Bridge over troubled water

In America, people of mixed race have been dubbed `the bridge generation'. In this country, one in 20 children under five are `bi-racial', but can they really heal the colour divide? Aminatta Forna reports on Brown Britain

BRITAIN is witnessing a explosion in the number of mixed race children being born. The news that one in 20 pre-school children (and rising) is of mixed parentage has produced a range of responses, from predictions of a future brown Britain, to the idea that such a group could usher in a new era of race relations to the question of racial identity - both black and white. One way or the other, as people of mixed race become a significant minority they are expected to have a vital social impact.

Even among people of mixed heritage themselves, the response is ambiguous. Jo Hodges, author of the highly successful new film and the novel The Girl with Brains in her Feet a story about growing up as a mixed race kid in Leicester, claims she has been able to move fluidly across the cultural divide: "My experience is of being allowed to eavesdrop on all sorts of conversations that black and white people have about each other." The idea that mixed race people could create a "bridge generation" is a possibility. Yet Lenny Kravitz, a black, Jewish, New Yorker has commented: "You don't have to deny the white side of you if you're mixed. Accept the blessing of having two cultures, but understand that you are Black. In this world if you have one spot of Black blood you are Black. Get over it!" In the USA, where mixed race people live in a society which is more segregated than the UK, the issues revolve more urgently around the politics of race.

Mixed relationships have always attracted a disproportionate amount of interest. In addition, high-profile mixed marriages such as that of Labour MP Bernie Grant, black peer John Taylor, swimmer Sharon Davies, comedians Dawn French and Lenny Henry, plus all those black footballers with blonde girlfriends, have created the impression that large numbers of black men and white women are marrying each other. But the issue has been somewhat exaggerated. Figures drawn from the last census and reported in the newspapers claimed that 40 per cent of African Caribbean men had a white partner. But misinterpretation and misreporting have given a somewhat overblown idea of the true extent of mixed unions. In fact, the original figure was 40 per cent of African Caribbean men with a partner and under 30. It did not include the many men without a partner, or obviously, older men. The true figure for African Caribbean men of all ages in a relationship is 25 per cent. And the comparative figure for African Caribbean women is 14 per cent. What is significant is the number of children of mixed race of pre-school age, suggesting a sudden, recent explosion in the number of these relationships.

In the United States, a similar group of "bi-racial" people are being called the "bridge generation." According to British sociologist Stephen Small, currently a professor at Berkeley and writing a book on people of mixed and unmixed heritage, they are seen and see themselves as the interface between black and white generations.

Yet in both the US and in Britain mixed race relationships and people represent a paradoxical picture and generate radically different reactions. Today in the UK intermarriage is being portrayed, in the media at least, as wholesomely positive - a sign of the power of human relationships to overcome deep-rooted attitudes and a measure of modern racial tolerance. The same is true to some extent in the United States. However, it was only in 1991 that a survey conducted by the Independent on Sunday demonstrated that a third of white people thought you should only marry within your race. In the United States mixed relationships have a complex history, up until recently being more closely associated with slavery and the exploitation of black women by white men than anything else. Talk of a "bridge generation" of people who are both and neither black or white must be understood within the context of a country which, up until recently, defined a person as black if they had one sixteenth black blood, and where so much mixing has gone on in the past that sociologists agree that the majority of so- called "white" Americans have at least one black ancestor.

Today in the United States there is pressure to change the historic racial categories contained in the census and on official forms to reflect people of mixed heritage and even to jettison the whole idea that people can even be categorised according to race. Initially welcome, the different subtexts behind some of the calls is becoming evident. Some white women married to black men, it is claimed, simply do not want their children categorised as black with all the connotations that brings. And dispensing with racial classifications is also an aim of the anti-affirmative action lobby, who want to prevent policies allocating funds to disadvantaged groups. Interestingly in the US now, some of the most vociferous voices defending racial categories are black and not white. In the UK, the 1991 census already included a question on ethnicity including mixed heritage, and there

are rumours that the 2001 census White Paperwill propose a separate category.

But, the census debate apart, how much further will the US experience, specifically the idea of a "bridge generation", be reflected in the UK? Stephen Small points to Liverpool, which has historically had easily the largest mixed race population of any British city, but also "one of the highest rates of social exclusion on the grounds of race in the country". And whereas in the US, those who call themselves the bridge generation come largely from middle-class backgrounds, with parents who are typically white liberals married to black professionals, that is not the case in this country. Britain's black middle class is small and most of the new generation of brown Britons will grow up in working-class areas. High- profile mixed-race figures, such as Paul Boateng, the son of a Ghanaian politician and a white mother, will remain the exception.

And yet Julia Sudbury, who is an academic of mixed race and author of Other Kinds of Dreams (Routledge) argues that the influences of the new brown generation will emerge in music, art and writing in the coming decades produced by people who "play with the boundaries of blackness and whiteness and move between cultures". Of course Jo Hodges has already done precisely that, teasing out themes of race and culture, difference and similarity.

But perhaps the most important difference will be the profound change the emergence of numbers of young, mixed race people will have on discussions about their own identity. Mixed heritage has always been seen as a problem and critics of inter-racial relationships have often argued that the resulting children fall between cultures and belong nowhere. In the context of a racially oppressive society, all the mixed race people I have spoken to have mentioned a, sometimes intense, pressure to unify and to conform to ideas of blackness. Anne Phoenix, a London University psychologist and author of Black, White or Mixed Race? interviewed mixed race children between the ages of 14 and 18 and found that this was an issue for many of them. They nevertheless preferred to identify themselves as "mixed" and not to deny their own and one of their parents' whiteness.

Of course describing oneself as black is also read as a statement of political allegiance and refusal to do so can engender hostility or accusations of naivete. For years, according to Yasmin Alibai Brown, author of The Colour of Love, this discussion has surrounded people of mixed race. The difference now is that there is "a growing community of young adults who can express themselves". Julia Sudbury welcomes a future in which mixed race people "don't have to genuflect to notions of blackness imposed on them by unmixed people".

And Alibai Brown, who works at the Institute of Public Policy Research and last year organised a seminar on the subject of mixed heritage, believes that there are now a number of concerns which affect mixed race children separate from their black counterparts. One pressing problem is the highly disproportionate number of mixed race children in care. Despite the willingness to interpret relations between black and white as a sign of racial tolerance on the part of white people, there are a large number of white women who put their mixed race children into care. While black women who have a child by a white man usually raise that child, white women who bear mixed children often do not. This simple, chilling fact speaks louder than all the rhetoric of a happy, blended brown future.

In the future, people of mixed heritage will find themselves, as they always have been, at the intersection of debates about race, racialized divisions and cultural shifts. There won't be one homogeneous "brown" culture, just as there is not one black culture. They will be as different as Daley Thompson and Bob Marley, both of black and white parentage, are from each other. But as the numbers rise, sometime in the future, mixed people who have the ability to cross cultures will eventually challenge every existing definition of whiteness and blackness. In the end, their impact, in the words of Julia Sudbury, will be "immense and irreversible."