Welcome to the Mixed Museum

Though mixed race families in Britain had low visibility in the public consciousness at the turn of the century, they were present across the country and at all levels of society. Where interracial relationships were discussed in the press, the focus was frequently on those between Chinese men and white British women.

The First World War changed this picture, as men from Britain’s colonies were recruited into the services and demobilised in large numbers at the end of the war. The opportunities to marry across the ‘colour line’ increased and the emergence of mixed communities in Britain’s port cities, notably Cardiff, began to attract attention. In conditions of post-war economic decline and worsening conditions for seamen, the decade ended with the 1919 ‘Race Riots’ in London, Liverpool and Cardiff.

The twenty years 1920-40 can justly be described as the era of moral condemnation for interracial couples and their children. It began with Marriage Registrars’ ‘Warning Statement’ about interracial unions and the Special Restrictions (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order and saw the publication in the 20s of the first reports on ‘mixed race’ children by British anthropologists (an approach called ‘anthropometry’ based on detailed physical measurements). Although much of this work was published in the Eugenics Society’s journal, it took a neutral stand on the biological consequences of what was called ‘race crossing’.

However, the infamous ‘Fletcher Report’ of 1930 described Liverpool’s mixed couples and their offspring in racist and inflammatory language, with references to ‘brothels’, ‘ disorderliness’ , ‘illegitimacy’, ‘infectious diseases’, and ‘prostitution’, those in interracial unions being described as ‘disharmonious’, ‘immoral’, and ‘promiscuous’. In the 1930s Parliament, too, began to problematize the ‘mixed race’ population in Britain’s port cities in terms of poverty and a threat to economic and social stability. As the Eugenicists Society reached the peak of its popularity in the 1930s with an agenda that actively cautioned against interracial unions, the consequences of eugenicist policies in Nazi Germany were becoming apparent. These events drew devastating critiques of eugenicist thinking and theories of racial superiority from the British geneticists, Julian Huxley and Alfred Haddon, and Cedric Dover’s ‘Half-caste’ provided an eloquent riposte to those who denigrated the offspring of mixed unions.

This period was transformative for the position of mixed race families in British society. While the Second World War (1939-45) again increased the numbers of people in the country from Britain’s colonies, the inflow of large numbers of black American GIs in the country, in preparation for the invasion of Europe, had a greater impact as many forged relationships with British women. The ‘babies they left behind’ preoccupied the British government, voluntary organisations, well-meaning individuals like Pastor Daniels Ekarte, and ‘official’ children’s homes for much of the later 1940s and 50s. The consequences of the war were also felt by Chinese seamen in Liverpool, many of whom (including some who had partners and children in the city) were repatriated to East Asian when the Pacific war with Japan was concluded.

The Second World war, too, had exposed the full horrors of Nazi racist policies on mainland Europe, a programme of systematic state-sponsored incarceration and murder of Jews, Gypsies, and many who were mixed race. The UNESCO-sponsored statements on ‘race’ in 1950 and 1951 were an attempt to make known the scientific facts about race and to combat racial prejudice, including the spurious arguments about the biological consequences of race crossing. The eugenics movement began to lose its influence as the science underpinning it was revealed to be bogus and interest amongst geneticists turned away from the grand search for patterns of inherited human behaviour to the study of biological molecules and the gene. British anthropologists working on race abandoned physical anthropometry and moved, instead, to social aspects of race relations and processes of ‘racialisation’. The final, transformative event of these two decades was the start of mass migration to Britain from the Indian Subcontinent, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa, with the arrival in London of ‘Empire Windrush’ in 1948 with around 500 passengers from Jamaica. During the two decades 1951-71 the ethnic composition and geographical spread of new communities in Britain was to be changed beyond recognition, the New Commonwealth-born population increasing from 0.2 million to 1.2 million. Cities and towns like Birmingham, Leicester, Bradford, and Wolverhampton, headed the ranking and saw, for the first time, growing numbers of mixed race families.

Following the large scale immigration of the 50s and 60s, the subsequent decades witnessed a marked growth in the mixed race population in cities such as Birmingham and Manchester. The Home Office was active in its surveillance of these new communities, recording the racial composition of families, whether their births were outside marriage, and their housing circumstances. Besides such initiatives and those of some city medical officers of health, any attempts to count either the number of interracial partnerships or the growing mixed race population did not come till the end of the period when a few new government social surveys started collecting data on racial/ethnic group.

The 1970s was a decade of overt racism and political violence against black people. The first race relations legislation had come in 1965 and was strengthened by the 1976 Act. By the start of the 70s Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech was fresh in people’s minds and an emergent National Front cast a shadow over civil society. Popular culture (films and plays) took themes from Britain’s new demographic communities and the increasing frequency of what were still regarded as ‘transgressive’ interracial relationships in productions such as Taste of Honey and Tamed and Shabby Tiger.

1980-2000 The last two decades of the century saw the transformation of mixing and mixedness from a niche position in British society to the mainstream. This was apparent in the country’s ethnic/racial composition, public attitudes to interracial marriage, and the attitudes of officialdom. Between 1981 and 2002/3 the number of interracial relationships increased dramatically, for example, from 21.7% to 35.9% for intermarried Caribbean men and 10.4% to 22.5% for women. There was a commensurate increased in the mixed race population, the 230,000 recorded in the 1985 Labour Force Survey almost trebling in the next fifteen or so years.

The 1990s saw a marked shift in attitudes to intermarriage, social attitude surveys recording a marked drop in the level of opposition especially amongst the younger age cohorts in the population. The interracial partnering of prominent public figures, TV personalities, and a member of the Royal Family no doubt added to this increasing acceptability in British society. By the mid-1990s officialdom had recognised the need to included categorisation for the ‘mixed’ group in the upcoming census. ‘Mixed race’ children had also become the focus of scholarly research on racial/ethnic identity, racial prejudice, and their disproportionate presence in the ‘looked after children’ statistics. Drama series for TV and films for the cinema increasingly portrayed the lives of young mixed race Britons.

2000-2020 In the first decade of the new century mixing and mixedness have come of age. The 2001 Census recorded 237,420 White and Black Caribbeans, 78,911 White and Black Africans, 189,015 White and Asians, and 155,688 in the ‘Other Mixed’ group in England and Wales, around 660,000 in total. Since then the ‘mixed’ population has been amongst the fastest growing of all minority ethnic groups, latest estimates (mid-2009) recording almost one million ‘mixed’ people in the country, a figure that is likely to be exceeded when the 2011 Census figures are released this November. Coming on the back of official recognition, around a dozen mixed race organisations have been set up, including Bradley Lincoln’s Manchester-based social enterprise ‘Multiple Heritage Project’ (now our host website Mix-d:), Sharron Hall-Corby’s ‘Intermix’, and many others in towns and cities throughout the country including Birmingham, Sheffield, Brighton, and Exeter.

Over the last decade or so there has been a huge shift in coverage by the media, the focus now being on mixed race high achievers in the arts, literature, entertainment, sport, and politics (including the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency and of figures such as Chucka Umunna to the UK Parliament). Interracial marriage, in itself, is no longer newsworthy as it was in previous decades but has become quotidian. A new cosmopolitanism has taken root in many of our large cities, including what Paul Gilroy has called a ‘convivial culture’, the boisterous everyday interaction of Britain’s different racial/cultural groups. By 2020, the ‘Mixed’ group is predicted to grow to 1.3 million people (a 93% increase over the two decades 2001-20), by which time it will constitute around 2% of the country’s total population, still substantially smaller than the ‘Black’ and ‘Asian’ groups but a major grouping, emblematic of Britain’s era of ‘superdiversity’.