Making Mixed Race by Karis Campion

Author:Karis Campion [Campion, Karis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781000482621
Google: yzlJEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-23T05:28:42+00:00

In this excerpt mixedness becomes a metaphor for multiculture. The spectre of the postracial looms large beneath Nicholas’ claims that his mixedness might extend him the ability to be devoid of prejudice and connect with all people, regardless of their ‘culture’ or ‘background’. The excerpt demonstrates how mixed-race subjects can, at times, occupy the ‘moral high ground’ by offering ‘skills assessments of themselves as “bridge builders” or “peace makers” in situations of prevalent race thinking’ (Olumide, 2002: 9). In his account, Nicholas perceives of his mixedness as a ‘gift’ which allows him ‘to see behind the veil of racial ideology [and reject] its premises and its divisive effects’ (Morning, 2005: 4). Reminiscent of Nicholas’ comments, Robert from the 70s-born cohort felt that being mixed-race made him ‘more open minded … about other people and other cultures’. Another common opinion across the cohorts was that having a mixed-race identity allowed one to enjoy ‘the best of both worlds’.

These positive self-perceptions about mixed-race subjectivities speak back to historical pathologies that represented mixed-race people in a continuous state of conflict due to their supposed competing racial identities (Stonequist, 1937; Christian, 2008). Whilst these (re)framings of mixed-race do challenge harmful stereotypes, they also risk reproducing mixed-race subjects as sites of racial harmony. In doing so, mixed-race can become a smokescreen that obscures our racist realities, if it is persistently framed through ‘raceless’ language. Further, by tagging mixedness to characteristics or qualities that are supposedly ‘inherent’, it becomes re-inscribed with biological meaning and is essentialised once more but this time through problematic notions of ‘hybrid vigour’ rather than degeneracy (Lewis, 2010: 136). We can see how this can take shape in Patricia’s (42) comment; ‘mixedies rule the world because we’re the most beautiful people in the world, we can’t help it’. Patricia’s perception that mixed-race people possess a particular skill set that can effectively lead the way is in keeping with many social representations of mixed-race in the contemporary moment as; ‘Britain’s largest ethnic minority’,29 ‘the twenty-first century family’, ‘attractive [and] disproportionately successful’ (Aspinall, 2015: 1070, 1073, 1074).

Patricia’s suggestion that beauty is a naturally occurring trait in mixed-race people is also of particular interest. Again, it speaks to a common mixed-race trope – what Sims (2012: 64) aptly calls, the Biracial Beauty Stereotype. In the contemporary moment, it even appears that the so-called mixed-race aesthetic is beginning to sit ‘atop the hierarchy’, overtaking whiteness as the beauty ideal (ibid.: 64). Within contemporary social media culture, the desire to achieve a distinctly Black mixed-race aesthetic is made explicitly clear in a phenomenon termed ‘blackfishing’. A term that describes how some white women manipulate their physical features such as skin tone, hair, and lips to align with a Black and particularly mixed-race aesthetic (Dabiri, 2018). Some of the participants seemed to internalise stereotypes about mixedness as a beauty ideal and were privy to reproducing the idea that mixed-race people are inherently attractive (Rockquemore and Arend, 2002; Sims, 2012; Reece, 2016). For participants like 60s-born Olivia, she felt

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