Is racial mismatch a problem for young ‘mixed race’ people in Britain? The findings of qualitative research

How groups respond to others’ perceptions of them

As discussed in a growing number of studies (see Brunsma and Rockquemore, 2001; Herman, 2004; Herring, et al. 2004; Khanna, 2004, 2010; Rondilla and Spickard, 2007; Roth, 2010), one’s physical appearance is central to how one is perceived in ethnic and racial terms. The ways in which our multiracial respondents were seen by others could vary considerably: while some were consistently pigeon-holed into a single racial category (such as ‘White’, ‘Asian’ or ‘Black’), others were seen in a multitude of ways, as physically ambiguous individuals who were not readily assigned to existing racial categories. For this latter group, a common theme reported in studies of mixed people is that many people do not know how to ‘place’ them in the existing taxonomy of racial categories.

All of the interview respondents reported that there was frequently, or sometimes, a disjuncture between their expressed and their observed identifications. That is, there was a mismatch between how they saw themselves and how others saw them in racial terms, and respondents’ phenotype (and how this was perceived by others) was central to this process. Note that self-identification is not necessarily based upon a respondent’s actual parentage or phenotype; reported mismatch or disjuncture was quite widespread, and could occur whenever others’ perceptions clashed with how one wished to be seen. Nevertheless, this mismatch did not always result in a sense of misrecognition. We relied upon respondents’ own reports of how others saw them. We did so by asking them:(1) how others saw them in racial terms; and (2) how they felt about how others perceived them. In the interviews, we asked respondents for specific examples of how they were seen by others, and how this made them feel.

While a mismatch between expressed and observed identifications was widely reported across all the mixed groups, their responses to this mismatch tended to vary according to three possible responses: (1) for 17 respondents, the disparity between how others saw them and how they saw themselves posed a regular source of irritation or stress in their day-to-day lives, resulting in a negative sense of misrecognition; (2) for 15 respondents, this mismatch, based upon others’ inability to place them, was actually experienced positively, not negatively; (3) yet 33 interviewees were reportedly indifferent to how others saw them, and did not pay much attention to, or take seriously, others’ perceptions of them.

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Table 1.

How mixed race groups respond to others’ perceptions of them (n = 65).

	Misrecognized	Positive	Indifferent
Black/white	8	2	7
East or SE Asian/white	4	7	5
Arab/white	3	1	11
South Asian/white	1	3	6
Minority mix	1	2	4
Total = 65	17	15	33

Of these three possible responses, only the first type of response actually constitutes a sense of misrecognition. This is because individuals who felt primarily positive or indifferent did not expect others to be able to place them or validate their desired identifications, and they were more able to deflect or disregard other people’s perceptions of them. By comparison, those who felt misrecognized felt that a lack of validation of their asserted identity (which was of importance to them) was difficult and distressing. Rather than attempt to discern whether our respondents were actually accurate about how other people racially assigned them or not (which would not be possible, retrospectively), we wanted to see the ways in which respondents felt about others’ perceptions of them, and how this made them feel.

Negative experiences of misrecognition

For 17 respondents (eight Black/White, three Arab/White, four East or SE Asian/White, one South Asian/White, and one Minority Mix), others’ racial perceptions of them were experienced as misrecognition. How others racially assigned them jarred with how they saw themselves, and this was a recurring concern in their day-to-day lives. The nature and basis of such misrecognition, however, was variable.

Positive about how they were seen by others

In comparison with the 17 respondents who found other peoples’ perceptions of them to be very problematic, 15 of the 65 interviewees articulated primarily positive experiences about how they were seen by others. Seven of these 15 were East or SE Asian/White, three South Asian/White, two ‘minority mix’, two Black/White, and one Arab/White. These respondents, most of whom were seen as physically indeterminate, reported that they enjoyed instances of mismatch and the fact that people were unable to discern their ethnic and racial heritage.

Many of these respondents, and in particular female respondents, said that they enjoyed the attention they received from others because of their physical ambiguity – they were considered ‘exotic’. The guessing game involved in people’s reactions to them was often a good ‘conversation starter’. As one male respondent put it: ‘The girls love it!.’ Hari (Indian and White English) said that his physical appearance aroused curiosity:

I quite like it because … it’s like it makes me a bit more, I suppose, mysterious. It’s sort of quite glamorous … Yeah, from my point of view it’s quite nice, that sort of uniqueness…

Although some male respondents, such as Hari, reported that they liked being seen as exotic, the awareness that being mixed, and thus physically alluring, appeared to be gendered.

Like Hari, looking physically ambiguous also made Jenny (Chinese and White English), feel special and attractive:

To be honest, my sister and I look quite similar and were quite cute when were kids, and it was often, ‘Aren’t you pretty’, it was never negative…

Crucially, the curiosity they encountered was experienced positively, in contrast to the respondents (who were seen as physically indeterminate) who reported negative attributions of being foreign or odd looking. Some of the respondents who felt positive about how they were seen by others articulated thoughts that were reminiscent of those expressed in Waters’ (1990) study of White Americans, in which many White Americans tried to highlight an ethnic ancestry (e.g. Irish, Italian, Polish) in order to feel more distinctive, and not ‘just’ American.

Although most of these respondents were unable to control how others saw them, and could not effectively invoke specific identifications at will, they enjoyed the fact that they were not easily categorized – in stark contrast with the Black/White respondents who identified as mixed, but felt pigeon-holed into the Black category. For these respondents, others’ curiosity and/or inability to place them could be a source of fun or amusement because: (1) their sense of belonging in Britain was primary and secure, and not challenged by others; and (2) how others racially assigned them was not considered to be stigmatizing – rather, the fact that others found it difficult to ‘place them’ made them feel special and distinctive.

In comparison with some of the Black/White respondents who objected to the often denigrating meanings and imagery associated with Blackness, these non-Black mixed individuals highlighted the positive aspects of their racial and ethnic ambiguity – though as we saw in the previous section, some non-Black mixed individuals also experienced negative attributions from others, and could feel misrecognized. Nevertheless, it seems that part East or SE Asian/White respondents (seven of 15) were especially prominent among those reporting positive experiences resulting from instances of mismatched identifications. While not within the scope of this article, a variety of positive and negative meanings (albeit potentially double-edged) could apply in relation to different types of ‘mixture’.

Indifferent to how they were seen by others

In comparison to respondents who reported either negative or positive experiences in terms of how others perceived them, 33 of the 65 interview respondents (comprised seven of 17 Black/White, 11 of 15 Arab/White, six of 10 South Asian/White, five of 16 East or SE Asian/White, and four of seven ‘minority mix’) claimed to be indifferent to how they were seen by other people. A large number of these respondents talked about the fact that although there was often a mismatch between their expressed and observed identifications, they were not terribly concerned about instances of mismatch or of how others viewed them in racial terms.

This lack of concern derived from the fact that their ‘race’ was not particularly central to their sense of selves and/or the fact that their race was less salient than their overriding sense of Britishness, or their religion, studies, or regional identification (e.g. as a Londoner). This derogation of racial difference was typically mentioned in terms of everyday life in large urban centres such as London. As one South Asian/White respondent, Ben, put it: ‘You don’t really expect people to be White in London!’ Or as Kareem (Pakistani and Arab) observed: ‘I am what I am … I’m just technically another person just walking.’ Nor did they think that their peers necesssarily paid much attention to their exact parental heritage, given their common upbringing as British.

Some of these respondents also explicitly disavowed the concept of race or racial difference. Beth (Black African and English) refused to identify racially, claiming that she transcended categorization. She also reported that she was seen in many different ways, ranging from ‘mixed race’, to Mediterranean and Middle Eastern, but that she was not worried about how other people saw her:

I personally forget most of the time that I have an ethnicity, but I am lucky to have been successful academically and study in a world where I don’t feel that such things are important … as I say, it’s not an issue that even occurs to me unless someone raises it.

As a child, she had grown up in a Northern town, and had lived in a predominantly White neighbourhood, in which she had felt consciously different, being part Black. But in London, where she has lived the last 10 years, she reported that she felt very ordinary.

Peter (Vietnamese and White English) identified as a ‘mixed’ person, but had grown accustomed to the varied ways in which he was seen by others. He said that he was usually seen as ambiguous – sometimes South American, ‘Oriental’ or Mexican, but how others saw him did not matter very much to him. Although he had felt different and vulnerable (in terms of being racially targeted) in primary school, he did not pay much attention to how others now saw him, even though he could encounter occasional racial prejudice: ‘When I think of me, I don’t think … The first thing is not race. It’s not an issue.’ While he would readily note his parental heritage on official forms, his racial and ethnic heritage did not figure centrally to how he saw himself.

Of course, claimed indifference to how they were seen in racial terms should not necessarily be taken at face value. In comparison to those Black/White respondents who were consistently seen as Black (and who experienced this racial assignment as misrecognition), it is relatively easy for respondents who are not consistently pigeonholed (or who may ‘pass’) to claim that race is not an issue (Song, 2003; Waters, 1990). Nevertheless, there were a significant number of respondents across all the mixed groups (most of whom did not appear White), including some who were consistently seen as Black (but who saw themselves as being ‘mixed’), who reported that they were indifferent to how they were seen by others.

Such a claimed indifference to how others racially assigned them did not necessarily mean that these respondents had not experienced forms of racism (especially in school, during their childhoods and adolescence), but they were able to contain and minimize the significance of such negative experiences. Those who grew up in primarily White, non-urban locations (such as George) were less likely to report indifference to mismatch than those who had grown up in more cosmopolitan settings. Yet the move to a more ethnically diverse university setting afforded such individuals an opportunity to re-evaluate their ‘mixedness’, and the relative importance (or not) of others’ perceptions. Some respondents who reported indifference, such as Beth, articulated the view that they had transcended race and racial thinking and identification, but only after a childhood and adolescence in which they had felt negatively racially marked in a mostly White town. So for some reporting indifference, this could entail a process of change, whereby they gradually became indifferent toward the myriad ways in which they were seen by others. Even so, most of these ‘indifferent’ respondents recognized the contextually specific ways in which being ‘different’ could still matter, especially in settings outside multi-ethnic London, where one could, as one respondent put it, be vulnerable and outside of one’s ‘comfort zone’.

Indifference to others’ perceptions

This article extends existing studies by examining not only the potential disjuncture between expressed and observed identities for mixed individuals, but also the variable ways in which mixed people may feel about how they are seen by the wider public. Previous literature on this topic has tended to assume that the mismatch between expressed and observed identification is usually problematic, but our study of mixed race people in metropolitan Britain suggests that such mismatch was not problematic for all our respondents. While some people experienced this mismatch very negatively, as a form of misrecognition, others experienced this mismatch mostly positively, and yet others, with indifference. Crucially, such variation in responses was found both across and within all the mixed groups.

Although such a disjuncture between expressed and observed identifications was commonly reported by the 65 interview respondents, not all of them particularly cared about their racial assignment by others (especially if these were superficial social encounters). More than half the Arab/White, South Asian/White, and ‘minority mix’ respondents claimed to be indifferent to how others saw them, and played down the importance of race for their sense of selves and their everyday lives, while 40 percent of Black/White and 30 percent of East or SE Asian/White respondents claimed indifference.

How should we interpret this reported indifference to misrecognition? In addition to the fact that they did not expect the wider public to validate their expressed identifications, these respondents tended to note: (1) the fact that they were British, regardless of ‘colour’, thus emphasizing the growing importance of national belonging over membership in a ‘race’; and (2) the relative unimportance of race in cosmopolitan, metropolitan settings such as London, where degrees of conviviality and mixing were high, and where being of any hue or mixture was regarded as unremarkable – at least in many situations. Importantly, claims to indifference were not devoid of a recognition of continuing forms of racial prejudice and disadvantage, especially in certain institutional contexts; so these claims should not be interpreted as naive denials of the existence of racism. Rather, these respondents tended to articulate the view that they refused to take racial thinking and ideologies seriously and/or that they were able to deflect such thinking and prejudice in their everyday lives.

In Britain, it appears that, at least for this predominantly middle-class, metropolitan sample, an increasingly inclusive and race-neutral nationality, as British, is a central part of the experiences of many (though not all) younger mixed Britons. If race is not always regarded as an important dimension of self-identity, then racial assignment by others may be divested of some of its potency and consequences. It may be that, in certain urban areas of Britain, the constitution of racial identities is interwoven with other dimensions of identification and belonging that are important, such as a national or regional identity, and other modes of belonging – though these modes of belonging can be highly contested and by no means automatic.

Group differences and racial mismatch

Despite the fact that a substantial proportion of respondents across all the groups reported indifference to how others saw them, we found some differences between groups in terms of how they responded to other peoples’ perceptions of them. In comparison with the other mixed groups, a higher proportion of part-Black respondents (47%) felt misrecognized than any other group (the second highest was 25% of East and SE Asian/White respondents). Although the majority of the Black/White interviewees saw themselves as ‘mixed race’, many of them were pigeonholed as Black (as found in the US). Their feelings of misrecognition were based upon a lack of validation of their mixed heritage, and upon the perceived negative social values attributed to their Blackness. As reported in studies in the US, we found that many of our Black/White British respondents were conscious of being subject to an unwritten ‘one drop rule’; the degree to which this was found is interesting, given the absence of such a convention in Britain. Clearly, the British ‘public’ recognizes someone with some African heritage as a ‘Black’ person, even if they note variations in skin tone and other physical features (see Khanna, 2010). Certainly no such rule applied to the other types of mixes in our study, so that they were less likely to be consistently pigeon-holed into a single category, such as ‘Black’.

By comparison, non-Black mixed respondents were often seen to be physically indeterminate, and racially assigned in a wide variety of ways. This was experienced negatively by some, as misrecognition, by some with indifference, and for others, with positive social values and encounters. What some Black/White respondents found to be problematic (pigeon-holed into a Black category, attribution of negative values associated with Blackness) differed from what non-Black mixed respondents found to be problematic about their misrecognition by others (being seen as ‘foreign’ and thus not really British, being seen as physically odd). Thus a key distinction between respondents who experienced instances of mismatch positively, as opposed to negatively, is that the former: (1) did not expect others to validate their expressed identifications; and (2) did not perceive their racial assignment by others to entail racial prejudice or negative social value. Respondents who were reportedly indifferent did not expect others to validate their expressed identities; furthermore, they may have been less invested in their ethnic and racial ancestries than those who felt misrecognized, or positive (though clearly, more research is needed on the dynamics differentiating these different kinds of responses).

National identification and Britishness

In addition to the categories of multiracial identification found by Rockquemore and Brunsma (2002), based upon Black/White individuals in the USA, we would add a national mode of identification (e.g. British), in which one’s sense of national belonging can take precedence over ethnic or racial identifications in certain social situations – though the meanings associated with national and racial (and ethnic) identifications are not mutually exclusive, and can shade into each other. Many of our respondents, especially non-Black mixed respondents (many of whom were not consistently racially assigned), described themselves in terms of nationality and cultural belonging in Britain, and saw their nationality as being more salient than their racial or ethnic identities. Furthermore, a British (or White British) identity could take precedence, because they grew up in Britain, surrounded by British norms and cultural practises. Most of these young people did not feel that they could claim an ethnically authentic affiliation with some distant ancestral culture, for instance, in Hong Kong or Pakistan. Yet, as discussed above, their assertions of Britishness were not always validated by others, especially if they looked ‘foreign’, and not White. This discourse of national belonging may also be gaining currency at a time when growing numbers of young people may question the legitimacy of racial ideologies and categories in their everyday lives.

While their sense of belonging in Britain seemed no less strong for part-Black respondents, their consistent and persistent racial assignment as Black by the wider public meant that they were regularly reminded of their ‘race’ (though some Black/White respondents managed to deflect or disregard this). Black/White respondents tended to differentiate their racial and national identifications more clearly than the other groups. For most part Black respondents, being British sat alongside their racial identifications as mixed or Black, with no necessary tension between the two (though in a few cases, experiences of racism attenuated feelings of Britishness). Therefore, it is important not to overstate group differences in expressed identification between part-Black (who could identify themselves, e.g., as ‘mixed race’) and non-Black groups (who identify themselves, e.g., as ‘British’ or ‘White British’) – because despite differences in their expressed identifications or how they experienced instances of mismatch, a shared sense of being British was a strong undercurrent across all the mixed groups, and served to dilute the force of differently expressed racial identifications. Thus, special care is needed in the interpretation of racial terms, as they are used by a variety of mixed respondents. Expressed racial identifications do not necessarily reveal the strength of such identifications, or the potentially multifaceted layers of belonging (national, regional, faith communities) that can accompany a racial sense of self.

Differential ethnic options

In their studies of how various multiracial adolescents in the US racially identify, various analysts found that, in comparison with Black/White young people, Asian/White respondents effectively possessed a wider range of identity options. Based on our findings, the identity options of Black/White respondents in Britain also appear to be more constrained than those for other mixed groups. However, we need to qualify a stark comparison between part-Black versus non-Black mixed people in Britain.

The fact that one was not consistently pigeon-holed into a category (as in the case of East or SE Asian/White individuals) did not automatically translate into an ability to assert a racial, ethnic, or national identification that was validated by others. For instance, some East or SE Asian/White respondents such as George identified as British, but were consistently misrecognized as ‘Chinese’ or ‘foreign’. About 40 percent of those reporting misrecognition were people who said that they were seen as physically ambiguous – individuals who were made to feel that their physical appearance was odd, and potentially ‘foreign’. Misrecognition could therefore entail not only a negative experience of mismatch, but also an unwanted ethnic or racial attribution in the case of respondents who identified primarily as British, in cultural and national terms. Therefore, the apparent range of ethnic options seen to be held by non-Black mixed individuals may obscure the fact that their Britishness may not be validated, and that they can be attributed racial, ethnic, and cultural qualities that hold little or no resonance for the respondent.

Variation in physical appearance within groups (e.g. East or SE Asian/White) could be considerable. Some in the South Asian/White and East or SE Asian/White categories can look mostly White, while others look much more South Asian or East or SE Asian by prevailing social norms. The fact that there are no widespread social conventions in Britain about how to classify these part-Asian (or part-Arab) groups does not necessarily mean that such individuals are able to assert their desired identifications. Thus, variability in individuals’ phenotype, while noted as being of importance, especially in relation to the skin colour variations among Black people, has not been emphasized enough in studies of other types of multiracial people (but see Khanna, 2004; Rondilla and Spickard, 2007; Roth, 2010).

Theorizing on the dynamics of ethnic options also needs to consider the experiences of mixed race people who are consistently misrecognized as White, as opposed to a minority race. Although they benefited from their White skin privilege more generally, such misrecognition could be upsetting if their minority heritage was meaningful to them (and especially if they had been raised primarily by their minority parent and extended family). Thus, one’s ethnic options can be constrained in a variety of ways, and can involve a lack of acceptance and validation in relation to minority group membership (Campbell and Troyer, 2007; Mengel, 2001).