{"id":35758,"date":"2014-02-11T05:15:01","date_gmt":"2014-02-11T05:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35758"},"modified":"2014-02-11T05:15:01","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T05:15:01","slug":"into-the-melting-pot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35758","title":{"rendered":"Into the melting pot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Into the melting pot<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Economist<\/a>
\n2014-02-08<\/p>\n

The rapid rise of mixed-race Britain is changing neighbourhoods\u2014and perplexing the authorities<\/em><\/p>\n

ZADIE SMITH<\/a>, a novelist born to a black Jamaican mother and a white British father, recently recalled that when she was growing up in Willesden Green<\/a>, a London district with a large immigrant population, \u201cnothing could be more normal than a mixed-race girl\u201d. The surprise, she said, was entering publishing and finding that people thought it unusual. Nobody could get that impression now: Britons are mixing at extraordinary speed.<\/p>\n

The 2011 census revealed a country that is decreasingly white and British<\/a>: England\u2019s ethnic-minority population grew from 9% of the total in 2001 to 14%. But the biggest single increase was in the number of people claiming a mixed-ethnic background. This almost doubled, to around 1.2m. Among children under the age of five, 6% had a mixed background\u2014more than belonged to any other minority group (see chart). Mixed-race children are now about as common in Britain as in America\u2014a country with many more non-whites and a longer history of mass immigration.<\/p>\n

As Britain\u2019s mixed-race population swells, another group appears destined to shrink. The Labour Force Survey<\/a> reveals that 48% of black Caribbean men and 34% of black Caribbean women in couples are with partners of a different ethnic group\u2014with higher proportions still among younger cohorts. Black Caribbean children under ten years old are outnumbered two-to-one by children who are a mixture of white and black Caribbean.<\/p>\n

Rob Ford<\/a> of Manchester University points out that Caribbean folk are following an Irish pattern of integration, in that their partners are often working-class. The Irish parallel also suggests they will eventually be fully absorbed into the British population. Polls show that adults who are a mixture of white and black Caribbean tend to see themselves not so much as black, Caribbean or even as British, but rather as English\u2014the identity of the comfortably assimilated.<\/p>\n

Indians, who began arriving in large numbers in the 1960s, were slower to mix. They are now doing so\u2014but along Jewish, rather than Irish, lines. For them, assimilation follows education: according to research by Raya Muttarak<\/a> and Anthony Heath<\/a>, Indians with degrees are far more likely to marry whites. Indians are not so much marrying into the white majority as into its suburban middle class, says Shamit Saggar<\/a> at the University of Essex…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Into the melting pot The Economist 2014-02-08 The rapid rise of mixed-race Britain is changing neighbourhoods\u2014and perplexing the authorities ZADIE SMITH, a novelist born to a black Jamaican mother and a white British father, recently recalled that when she was growing up in Willesden Green, a London district with a large immigrant population, \u201cnothing could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,8,394,10],"tags":[16946,16945,13077,13083,6366],"class_list":["post-35758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-uk","tag-anthony-heath","tag-raya-muttarak","tag-rob-ford","tag-shamit-saggar","tag-the-economist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}