Advocates of migration and ethnic diversity might consider shifting from the celebration of accelerating diversity, to investigate the reassuring power of this integrationist story
-
Being mixed race in Britain has a different dynamic from in the United States. In the US, it is more firmly a minority identity – and three-quarters of those of mixed ethnic descent marry somebody from a minority group. By contrast, in Britain, three-quarters of marriages of those of mixed ethnicity are to somebody white, often making ethnic identity a matter of choice more than ascription by the second and third generation.
This voluntary assimilationist trend among white European and Jewish migrants is long familiar: the white Irish group has, by some distance, the oldest demographic profile, in large part because the British-born children and grandchildren of Irish migrants mostly identity as white British, rather than Irish (despite a “tick the Irish box” census campaign in 2011 aimed at them). It has seemed more counter-intuitive that something similar may happen among ethnic minority populations too, but the British Caribbean population has done precisely this, dividing across the black, mixed and white British categories over three generations.
Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, has suggested that advocates of migration and ethnic diversity might consider shifting from the celebration of accelerating diversity – telling those who are anxious about change that it will speed up ever faster – to investigate the reassuring power of this integrationist story instead.
Rejecting simplistic multiculturalisms
The rise of mixed-race Britain puts extra pressure on the type of ‘community of communities’ multiculturalism which was, for example, set out in the influential but contested Parekh Report into the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain from 1998. This saw Britain as “both a community of citizens and a community of communities”, arguing that this could generate “conflicting requirements” between being both a liberal and a multicultural society. The practice of British multiculturalism in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s relied significantly on a conflation of ethnic minorities with faith communities – which had difficult implications for the share of women and younger people in particular.
I found that a ‘community of communities’ multiculturalism risked offering a too neat and tidy a model of inter-ethnic federation, which felt both unfeasible in practice and unattractive in principle
-
As a mixed-race Englishman of Indian and Irish parents, who had become a lapsed Catholic agnostic by the time I left university, I found that a ‘community of communities’ multiculturalism risked offering a too neat and tidy a model of inter-ethnic federation, which felt both unfeasible in practice and somewhat unattractive in principle.
Mixed-race Britain has a growing number of role models – strikingly among 20- and 30-somethings in sport and popular culture, from Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton to singer-songwriter Zayn Malik – but these personalities had the good fortune not to have to entertain claims to leadership of the mixed-race community. This group was always rather too mixed for that to work.
It would be a mistake to believe that a growing mixed-race population means that the ‘bridgers’ must inevitably prevail
-
This difficulty of a group-based multiculturalism in dealing with the rising mixed-race population may illuminate a way out of its much bigger difficulty: how it sees the role of the ethnic majority. A group-based multiculturalism is hoist with its own petard if the majority community feels that the natural response is to assert its own group-based ethnic interests.
With some honourable exceptions, such as Tariq Modood’s emphasis on the value of national identity, multicultural thinkers were often slow to grapple with this central challenge: that if a politics of recognition matters to minorities, it is surely going to matter to majorities too. Unless a politics of racial polarisation is attractive, it is important to ensure that the shared identities that underpin citizenship are meaningful across majority and minority groups.
Polarise or depolarise?
One of the big questions of our time might be: polarise or depolarise? It is certainly harder to be mixed race in an atmosphere of sharp racial polarisation, where the competing grievances of minorities and majorities create increasing pressure to ‘pick a side’.
But it would be a mistake to believe that a growing mixed-race population means that the ‘bridgers’ must inevitably prevail. US politics and society in the age of Obama and Trump offer a cautionary warning: if Obama made an eloquent case for bridging – both white and minority America may turn out to have a stronger appetite for polarising the question of race in America.
Many people of mixed ethnicity are somewhat more likely to feel they might have some skin in the game on both sides of that question. But it would surely put too much pressure on even a fast-growing minority group to provide the answers: the future of race relations surely depends on what everybody else wants too. The success of a multi-ethnic society may depend on whether it is possible to construct a robust inter-ethnic consensus on what fairness demands, or whether disagreements about opportunity and prejudice drive a politics of mutual grievance and incomprehension.
The rise of mixed-race Britain will change the way we think about race. What it may also illuminate is that demography is rarely destiny in either society or politics: so much depends not only on what is driving social change, but also on how we choose to respond.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe