Social representations of ‘mixed-race’ in early twenty-first-century Britain: content, limitations, and counter-narratives

Abstract

Over the last two decades, lay and professional interest in Britain's 'mixed-race' population has markedly increased, following dramatic growth in mixing and mixedness. As is often the case with new phenomena, agencies in the sphere of popular culture have stepped in to offer the wider public interpretative representations of this 'new' group. Drawing on challenging concepts, like demographic growth rates and projections, the family 'norm', the ostensible benefits of heterozygosity, and the drawbacks of claimed 'inbetweenness', they have offered us a picture of the 'mixed-race' population that is sometimes at variance with lived experiences or the harder image of statistical reality. Social representation theory is used to explore the limitations of these representations and to offer a number of counter-narratives that are grounded in the evidence base.

What Constitutes Intermarriage for Multiracial People in Britain?

“…Studies of the social class backgrounds of those who intermarry are still few, but are now countering the often ridiculously polarized depictions of mixing (and of mixed people) as either wholly disadvantaged or “the exceptional multiracial” (see Aspinall 2015 ). For instance, Muttarak’s (2004) analysis of Labour Force Survey data found that a higher proportion of white women in mixed unions were in Social Class I (professional and managerial) than women in coethnic unions.…”

Comparing Preferences towards Multiracial Advertising in Sweden and the US-Exploration through Eye-Tracking

“…Social and cultural representation of different population groups are theorized and analyzed extensively. Representation is about making sense of the world, and how these are communicated within society psychologically and through objects (Aspinall 2015;Hall 1997). Mass media is one of the communication platform where images shown conform to dominant cultural norms and promote particular categories of people, voices, values, and bodies (Edström 2018).…”

Wannabe Israeli: immigrants wrestling with their identity

“…An open-ended question as a part of quantitative online questionnaire may be seen as a window to catch a glimpse of representational dynamics of anchoring and objectification. Moreover, it provides a way to empower participants to express themselves in a free manner, opening up to a possible counter-narrative based on accounts of everyday experiences (Aspinall 2015).…”