ABSTRACT
The proliferation of research on mixed identities emerged circa 1990. Less is known about Black mixed-race people who came of age in the hostile racial climate of the 1970s and 1980s, before ‘mixed-race’ was the recognisable ethnic identification it is now. Organised chronologically, the chapter shows how Black mixed-race youth cultivated positive Black identities and experienced a counter-hegemonic education within and through the Rastafari movement and the Afrocentric musical genres of roots reggae and African American hip-hop in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. The chapter demonstrates that Black mixed-race identities were both shaped by and shaping emerging understandings of Black British identity through the 1970s and 1980s, challenging the notion of a singular, essentialist conceptualisation of Blackness. As Black youth cultures were increasingly shaping urban Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I show that some participants felt able to capitalise on this moment and also on their racialised positions as mixed-race people in an increasingly multi-ethnic Britain. The chapter ends by drawing across all the age groups to explore how they experience their racial identities in contemporary Britain. I consider how the myth of post-raciality and discourses of mixed-race exceptionalism are resisted, reproduced, and conceptualised in participants’ self-identifications.
