ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the tensions between privilege and precarity in Black mixed-race lives. It starts by examining the specific ways that mixedness (and/or light skin) can be valorised within the complex racial schemas of Black diasporic communities due to colourism. It shows how Black mixed-race subjects can be racialised as ‘brownings’ and ‘red skin’ within the diaspora and traces the etymology of such phrases to the historical racialised categories of patriarchal plantation societies in the Caribbean. In these discussions, colourism is shown to be a gendered phenomenon which Black mixed-race men and women experience in distinct ways. The chapter goes on to examine how participants are often simultaneously racialised as ‘Black’ within the majority-white context of the UK. Shifting focus away from the Black/white binary, the interplay of Black and mixed-race identities is foreground. Black identities tend to be articulated through discourses of collective consciousness, whilst mixedness is often understood through the lens of personal identity. The chapter ends by drawing on the concept of horizontal hostility to explore how encounters with discourses of Black (in)authenticity in interactions with Black counterparts can manifest in feelings of rejection from a collective Black identity and have transformative impacts on identification processes.
