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5 - Does a recognition of mixed race move us toward post-race?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2014

By
Miri Song
Edited by
Karim Murji  and
John Solomos
Miri Song
Affiliation:
University of Kent
Karim Murji
Affiliation:
The Open University, Milton Keynes
John Solomos
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Summary

Back in 1997, the Guardian G2 headline proclaimed, ‘beige britain: a new race is growing up. it’s not black, it’s not white and it’s not yet officially recognised. welcome to the mixed-race future’ (Younge 1997). More than 15 years later, there is growing evidence not only that mixed people are officially recognised (e.g., in terms of census categories and in many other manifestations of officialdom) but also that mixed people (and especially celebrities) often feature prominently in various forms of media and popular culture. Inevitably, the election of the current U.S. president, Barack Obama, has also generated huge amounts of debate about what his rise to power signals in terms of contemporary attitudes and social mores concerning race and ‘mixed race’. Contemporary multiethnic Britain is now steeped in images and references to mixing and ‘cultures of conviviality’ (Back 1996; Gilroy 2004; Solomos and Back 1996).

Despite this relative ‘normalisation’ of mixedness, in a contemporary context in which cultural hybridity and ‘superdiversity’ are increasingly evident in multiethnic metropolitan contexts, societal anxieties about mixing and the transgression of racial boundaries remain and are manifest in various policy debates. For instance, in a speech from 2006, Trevor Phillips, the head of the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, talked about mixed people being potentially disadvantaged and vulnerable to ‘identity stripping’, as a result of them growing up ‘marooned between [disparate] communities’.

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Type
Chapter
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Theories of Race and Ethnicity
Contemporary Debates and Perspectives
 , pp. 74 - 93
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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