and (ii) to serve as a pilot study for an ESRC application: ‘The ethnic options of mixed race people in Britain’ (which also had a focus on official terminology and classifications).  This application was funded by ESRC and the project began on 1st March 2006.  A small dataset on official terminology and classifications is also accruing via this route…

…On issues of terminology, the salient general term of choice amongst respondents was ‘mixed race’.  The only other terms that attracted significant support were ‘mixed heritage’ and ‘mixed parentage’. Very few preferred ‘dual heritage’.  Respondents identified eleven different terms as offensive, most frequently ‘dual heritage’, ‘half-caste’ and ‘mixed origins’.  The reasons for the dislike of ‘dual heritage’ focussed mainly on its limitation to two groups.  ‘Half-caste’ was regarded as pejorative by several respondents, on the ground of partial recognition & historical connotations.  The largest number of respondents felt that terms like ‘mixed race’ and ‘mixed parentage’ should refer to ‘people who are mixes of white and any minority racial/ethnic group’.  Significant numbers also felt that the terms should refer to people who are mixes of minority racial/ethnic groups, people who are mixes of white and black groups only, and people of disparate ethnic origins…

Read the entire report here.

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….