Mixed-Race in the US and UK

Comparing the Past, Present, and Future

Jennifer Patrice Sims, Chinelo L. Njaka

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781787695566, 9781787695542
• eBook ISBN: 9781787695559
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2020 Mid-South Sociological Association Stanford M. Lyman Distinguished Book Award.

Contributing to an emerging literature on mixed-race people in the United States and United Kingdom, this book draws on racial formation theory and the performativity (i.e. "doing") of race to explore the social construction of mixedness on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

In addition to macro- and micro-level theoretical frameworks, the authors use comparative and relational analytical approaches to reveal similarities and differences between the two nations, explaining them in terms of both common historical roots as well as ongoing contemporary interrelationships.

Focusing on the census, racial identity, civil society, and everyday experiences at the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality, Mixed-Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future offers academics and students an intriguing look into how mixed-race is constructed and experienced within these two nations. A final in-depth discussion on the authors' research methodologies makes the book a useful resource on the processes, challenges, and benefits of conducting qualitative research in two nations.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Past, Present, and Future of Mixed-Race People in the United States and United Kingdom

So, can I ask, where are you from?

Yeah, the United States.

Oh yeah? Whereabouts?

A state called Tennessee. It’s in the south.

And your parents too?

My dad yes. My mom is from another southern state, South Carolina.

Hmm … were they born there?

Um, yes ….

Ten years ago, London South Bank University and London School of Economics jointly hosted a series of one-day workshops on mixed-race scholarship in the UK. The above exchange took place between a UK-based attendee and the first author, who was a US PhD student at the time. It would take another couple of trips across the pond before the underlying meaning and theoretical significance of “Where are you from?” became clear to her.

Like its US counterpart “What are you,” a question with which the first author was all too familiar, the UK query “Where are you from?” is a racialised question. The workshop attendee no more wanted to know the home state of the first author’s parents than people in the US wanted answers such as “a human being” when they asked “What are you?” In both cases, the question seeks a racial answer. “I’m mixed-race,” “I’m Black,” “I’m from Birmingham but my mum is from India and dad is from Scotland” are the types of responses askers are seeking.

Scientists know that races are not biologically predetermined subdivisions of humans but are instead socially constructed groupings.¹ Part of racialised social construction happens at the structural level in the prominence of race in laws, policies, and other types of legislative and political practices and thought. In other words, it is “institutional” in quality.

Another part of racial groups’ social construction is at the micro-levels of interaction and symbolism. Regarding the latter, for example, race being socially constructed means that collective ideas have developed about what members of different races “look like.”² Ideas of race-specific physical features abound: Blacks have wide noses, Whites have light skin, Native Americans have high cheek bones, and East Asians have almond-shaped eyes. How, then, does one racially classify a PhD student who has a wide nose, light skin, and almond shaped eyes?

Even when innocently intended, questions such as “What are you?” reveal the observer’s racialised gaze,³ awareness of ambiguity,⁴ and sense of discomfort with a momentary crisis of racial meaning.⁵ The different linguist manners and rhetorical strategies used to ask about race within the US and UK, despite both having a dominant colourblind ideology,⁶ underscores how race is differentially constructed in the two nations. Their different ways of defining mixed-race on their respective censuses further reveals differential zeitgeists. And yet, whilst the available tick-boxes and the phrasing of questions greatly differ, feelings towards identity, everyday experiences, and relationships with friends and family are somewhat similar. This indicates both a broader globalisation of mixedness⁷ as well as a specific transatlanticity of mixedness.⁸

The Simultaneous Emergence of Critical Mixed Race Studies in the US and UK

Over the past 30 years, social scientists and activists in the US and UK have sought to bring to light the uniquely racialised experiences of mixed-race people. Numerous contemporary mixed-race anthologies exploring identity and various lived experiences stemming from this racialised category were published in the 1990s and early 2000s.⁹ From personal identity, to socialisation, to the processes by which “mixed-race” became self-enumerable on the censuses, this era of mixed-race scholarship in the US and UK has comprised and shaped the majority of English language work in the global canon. In contrast to earlier writings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that pathologised racialised mixture,¹⁰ contemporary work has frequently attempted both implicitly and explicitly to construct an alternative, “positive” discourse that celebrates and empowers this “new demographic.” At the same time – and seemingly in tension – some of this research has simultaneously highlighted areas of need and support “specific” for the population.¹¹

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is a relatively recent label coined to describe the global canon of interdisciplinary research focussing on racialised mixedness.¹² Formerly known as Mixed Race Studies, Daniel et al. (2014) charted the “critical turn” mixed-race scholarship has taken over the past 35 years as scholars began to incorporate race-critical theories which prioritise “race” as a subject for social inquiry around racialised disparities.¹³ Though some scholars have argued that in practice the field is not very critical in their understandings and analyses of mixedness,¹⁴ CMRS is now the institutionalised name of the field in both the US and UK.¹⁵

As a critical and international field, cross-cultural research has been a mainstay within CMRS. King-O’Riain et al.’s Global Mixed Race (2014) and Edwards et al.’s International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing (2012), for example, both examine mixed-race populations in multiple nations.¹⁶ There is also a rich scholarship specifically examining racial mixing and (mixed-)race construction, experiences, and identity in Brazil,¹⁷ South Africa,¹⁸ Canada,¹⁹ and Puerto Rico and various Latin American countries.²⁰

This book joins a nascent literature focussing on mixed-race experiences in the US and UK.²¹ These two nations are often said to have a “special relationship”²² due to (common perceptions of) their shared history, language, and values; and thus they are beneficial for a study of mixedness for several reasons. Firstly, from historic mixed-race figures such as Dido Elizabeth Belle and Sally Hemmings to contemporaries such as Barack Obama, Naomi Osaka, Meghan Markle, Lewis Hamilton, Keanu Reeves, Naomi Scott, Jason Momoa, and Daniel Holtzclaw, mixed-race people have existed, prominently, in both the US and UK for centuries. Relatedly, at 2.9 per cent and 2.2 per cent of the nations’ populations,²³ respectively, the percentage of mixed-race people in the US and UK is comparable.

Secondly, the nations’ related but different histories offer a unique perspective on the historical rootedness of contemporary racial understandings. For instance, the importance of African enslavement in the early modern period for the development of ideas about race is shared across the Atlantic. However, the classification of people with any discernible African ancestry as Black, that is, the “one-drop” rule of hypodescent, was institutionalised in the US but not the UK, leading to differential perceptions of Black mixed-race people in the two nations. On the other hand, the two nations had different relationships with the same Asian countries. Early immigration of Indians like Bhagat Singh Thind to the mainland US versus UK overseas colonisation of the subcontinent followed by only recent immigration of Indians to the British Isles contributes to observed differences regarding contemporary racialisation of (mixed-race) Asians. In short, the outgrowth of historic similarities and differences can be seen in the current constructions of mixedness in the nations. General knowledge of these events and on-going cultural exchange also underscore how ideas about race in one nation have and continue to influence ideas about race in the other.

Theoretical Frameworks

This book uses both macro- and micro-level theoretical frameworks as well as both comparative and relational analytical frameworks. According to Omi and Winant’s (1994, 2002) racial formation theory, “racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” over time and space by a combination of social, historical, and political processes.²⁴ Racial formation theory provides a useful framework through which to investigate the particulars of racialisation processes that “locate the role of race in structuring broader social formations.”²⁵ Omi and Winant view race as a social construct, though not one that is merely an “ideological illusion” that influences other forms of social stratification. Race has a long, salient, and pervasive history that is significant to all social relations.²⁶ At the same time, race is viewed as socially and politically transient; the meanings and logistics of it are never fully fixed. It is an “unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.”²⁷ Ultimately, racial formation theory views race as a key category of social differentiation and stratification and as a shifting concept that warrants investigation and understanding.²⁸

In racial formation theory, the concept of race in a given socio-historical context is understood to be constructed through both structural and cultural elements within societies. By acknowledging both of these elements in racial formation, there is room for smaller-scale – and even personal – experiences to be taken into account when examining how race functions, affects, and shapes societies alongside the larger and perhaps more wid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1. Introduction: The Past, Present, and Future of Mixed-Race People in the United States and United Kingdom
• Chapter 2. Creating Mixed-Race: The Census in the US and the UK
• Chapter 3. Black, British Asian, Mixed-Race, or Jedi: Mixed-Race Identity in the US and UK
• Chapter 4. Mixed-Race Civil Society: Racial Paradigms and Mixed-Race (Re)production in the US and UK
• Chapter 5. “Sometimes It’s the First Thing People Ask”: Daily Experiences of Mixedness in the US and UK
• Chapter 6. “Yes, Girl, Yes. I Want Babies”: Mixed-Race Families Generation After Generation
• Chapter 7. Queering Critical Mixed Race Studies
• Chapter 8. Conclusion: Creating and Comparing a Mixed-Race Future
• Methodological Appendix
• References
• Index