{"id":38169,"date":"2014-11-09T18:34:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-09T18:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38169"},"modified":"2014-11-09T20:49:19","modified_gmt":"2014-11-09T20:49:19","slug":"mixed-race-in-the-uk-am-i-the-future-face-of-this-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38169","title":{"rendered":"Mixed race in the UK: am I the future face of this country?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mixed race in the UK: am I the future face of this country?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Telegraph<\/a>
\nLondon, United Kingdom
\n2014-11-08<\/p>\n

Laura Smith<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

With \u2018mixed race\u2019 now the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the country, prejudice should be a thing of the past \u2013 but as one writer reveals, we’ve still got a long way to go<\/em><\/p>\n

Where I grew up, a mixed-race family was something of an anomaly. Families, according to our neighbours \u2013 and the pictures on cereal boxes, board games and holiday brochures \u2013 meant a white mother and a white father and two children, preferably a boy and a girl, ideally blonde. The father went to work in a suit; the mother stayed home and sang along to Radio 1<\/a> while doing the housework.<\/p>\n

My family wasn\u2019t like that. My mother was from Guyana<\/a> and wore her hair in a short Afro. She liked jumpsuits and jewellery and, shockingly, worked full-time. My father was from Scotland and wore embarrassing checked jackets from the 1960s (he was in his forties when my brother and I were born). Neither had heard of Radio 1.<\/p>\n

My childhood memories of growing up in a mainly white, expensively heeled north London suburb include the following…<\/p>\n

…Reaction to this social change has been contradictory, and peppered with hyperbole. On the one hand, the rise of \u201cbeige Britain\u201d is eulogised as evidence of an open, tolerant country that\u2019s moved beyond outdated notions of race and racism. It has become fashionable to shrug and say, \u201cWell, we\u2019ll all be brown soon.\u201d On the other, it is not unusual to see alarmist articles about white people becoming the minority (two recent stories predicting that so-called \u201cindigenous white children\u201d would be \u201coutnumbered\u201d in state schools by 2037 were illustrated with images of mixed children), while in the black press there are reports about the disappearance of the Caribbean presence as increasing numbers \u201cmarry out\u201d…<\/p>\n

…Negative ideas around racial mixing have a long history. In Britain, concern about interracial unions reached a peak in the first half of the 20th century, when mixed neighbourhoods such as Toxteth<\/a> and Tiger Bay<\/a> were portrayed as immoral and dangerous, mixed children as tragic outcasts. Marie Stopes<\/a>, then a prominent eugenicist<\/a>, called for all \u201chalf-castes<\/a>\u201d to be \u201csterilised at birth\u201d. Caballero<\/a> says this notion of mixed people as divided and confused \u2013 the \u201cmarginal man<\/a>\u201d of early social science \u2013 remains. \u201cWhen I started in this area I got sick of reading about how we were all psychologically traumatised and about all these broken relationships when my own parents have been together for 30 years,\u201d she says…<\/p>\n

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

Mixed race in the UK: am I the future face of this country? The Telegraph London, United Kingdom 2014-11-08 Laura Smith With \u2018mixed race\u2019 now the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the country, prejudice should be a thing of the past \u2013 but as one writer reveals, we’ve still got a long way to go Where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,414,8,394,10],"tags":[57,62,3669,7738],"class_list":["post-38169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-family","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-uk","tag-bradley-lincoln","tag-chamion-caballero","tag-laura-smith","tag-the-telegraph"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38169","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=38169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}