Rhi-Mixed Views

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 Le...

  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'...

Picture:  @mixdgrlprblems  Instagram post  No matter where you are in the world, you will find those who connect themselves with the concept of ‘mixed race’.  It will mean different things in different places It will mean the same thing in different places  It will be mean different things in the same places  It will mean something unique to each individual person in each individual life.  For me, as a Chinese 'mixed race' woman, I identify heavily with using 'mixed race' as a linguistic home for myself. I have a Chinese mother, born in Indonesia, raised in Nigeria, and a white father born and raised in the UK. Given the erasure of a lot of our Chinese identity in the 'ethnic cleansing' in Indonesia in the 1960s, and my British cultural upbringing, it is hard to claim a Chinese identity without recognition of the white, both optically and culturally, therefore 'mixed race' works well for me. I am also 'white passing' in some spaces, giving me a d...

With almost 2 million people today identifying as 'mixed race' in the England and Wales, there is a distinct lack of engagement with what 'mixed race' means to higher education, and what it means to the conceptions of 'race' and people's experiences with identity. While there is engagement with 'mixed race' histories and contemporary experience, this engagement in the UK often stems from research into 'mixed race' relationships, migration, or early years education.  Often, 'mixed race' people are stigmatised as issues in society, as they question the very foundations that 'race' rests on to uphold white supremacy culture. 'Mixed race' can also complicate the boundaries of belonging, which creates uncomfortable emotions for those protective over access to space based on physical appearance. In the context of Black History Month for example, Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2020) argues that the issue is often placed on Multiraci...

As an academic, names become something extremely prevalent to your career and identity. This is because when we publish, our surnames become attached to our work forever. Our careers are dependent on this one word that attaches our identities to our expertise. This can come with a lot of intersectional challenges. For example, it is common for women in academia when they get married to change their names, but keep their maiden name's in their publications, as if they change it, it could look like a completely different body of work.  An article in Nature ' Racial inequalities in journals highlighted in giant study ' by Amanda Heidt, found that scientists from minority ethnic groups experience various forms of inequality throughout the academic-publishing process and are poorly represented on journal editorial boards.  The study itself is an imperfect study, as the algorithms used misclassified Black names 65% of the time, which led researchers to argue that it might be mo...

Let's re-imagine space Introduction  When you go your whole life being told you do not belong to a specific community, never truly 'fitting' anywhere, its always shocking when you realise there are more communities you are a 'part' of, yet still struggle to navigate them.  I was recently (educationally) diagnosed with  ADHD  (not a medical diagnosis), which really explains a lot of reasons I am the way I am, and it was very  reaffirming  to my sense of self.  But what comes with that is a continued  self-reflection  into my own identity, and who that makes me, where I fit, and where I perhaps do not.  When you are  mixed race in Britain , the monoracial culture attempts to get you to choose one side or the other, for me, either be a Chinese woman or a white woman,  but never both.   When you are in ' neurotypical  Britain', our brains are expected to function in a way that suits the way society has been built,...