Reimagining the Mixed Race Experience

The category ‘mixed race’ defines those whose biological parents have differing racial identities, or are categorised as such. Because racial categories are somewhat different across the globe, there are numerous terms that people use to define their mixed race identity.

In the West most of the discourse surrounding mixed race-ness focuses on those born to a White (those largely descended from Europeans) and Black (those largely descended from Africans), and when it doesn’t, the focus remains largely on those with one white parent. 

This pushes the experiences of children of other ‘admixtures’, for example Black-South Asian, or South Asian-Indigenous South American, to the margins of discourse.

In this ToR, we will be focusing on mixed race people living in the UK of Black heritage, in short, Black mixed race people exclusively, as a starting point, to contribute content that explores their identities as mixed race people, particularly in relation to how others/society/ the state categorise them, and their relationship to their blackness.

The aim is to complicate mainstream narratives of Blackness, to make known the different relationships Black people have to their Blackness, to move Blackness away from biological notions of race, to one centred around the experiences of a group of people under white supremacy. We want to expand what it means to be Black, confront the concept of ‘passing’, how colourism functions in the Black community, how non-black communities relate to Blackness and the experiences of growing up as a mixed race Black person in a non-black environment. 

We want to explore the deployment of mixed race-ness, whether in imaginings of the future, or as branding, advertisements, on social, and the effects of these on mixed race people.