Overall, I understand the feeling of need to tell our own personalised story about our ‘mixed-race’ identity, but…

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2019-08-27 00:34Z by Steven

Overall, I understand the feeling of need to tell our own personalised story about our ‘mixed-race’ identity, but we need to be thinking a lot harder about how we communicate these issues and how they should be attentive to intersectional specificities as well entangled proximities to whiteness.

Chantelle Lewis, “Please can we stop talking about ‘mixed-race’ identity (on its own)?” Discover Society, August 23, 2019. https://discoversociety.org/2019/08/23/please-can-we-stop-talking-about-mixed-race-identity-on-its-own/.

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Please can we stop talking about ‘mixed-race’ identity (on its own)?

Posted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science on 2019-08-25 01:42Z by Steven

Please can we stop talking about ‘mixed-race’ identity (on its own)?

Discover Society
2019-08-23

Chantelle Lewis, Ph.D. Student
Sociology Department
Goldsmiths, University of London

Please can we stop talking about ‘mixed-race’ identity (on its own)?

In response to recent mainstream media outlets featuring and celebrating ‘mixed-race’ populations as a symptom of progress in our society, my concern is this simplistic analysis conceals the broader structural implications of mixedness.

Given the opportunity, we all like talking about how we feel about our identity. If, like me, you belong to a racialised group, we become particularly animated by these opportunities because whiteness permeates so much of public life. We want to think about our varying family histories and how we embody them (or not) within our appearance and how we live our lives.

More often than not, when there is a public discussion about racialised identities, ‘mixed-race’ people are given too much space to grapple with theirs without critically engaging with their own structural positionalities. My contention is that these discussions will often position identity in abstraction from discussions of place and space, class, gender, and wider structural issues…

Read the entire article here.

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