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Biracial Britain by Remi Adekoya review: turning assumptions upside down

Race is not a universal category but shaped by many different cultures

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Constable
Tomiwa Owolade
25 January 2021

Thirty percent of Britain’s population will reportedly be mixed-race by the end of this century. Mixed-race people are the fastest growing ethnic group in the country. After the Black Lives Matter debates last year, following from the death of George Floyd in America, where do mixed-race Britons stand in our current racial paradigm? 

Remi Adekoya’s Biracial Britain: A Different Way of Looking at Race doesn’t offer a straightforward answer to that question. And rightly so. The question implies mixed-race Britons are a community; the book shows mixed-race individuals have experiences and perspectives that are their own. Biracial Britain documents rich, poor, old, and young mixed-race people; ancestries spanning from Colombia to China, India to Italy. What unites them is, arguably, what unites everyone: navigating the tensions between how society sees you and how you see yourself. 

Adekoya, an associate lecturer of politics at the University of York, is as much the editor as the writer of this book. Each chapter is largely composed of a mixed-race person sharing, in uninterrupted text, their experiences of growing up in Britain. This is followed by a shorter commentary by Adekoya - offering a more conceptual angle to these personal experiences, and comparing them with his own background as the son of a Nigerian father and Polish mother. 

The effect of this structure is revelatory: many of the assumptions about what it means to be mixed-race are shown to bear only a superficial resemblance to reality. For instance, many of the people interviewed state that, although they grew up feeling alienated in Britain, when they visited one of their parent’s native country, they were treated as incorrigibly foreign. 

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Sophia, whose mum is white German-English and father is black Zimbabwean, says of her visit to her father’s country: “In Britain, I’m mainly a black woman. I’ve always felt black because that’s how white people have treated me. But in Zimbabwe, even my family saw me as ‘white’”. Adekoya supplements this with his own experience of growing up mixed-race in Nigeria. “In Nigeria, people don’t look at me and see a black person”, he writes. “The Nigerian who hasn’t had much contact with people of different races looks at me and sees an oyinbo (white person)”. 

When we talk about what it means to be mixed-race, we sometimes assume this is a fixed identity -- one black British anti-racism activist and broadcaster told someone Adekoya interviewed that, “if you’re not white, you’re black”. 

Race, however, is not a universal category; it is shaped by different cultures. To many Nigerians or Zimbabweans, if you’re mixed-race you’re white! Another important aspect of Adekoya’s book is that it doesn’t simply pay attention to mixed-race people who are, to put it crudely, half-white and half-black. We also have mixed Asian and white, mixed black and Asian, and even mixed Asian and Arab. Dania, whose father is from Pakistan and mother is from Lebanon, has this to say about it: “It is frustrating that many Britons still instinctively assume a mixed-race identity to be limited to people of black and white heritage”. 

Viewing someone through the lens of  their racial background fails to capture their humanity

Indeed: mixed-race people with black and white heritage only constitute 50% of all mixed-race people in the country. Perhaps the most valuable part of this book is it calls into question the very salience of these identity markers, our need to demarcate people on the basis of race. 

Of course, in the context of racism, it is understandable; and this book details some of the terrible racism mixed-race people still face today. But viewing someone simply through the lens of their racial background fails to capture their humanity; it obscures what makes them unique and interesting. As Danyal, who is in his early twenties, puts it: “The days of racial purity, be it black, white or Asian, are over, and are a pretty old-school idea. 

My generation won’t accept the idea of fixed racial and identity boundaries or people imposing on them who they are allowed to feel like, they just won’t”. I certainly hope so.

Biracial Britain: A Different Way of Looking at Race by Remi Adekoya (Constable, £18.99) 

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