“Mixed race? What’s all this mixed-race nonsense? If you’re not white, you’re black.” So said a legendary black British broadcaster to Sunder Katwala, a mixed-race Briton I interviewed for my new book Biracial Britain, during a conversation they had on identity.
Katwala has an Indian father and Irish mother with no black roots of which he is aware. When he pointed this out, he was asked why in that case he didn’t simply call himself Indian. Was he ashamed of his Indian roots?
The exchange typifies the kind of social reality mixed-race people know all too well: one that combines a binary way of thinking about identity, and the right monoracial society confers on itself to tell mixed-race people how they should identify.
What is it like to be a mixed-race person in modern Britain? To those forced to straddle multiple ethnic identities, this question is an absolutely central part of their lives. To the rest of Britain
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera / Viking
Several authors tackle colonialism in very different ways, from
Alex Renton confronting his own family’s involvement in slavery in
Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Enslaving Past (Canongate), and
Sathnam Sanghera in
Kehinde Andrews, who rather more controversially takes on capitalism and racism together in
The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World (Allen Lane).
Gender and Identity Politics
Likewise gender and identity politics get a good look-in, from
Julie Bindel’s manifesto,
Feminism for Women (Constable) to
You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed To Be: Into The Chaos of Modern Masculinity (Bloomsbury) by founder of the Book of Man website