Mixed Race Studies

Understanding the Educational Needs of Mixed Heritage Pupils

University of Bristol
June 2004
ISBN: 1844782646
121 pages

Leon Tikly, Professor in Education and Deputy Director of Research
University of Bristol

Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Jo Haynes, Lecturer in Sociology
University of Bristol

John Hill
Birmingham LEA

in association with
Birmingham Local Education Authority

Introduction

In March 2003, a team from the University of Bristol working in association with Birmingham Local Education Authority (LEA) was commissioned by the DfES (Department for Education and Skills) to conduct research into the educational needs of mixed heritage pupils with specific reference to the barriers to achievement faced by White/Black Caribbean pupils. Qualitative research was carried out in fourteen schools in six LEAs (primary schools with more than 10% of mixed heritage pupils and secondary schools with more than 5% of mixed heritage pupils). Quantitative data from the DfES National Pupil Database are also reported.

Key findings

• The attainment of White/Black Caribbean pupils is below average, the attainment of White/Black African pupils is similar to average in primary schools and slightly below average in secondary schools and the attainment of White/Asian pupils is above average.
• The key barriers to achievement facing pupils of White/Black Caribbean origin are in many cases similar to those faced by pupils of Black Caribbean origin. They are more likely to come from socially disadvantaged backgrounds; are more likely to experience forms of institutionalised racism in the form of low teacher expectations; and, are more likely to be excluded from school.
• White/Black Caribbean pupils also face specific barriers to achievement. Low expectations of pupils by teachers often seem based on a stereotypical view of the fragmented home backgrounds and ‘confused’ identities of White/Black Caribbean pupils. These pupils often experience racism from teachers and from their White and Black peers targeted at their mixed heritage. This can lead to the adoption of what are perceived to be rebellious and challenging forms of behaviour.
• The barriers to achievement experienced by White/Black Caribbean pupils operate in a context where mixed heritage identities (including those of White/Black Caribbean, White/Black African and White/Asian pupils) are not recognised in the curriculum or in policies of schools and of LEAs. In the case of White/Black Caribbean pupils, their invisibility from policy makes it difficult for their underachievement to be challenged.
• In those schools where White/Black Caribbean pupils achieve relatively highly they often benefit from inclusion in policies targeted at Black Caribbean learners, with whom they share similar barriers to achievement and with whom they often identify.
• Even in these schools, however, the specific barriers to achievement faced by White/Black Caribbean learners are rarely explicitly addressed.

In our 2004 report from the DfES, our analysis indicated that 2.5% of the national school age population were identified as belonging to the overall ‘Mixed’ ethnic group, with large regional variations. The largest proportion of these pupils could be found in the Inner London area – they constituted 7.3% of school pupils. The smallest was in the North East – 0.7%.

Read the entire report here.

Parenting ‘mixed’ children: difference and belonging in mixed race and faith families

Joseph Rowntree Foundaton
2008-06-20

Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University 

Rosalind Edwards, Professor in Social Policy
Families and Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Shuby Puthussery, Senior Research Fellow
Family and Parenting Institute

Insights into parenting ‘mixed’ children.

More and more is known about the ‘mixed’ population of Britain – those brought up in families with different racial, ethnic and faith backgrounds. But less is known about their parents. Who are they and what are their experiences of bringing up their children?

This report aims to provide insights about parenting mixed children to inform debates about family life and professional strategies for support. Focusing on mothers and fathers living together, it:

• Investigates how parents from different racial, ethnic and/or faith backgrounds give their children a sense of belonging and identity.
• Examines parents’ approaches to cultural difference and how they pass on aspects of belonging and heritage across generations.
• Explores the opportunities, constraints, challenges and tensions in negotiating a sense of identity and heritage between parents.

Click here for the 4 page summary.
Click here for the 76 page full report.

Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of Race, Nation and Gender

Routledge an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
1999-01-14
240 pages
234×156 mm
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-17096-3

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

When the American golfer Tiger Woods proclaimed himself a “Caublinasian”, affirming his mixed Caucasian, Black, Native American and Asian ancestry, a storm of controversy was created.  This book is about people faced by the strain of belonging and not belonging within the narrow confines of the terms ‘Black’ or ‘White’.

This is a unique and radical study. It interweaves the stories of six women of mixed African/African Caribbean and white European heritage with an analysis of the concepts of hybridity and mixed race identity.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Prologue
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Cracking the Coconut:Resisting Popular Folk Discourses on “Race,” “Mixed Race” and Social Hierarchies
• 2. Returning(s):Relocating the Critical Feminist Auto- Ethnographer
• 3. Setting the Stage:Invoking the Griot(te)Traditions as Textual Strategies
• 4. Ruby
• 5. Similola
• 6. Akousa
• 7. Sarah
• 8. Bisi
• 9. Yemi
• 10. Let Blackness and Whiteness Wash Through: Competing Discourses on Bi-Racialization and the Compulsion of Genealogical Erasures
• Epilogue
• Select Bibiographies
• Index

Black, White or Mixed Race? Race and Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage, 2nd Edition

Routledge an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
2001-11-22
272 pages
ISBN: 978-0-415-25982-8 Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
Trim Size: 216 x 138

Ann Phoenix, Professor and Co-Director of the Thomas Coram Research Unit
University of London, Institute of Education

Barbara Tizard, Professor Emeritus
University of London, Institute of Education

The number of people in racially mixed relationships has grown steadily over the last thirty years, yet these people often feel stigmatised and unhappy about their identities.

The first edition of Black, White or Mixed Race? was a ground-breaking study: this revised edition uses new literature to consider what is now known about racialised identities and changes in the official use of ‘mixed’ categories. All new developments are placed in a historical framework and in the context of up-to-date literature on mixed parentage in Britain and the USA.

Based on research with young people from a range of social backgrounds the book examines their attitudes to black and white people; their identity; their cultural origins; their friendships; their experiences of racism. This was the first study to concentrate on adolescents of black and white parentage and it continues to provide unique insights into their identities. It is a valuable resource for all those concerned with social work and policy.

Table of Contents

1. Setting the Scene
2. People of Mixed Black and White Parentage in Britain: A Brief History
3. Identity and Mixed Parentage: Theory, Policy and Research
4. The ‘Transracial Adoption’/’same race’ Placement Debate
5. How the Research Was Carried Out
6. The Radicalised Identities of Young People of Mixed Parentage Today
7. Friendships and Allegiances
8. Experiencing Racism
9. Dealing with Racism
10. Some Parents’ Accounts
11. But What About the Children? An Overview, With Some Comments

Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues

University of Texas Press
2002
6 x 9 in.
324 pp., 4 photos, 1 chart
ISBN: 978-0-292-74348-9
Print-on-demand title

Edited by

Monika Kaup, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington, Seattle

Debra Rosenthal, Assistant Professor of English
John Carroll University

Over the last five centuries, the story of the Americas has been a story of the mixing of races and cultures. Not surprisingly, the issue of miscegenation, with its attendant fears and hopes, has been a pervasive theme in New World literature, as writers from Canada to Argentina confront the legacy of cultural hybridization and fusion.

This book takes up the challenge of transforming American literary and cultural studies into a comparative discipline by examining the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture and its opposite tendency, racial and cultural disjunction, in the literatures of the Americas. Editors Kaup and Rosenthal have brought together a distinguished set of scholars who compare the treatment of racial and cultural mixtures in literature from North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. From various angles, they remap the Americas as a multicultural and multiracial hemisphere, with a common history of colonialism, slavery, racism, and racial and cultural hybridity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Mixed-Blood Epistemologies
  1. Werner Sollors, Can Rabbits Have Interracial Sex?
  2. Doris Sommer, Who Can Tell? The Blanks in Villaverde
  3. Zita Nunes, Phantasmatic Brazil: Nella Larsen‘s Passing, American Literary Imagination, and Racial Utopianism
• II. Métissage and Counterdiscourse
  1. Françoise Lionnet, Narrating the Americas: Transcolonial Métissage and Maryse Condé‘s La Migration des coeurs
  2. Michèle Praeger, Créolité or Ambiguity?
• III. Indigenization, Miscegenation, and Nationalism
  1. Priscilla Archibald, Gender and Mestizaje in the Andes
  2. Debra J. Rosenthal, Race Mixture and the Representation of Indians in the U.S. and the Andes: Cumandá, Aves sin nido, The Last of the Mohicans, and Ramona
  3. Susan Gillman, The Squatter, the Don, and the Grandissimes in Our America
• IV. Hybrid Hybridity
  1. Rafael Pérez-Torres, Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice
  2. Monika Kaup, Constituting Hybridity as Hybrid: Métis Canadian and Mexican American Formations
• V. Sites of Memory in Mixed-Race Autobiography
  1. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Living on the River
  2. Louis Owens, The Syllogistic Mixedblood: How Roland Barthes Saved Me from the indians
• Coda: From Exoticism to Mixed-Blood Humanism
  1. Earl E. Fitz, From Blood to Culture: Miscegenation as Metaphor for the Americas
• Contributors
• Works Cited
• Index

Read the entire introduction here.

Specialist mixed-race training event

Mix-d: Professionals,

The Multiple Heritage Project is proud to present two specialist mixed-race training events for Black History Month 2009, in Manchester and London.

Are you a professional working with young people?
Want to really understand the complex issues around ‘mixed-race’?

If the answer is yes, then come and join us:

• Manchester: (on 2009-10-06 from 09:00Z to 12:00Z) – Lancashire Cricket Club
• London: (on 2009-10-21 from 09:00Z to 11:30Z) – North London Business Park

Who Should Attend?
Professionals working with young people, whether in education, criminal justice service, looking after care, youth work and foster care.

Aims of the day:

• Learn more about our work with young people across the country.
• What young people have to say on the subject.
• Six things to understand when developing positive racial literacy.
• Input from three leading specialists.
• Do’s and don’ts for developing student voice.
• Creating an action plan for your organisation.
• The ‘latest’ street terminology.
• Useful books and resources.
• Free DVD from our 1st National Youth Conference.

Key Speakers:
Bradley Lincoln, Dr. Chamion Caballero, Denise Williams

For more details visit: www.multipleheritage.co.uk

Mixed Heritage – Identity, Policy and Practice

Runnymede Trust
ISBN-10: 0-9548389-6-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-9548389-6-6
EAN: 9780954838966
40 pages
September 2007

Edited by Jessica Mai Sims

Although they are often invisible in debates on race and ethnicity, the 2001 census reveals that the ‘Mixed’ population is the third largest ethnic category in the UK, with predictions that it will become the single largest minority group recognised by the Census by the end of 2020.

Over the summer months we have developed our thinking on this area of study through a seminars, roundtables, and conferences by partnering with the CRE, CLG, and London South Bank’s Families and Social Capital Research Group. Through this partnership we have established the following series of activity that forms that basis for future work on mixed heritage, which seeks to challenge the prevalent understandings and assumptions of the people who are thought to comprise of this group.

Table of Contents

• Foreword – Rob Berkeley

1. Statistics: The Mixed Category in Census 2001 — Charlie Owen
2. The Diversity of ‘the’ Mixed Race Population in Britain — Miri Song
3. Gendering Mixed-Race, Deconstructing Mixedness — Suki Ali
4. Thai-British Families: Towards a Deeper Understanding of ‘Mixedness’ — Jessica Mai Sims
5. Meeting the Educational Needs of Mixed Heritage Pupils: Challenges for Policy and Practice — Leon Tikly
6. Mixed Heritage: Perspectives on Health and Welfare — Mark R. D. Johnson
7. Adoption and Fostering Issues: ‘Judgement of Solomon’ — Savita de Sousa & John Simmonds
8. ‘Mixed’ Families: Assumptions and New Approaches — Chamion Caballero
9. It’s Time for Foundation — Sharron Hall
10. I loathe the term ‘mixed race’… — Linda Bellos
11. People in Harmony — Jill Olumide

• Biographical Information on Contributors
• Bibliography

Read the entire document here.

Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’

Pluto Press an imprint of MacMillan
May 2001
5.5 x 8.25 inches, 208 pages, 4 figures
ISBN: 978-0-7453-1567-6
ISBN10: 0-7453-1567-4

Edited by

David Parker, Lecturer and Faculty of Social Sciences
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Nottingham

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

One of the fastest growing ethnic populations in many Western societies is that of people of mixed descent. However, when talking about multicultural societies or ‘mixed race’, the discussion usually focuses on people of black and white heritage. The contributors to this collection rectify this with a broad and pluralistic approach to the experiences of ‘mixed race’ people in Britain and the USA. The contributors argue that people of mixed descent reveal the arbitrary and contested logic of categorisation underpinning racial divisions. Falling outside the prevailing definitions of racialised identities, their histories and experiences illuminate the complexities of identity formation in the contemporary multicultural context.  The authors examine a range of issues.  These include gender; transracial and intercountry adoptions in Britain and the US; interracial partnering and marriage; ‘mixed race’ and family in the English-African diaspora; theorising of ‘mixed race’ that transcends the black/white binary and includes explorations of ‘mixtures’ among non-white minority groups; and the social and political evolution of multiracial panethnicity.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’ David Parker and Miri Song
1.  How Sociology Imagined Mixed Race—Frank Furedi
2.  Re-Membering ‘Race’: On Gender, ‘Mixed Race’, and Family in the English-African Diaspora—Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe
3.  Same Difference: Towards a More Unified Discourse in Mixed Race Theory—Minelle Mahtani and April Moreno
4.  The Subject is Mixed Race: The Boom in Biracial Biography—Paul Spickard
5.  Triples: The Social Evolution of a Multiracial Panethnicity: An Asian American Perspective

Raising Eurasia: Race, Class, and Age in French and British Colonies

Comparative Studies in Society and History
Volume 51, Issue 2 (April 2009)
pages 314-343
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417509000140

David M. Pomfret, Associate Professor
The University of Hong Kong

Sexual relationships between European men and indigenous women produced racially mixed offspring in all of Europe’s empires. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has shown how these persons of mixed race, seen as transgressing the interior frontiers of supposedly fixed categories of racial and juridical difference upon which colonizers’ prestige and authority rested, posed a challenge to the elaborate but fragile sets of subjective criteria by which “whiteness” was defined.  Scholars critiquing the traditional historiography of empire for its tendency to present colonial elites as homogeneous communities pursuing common interests have emphasized the repertoire of exclusionary tactics, constructed along lines of race, class, and gender, devised within European colonial communities in response to the presence of “mixed bloods.” This article aims to show that the presence of people of biracial heritage inspired collaborative as well as exclusionary responses in outposts of European empire during the late imperial era. It also illustrates how, with white prestige and authority at stake, age, age-related subcategories, and in particular childhood and adolescence, powerfully underpinned responses to the threat this group posed to the cultural reproduction of racialized identity.

Footnotes
Acknowledgments: Research for this article was generously supported by the Hong Kong Government Research Grants Council Competitive Earmarked Research Grant (HKU7455/05H).

Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture

Duke University Press
1998
272 pages
13 b&w photographs
Cloth ISBN: 0-8223-2105-X, ISBN13: 978-0-8223-2105-7
Paperback ISBN: 0-8223-2120-3, ISBN13 978-0-8223-2120-0

Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor, African and African American Studies
Duke University

Using black feminist theory and African American studies to read Victorian culture, Impossible Purities looks at the construction of “Englishness” as white, masculine, and pure and “Americanness” as black, feminine, and impure. Brody’s readings of Victorian novels, plays, paintings, and science fiction reveal the impossibility of purity and the inevitability of hybridity in representations of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and race. She amasses a considerable amount of evidence to show that Victorian culture was bound inextricably to various forms and figures of blackness.

Opening with a reading of Daniel Defoe’s “A True-Born Englishman,” which posits the mixed origins of English identity, Brody goes on to analyze mulattas typified by Rhoda Swartz in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, whose mixed-race status reveals the “unseemly origins of English imperial power.” Examining Victorian stage productions from blackface minstrel shows to performances of The Octoroon and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she explains how such productions depended upon feminized, “black” figures in order to reproduce Englishmen as masculine white subjects. She also discusses H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau in the context of debates about the “new woman,” slavery, and fears of the monstrous degeneration of English gentleman. Impossible Purities concludes with a discussion of Bram Stoker’s novella, “The Lair of the White Worm,” which brings together the book’s concerns with changing racial representations on both sides of the Atlantic.

This book will be of interest to scholars in Victorian studies, literary theory, African American studies, and cultural criticism.