ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contradictory personal and political meanings of ethnic and racialized identities. It examines how the choice and implications of a particular identity, for example a minority one, can challenge and reproduce both hegemonic and critical understandings of identity. The chapter discusses how the judgments of these identity choices by others, such as family, friends, teachers, colleagues, social workers, strangers, and wider society also reflect the inconsistent understandings of identity. In educational and direct social work practices, social policy, political strategies, and research methods the people need to be conscious that there are issues particular to people's experiences of having mixed ancestries. The chapter also discusses some of the identity paradoxes in the current contexts of Britain and several of its former settled colonies: Canada and Sri Lanka mainly, with some references to Australia and the USA whose minority-majority identity relations are similar to those in Canada and Britain.
