On August 3rd, as I walked down the street I heard a shout. "Are you a half-caste?!" they cried. I stood in disbelief. They continued to ask for my identity "Are you a dirty half-caste?!" As if my ambiguous face made them confused whether I was one of them or not. Or, as if they could not decide what racial slur to call me. Turns out, this was an EDL white supremacist. While still used as a common phrase in many countries, in the UK it isn't typically used in common contemporary discourse. If you don't know, as no one has really used this slur since the 50's, 'half caste' is a derogatory term used to refer to individuals of multiracial descent to describe their 'impure' blood. White blood that has been diluted by any non-white ethnicity. This turned my attention to the way these EDL ‘rioters’ (aka terrorists) saw race and ethnicity. EDL racists and their perpetuation of Eugenics EDL stands for the English Defense League, an or
When I say words like "mixedness", "liminal", "betwixt" or "between", what comes to mind? From the 13th-15th June 2024, I had the privilege of attending/ presenting at the Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) conference at Ohio State University in the United States, where these words were at the epicenter of discussions within a community, movement, and academic capacity. As a 'mixed race' woman, it was a joy to be surrounded by a multitude of global and liminal identities throughout the day, embodying a sense of value for mixedness and how important this research truly is. Typically in the UK, mixedness is described in deficit terms, such as isolated and un-belonging, but this conference reconstructed this to something more complicated - not as something that has 'solved' racism, but also not something to be ashamed of. In my talk, I discussed my paper "I'm not white": Counter-stories from 'mixed race'