Mixed Race Studies

The answer seems to be that mixed race people urgently need to be more represented in UK social policy and mental health experts need to do the groundwork of converting academic texts on mixed race identity into their practice. We are in a quandary though as for this to happen more academic research on mixed race identity is needed in the UK in the first place. The future for the mixed race population is currently not looking very bright in my opinion where academia is concerned.

Nicola Codner, “Academia and the Identity of Mixed-Race Women,” Ain’t I A Woman Collective, November 10, 2015. http://www.aintiawomancollective.com/academia-and-the-identity-of-mixed-race-women.

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.

All mixed people are entitled to self-identify how they please. But, for some, it is very simple: you are mixed, but you are Black – not in a reductive sense, but in a reflection of a structural reality. In my case, whilst I recognise that I am mixed (my father is white), I have always been brought up with an awareness that I live in a structurally racist society and therefore am engaged with on the spectrum of blackness. Accordingly, I politically align myself to Blackness. I am Black.

Sekai Makoni, “I Am Mixed And I Am Whole,” Ain’t I A Woman Collective, October 19, 2015. http://www.aintiawomancollective.com/i-am-mixed-and-i-am-whole/.

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.

How to Unlearn History | Ella Achola | TEDxCoventGardenWomen

TEDx Talks
2015-07-21

Ella Achola, Founder
Ain’t I A Woman Collective

From awkward school encounters to groan-inducingly offensive questions, Ella finds herself at the intersections of identity, and shares her big idea for bringing ourselves into the stories we tell.

Ella Achola is a writer and founder of the Ain’t I A Woman Collective. Born in Berlin, Ella founded the Collective as an opportunity to engage with her Afro-German heritage and extend the conversation about Europe’s black diaspora beyond the UK.