ABSTRACT

According to some theorising (popularised within social work from the 1970s onwards), a positive image for mixed-parentage people can come only from assuming a black identity, and identifying with other black people. By implication, this involves rejecting their white inheritance. Marginality theory, also, would predict that those who identified with neither black nor white groups would have a negative identity, feeling rejected by both. Since under half of our sample regarded themselves as black we were able to explore these theories in a series of questions asked quite late in the interview. By this time they had discussed their experience of racism (see Chapter 8), so that any unhappy feelings about their colour were likely to have surfaced, and might be more easily expressed than if we had asked the questions ‘from cold’.