‘Mixed Britannia’ – research by LSBU’s Dr Caballero informs BBC series

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2011-10-06 22:19Z by Steven

‘Mixed Britannia’ – research by LSBU’s Dr Caballero informs BBC series

London South Bank University
2011-10-05

Research conducted by Dr Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow in London South Bank University’s Families and Social Capital Research Group, has formed the foundations of a BBC2 series starting on Thursday 6 October.

Dr Caballero was an academic consultant for the three-part series ‘Mixed Britannia‘, which is presented by George Alagiah. This is part of a season of BBC programmes which explores what it means to be part of Britain’s mixed-race community.

Dr Caballero is interviewed for the final programme in the series which will air on Thursday 20 October…

…Dr Chamion Caballero says: “Despite there being a long presence of mixed race people and couples in Britain, there is still a tendency to herald their presence as part of a new multicultural phenomenon which has been dubbed the rise of ‘Beige or Brown Britain’. Yet such groups have a long history in Britain…

Read the entire article (and view a family portrait circa, 1916) here.  Find out more about the research here.

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Mixed race Britain: charting the social history

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2011-10-05 02:23Z by Steven

Mixed race Britain: charting the social history

The Guardian
2011-10-04

Laura Smith

While mixed race is one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the UK, there is nothing new in people from different cultures getting together

Olive was just 15 when she met the man who was to become her husband. It was 1930s Cardiff and the trainee nurse had become lost on her way home from the cinema to the Royal Infirmary. “I stopped and asked this boy the way to Queen Street. And we started talking and I think we fell in love there and then.”

The “boy” Olive met on the street that night was Ali Salaman, a young Yemeni working as a chef in his own restaurant, the Cairo Café, a popular hang-out in the city’s Tiger Bay neighbourhood. Despite being told by her priest that she was marrying a heathen, the Methodist teenager married Ali Salaman when she was 16 and they went on to have 10 children.

With mixed race now measured in the national census and one of the fastest growing ethnic groups, it is often viewed as a contemporary phenomenon. But Chamion Caballero, senior research fellow at London South Bank University’s Weeks centre, says: “There is a long history of racial mixing in the UK that people don’t talk about.”

Caballero has co-authored as yet unpublished research with Peter Aspinall, reader in population health at the University of Kent, that puts contemporary mixing into perspective.

It demonstrates that unions between white British women and men from immigrant communities were commonplace in areas where they were thrown together in the 1920s, 30s and 40s: from South Shields and Liverpool’s Toxteth to Cardiff’s Tiger Bay and London’s Docklands. The Era of Moral Condemnation: Mixed Race People in Britain, 1920-1950, shows that although they faced prejudice from some, mixed race families created new communities in which those from different backgrounds swapped cultural traditions. It also explores how official perceptions of mixed race families contrasted with the way people experienced it…

…Aspinall says the dominance of eugenics during this period was central to such attitudes. “If you look at the aims of the British Eugenics Society in the 1930s there was this explicit statement about the dangers of what they called race crossing,” he says. Marie Stopes, then a prominent eugenicist, advocated that all “half castes” should be “sterilised at birth”. Connie Hoe, the daughter of a Chinese father and white mother, was one of dozens of mixed race children who were experimented on by the eugenics society to test the relationship between physical appearance and intellect…

Read the entire article here.

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New book highlights the needs of Mixed Parentage children

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2009-11-14 20:41Z by Steven

New book highlights the needs of Mixed Parentage children

London South Bank University
News
2005-06-02

Dr Toyin Okitikpi with his challenging new book [Working with Children of Mixed Parentage]

Proportionately a higher percentage of mixed parentage children end up in care and in Britain we only statistically classify mixed parentage for children where one parent is black and the other white. The new book argues this totally misses the children who for example may be of Asian Chinese descent and when it comes to documents such as the National Census the best we can do is offer them the classification of ‘other’ and ask them to specify.

Toyin explains that there are problems with this form of pigeon holing. He explains, “We are expecting these children to be forced into one classification or another and there is confusion about the children’s identity and their sense of self”…

Read the entire article here.

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