Making Mixed Race

A Study of Time, Place and Identity

Karis Campion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367462918
• eBook ISBN: 9781000482621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

By examining Black mixed-race identities in the city through a series of historical vantage points, Making Mixed Race provides in-depth insights into the geographical and historical contexts that shape the possibilities and constraints for identifications.

Whilst popular representations of mixed-race often conceptualise it as a contemporary phenomenon and are couched in discourses of futurity, this book dislodges it from the current moment to explore its emergence as a racialised category, and personal identity, over time. In addition to tracing the temporality of mixed-race, the contributions show the utility of place as an analytical tool for mixed-race studies. The conceptual framework for the book – place, time, and personal identity – offers a timely intervention to the scholarship that encourages us to look outside of individual subjectivities and critically examine the structural contexts that shape Black mixed-race lives.

The book centres around the life histories of 37 people of Mixed White and Black Caribbean heritage born between 1959 and 1994, in Britain's second-largest city, Birmingham. The intimate life portraits of mixed identity reveal how colourism, family, school, gender, whiteness, racism, and resistance, have been experienced against the backdrop of post-war immigration, Thatcherism, the ascendency of Black diasporic youth cultures, and contemporary post-race discourses. It will be of interest to researchers, postgraduate and undergraduate students who work on (mixed) race and ethnicity studies in academic areas including geographies of race, youth identities/cultures, gender, colonial legacies, intersectionality, racism, and colourism.

Chapter 1

Mixed-race through place and time

DOI: 10.4324/9781003027935-1

Introduction

It was the first Saturday after Malcolm’s 14th birthday – a dull autumn day in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, 1987. It wasn’t too cold out but there was a slight chill in the air. He sat up in his bed, headphones on, thumping his new Public Enemy album. Bopping his head, eyes closed, he heard the muffled sound of his mom’s voice downstairs who’d just returned from her morning shift. ‘Malcolm … Malcolm!’ It was time to be dragged around Woolworths, he thought. Rolling his eyes, he hurried down the stairs, heavy footed, in to the front room. Already in his Public Enemy t-shirt, he put on his green beret, pulled on his black glove and scurried around looking for his clock necklace and leather African medallion. His mom hurried him along, ‘come on now, I haven’t got all day’. Off they went on their weekly shop, stopping to chat with Elaine next door within moments, and then Andrea just a few doors down. It’s okay, Malcolm thought, this shouldn’t take long, and then I can go play football at the bottom of the road in the garages with Paul and Jerome.

Malcolm was born in the mid-1970s, to a white mother and Black Caribbean father. He explained, ‘I’m one of those typical 70s babies who you know … that mix up of parentage, it was quite common’. His mother had him young, without support from her family or his father. He was her eldest child. Malcolm remembers, ‘she fed all of us by cleaning people’s shit basically’. In many ways, they were a typical working-class family of multi-ethnic Sparkbrook, in the late 1980s. A neighbourhood that was the focal point of seminal studies of ‘race-relations’ in Britain, just twenty years earlier. Malcolm’s story is one of thirty-seven that I explore in the pages of this book, which examines Black mixed-race identities through time. Contemporary representations of mixedness so often configure it as an emergent, new phenomenon and are couched in discourses of futurity. In the book, I dislodge mixed-race from the current moment to explore its emergence as a social and ethnic category over time. At its foundation, this is a social generational study that shows how Black mixed-race identities intersect with, and diverge from, wider discourses of (mixed) race in Britain. The stories in the book are all set in the thick material context of the UK’s second largest city, Birmingham, over different periods of time. Just like Malcolm, many of the participants experienced their identities through, and within, the flourishing Black diasporic cultures of their youth. From Rastafari and roots reggae music in the 1970s, to the ascendency of African American hip-hop in the 1980s, I locate the participants within their wider social and political contexts and some of the dominant countercultures of their coming-of-age years. In doing so, I highlight the structural conditions they have had to negotiate as Black mixed-race British ‘Brummies’¹ and show how their identities are always in the making and on the move.

As I will go on to argue, the personal politics of Black mixed-race identities are inextricably constituted by period and place, and in my tracing of the socio-historical contexts that form the backdrop to the participants’ lives, I keep in mind their geographical specificities. In a sense, this study is as much about Black mixed-race experiences of identity as it is about the place in which these identifications have been played out, Birmingham. Through my conceptual framework for the book, place, time, and identity, I begin my analysis of Black mixed-race identities ‘outside’ of the personal. By centring place as an analytical framework, the book tries to work outside of the ‘methodological comfort zones’ that have been said to shape the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies historically (Rockquemore et al., 2009: 26). Such critiques pertaining to method have been levelled at some of the mixed-race literature that emerged circa 1990, dubbed by some as the ‘new’ or ‘second wave’ of scholarship (Caballero, 2005). These approaches, it has been argued, risk conceptualising ‘mixedness through the articulation of individualism’ (Caballero, 2005: 95, 96; Small, 2001; Christian, 2000; Sexton, 2008) because of their tendency to over-rely on ‘small scale interview studies’ that are ‘actor-centred’ and produce ‘present-tense’ accounts of individual mixed-race biographies (Rockquemore et al., 2009: 20; Ifekwunigwe, 2004: 137; Mahtani, 2014: 243). In the book, I try to take heed of some of these critiques, dubbed by some as constituting a ‘third wave’ of literature (Caballero, 2005), or the age of critique (Ifekwunigwe, 2004). As Mahtani (2014: 46, 255) has warned, ‘ahistorical’ accounts of mixedness might surmount to an act of ‘strategic forgetting’ of our racialised histories and obscure how their ongoing legacies inform contemporary formations of (mixed) race.

To do this analysis, I delve into the personal life histories of thirty-seven people of Mixed White and Black Caribbean backgrounds based in Birmingham, UK. The oldest participant was born in 1959, just over a decade after the SS Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, Essex in June 1948, marking ‘the beginning of large-scale West Indian immigration to Britain’ that would change the country’s ‘social landscape forever’ (Henry, 2012: 371). The youngest was born in 1994, just a few years before Tony Blair’s landslide victory for Labour, in the so-called era of multicultural, multiracial, ‘cool Britannia’ (Arday, 2019). I group the participants into three birth cohorts, 1959–1969, 1970–1979, 1980–1994. From here on I refer to them as the 60s-born, 70s-born, and 80s-born cohorts. The numbers in each group are ten, eleven, and sixteen, respectively. By using a life history approach in the interviews, disaggregating the participants’ accounts along social generation and asking them to speak from their spatial, as well as racial locations, the book tries to expand the utility of the qualitative interview as a method.

The window of time between the youngest and the oldest participants’ years of birth, 1959–1994, is a useful vantage point from which to analyse mixed-race, precisely because of its relative absence in the public imagination and academic studies for a substantial part of this period. Whilst many of the early moral panics, debates, and academic works that pathologised racial mixing in Britain can be located around the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s² (Bland, 2007; Christian, 2008; Caballero and Aspinall, 2018; Caballero, 2019), there was a relative lull in research specifically focused on mixedness until the 1990s and early 2000s. This book tries to fill some of this gap in knowledge, by centring a large part of the analysis on Black mixed-race people’s coming-of-age stories from the 1960s to 1980s and shows how these were experienced within the Afrocentric Black expressive cultures of this tumultuous period of state-sanctioned racism, Black internationalist liberation movements, anti-imperialist struggles, and domestic uprisings.

The transatlantic body of academic work that emerged circa 1990 posed a challenge to the earlier pathological representations of mixed-race produced during the early-to-mid-twentieth century. Much of the scholarship was united in its reframing of mixedness as a positive, legitimate ethnic identity (Spickard, 1989; Root, 1992; Tizard and Phoenix, 1993; Zack, 1993; Ifekwunigwe, 1999; Alibhai-Brown, 2001; Parker and Song, 2001; Olumide, 2002; Ali, 2003). Existing alongside and in tandem with this growing interest in mixedness in academia was the steady increase in international recognitions of mixed-race as a viable ethnic category and identification. Between 1995 and 2004, mixed populations were enumerated on almost 140 censuses globally (Morning, 2014: 2). In the UK, a ‘Mixed’ category was included on the census for the first time in 2001 (Aspinall, 2003, 2017; Bradford, 2006). At that time, respondents were given the option to choose from four predetermined ‘mixed’ categories – Mixed White and Black Caribbean, Mixed White and Black African, Mixed White and Asian, and Mixed Other (Aspinall, 2003; Thompson, 2010, 2012; Aspinall and Song, 2014).

Out of those four categories, all of the thirty-seven participants in this study have a Mixed White and Black Caribbean background, although it is not a given that they all identify as such on official forms. Whatever the case, these ethnic descriptors conceal the diversity of the group. Although most traced their Caribbean heritage to Jamaica, the participants had family origins across the archipelago, including St Vincent and the Grenadines, St Kitts and Nevis, and Barbados. The white parents were mostly English, but a few participants had a white Irish parent. For that small group of participants, migration stories had shaped both sides of their family histories, albeit in quite distinct ways. All of the participants had a white mother and Black Caribbean father, except one.³ Due to the high representation of participants from working-class backgrounds⁴ and because the sample was relatively evenly split by gender – with nineteen women and eighteen men participating – this allowed for comparative intersectional analyses of gender, class, and (mixed) race. Given that samples in mixed-race research tend to comprise mostly middle-class participants and are skewed towards women, this is an important intervention (Tizard and Phoenix, 1993; Wilson, 1987; Song and Aspinall, 2012; Song, 2010b; Edwards et al., 2010; Caballero et al., 2008a). All of the participants came of age in Birmingham and were born in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Mixed-race through place and time
• 2 Introducing Birmingham
• 3 The making of mixed-race in place
• 4 From bun down Babylon to melting pot Britain: the manifestations of mixed-race over time
• 5 Mixed-race privilege and precarious positionalities: the personal politics of identity
• 6 The making of mixed-race families: past, present, and future
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index