By contributor Sean Carey

Around 2 million people in the U.K. — roughly 3 percent of the total population — come from “mixed race” backgrounds. The big surprise is that the estimate is twice the number recorded in official statistics. This finding comes from a study by Dr. Alita Nandi at the University of Essex’s Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) using data from the U.K. Household Longitudinal Study for BBC 2’s Newsnight program.

If this figure is accurate then there are more people of “mixed race” than any single, traditional ethnic minority – for example, “Black Caribbean”, “Black African”, “Indian”, “Pakistani”, “Bangladeshi” or “Chinese.” The “mixed race” group has its fair share of celebrities: Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, Surrey cricketer and 2006 Strictly Come Dancing winner Mark Ramprakash, Manchester United soccer players Ryan Giggs and Rio Ferdinand, pop singer Leona Lewis, and double Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes. But now, according to BBC News home editor Mark Easton, “in multiracial Britain, ethnicity is increasingly not the point. Mixed race is mainstream.”

The mixed race news story hasn’t come out of nowhere. In fact, BBC 2 television is currently running a Mixed Race Season so Dr. Nandi’s statistics produced for Newsnight were part of a high profile PR campaign. The first offering on 27 September, Shirley, was a critically acclaimed biopic of Welsh singer, Shirley Bassey, who is of Nigerian and English descent and born in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. Bassey, famous for singing the theme to three James Bond movies, was brilliantly played by the young, upcoming actor, Ruth Negga, who is of Ethiopian and white Irish heritage.

 

Last week’s program was the first of a new three-part series, Mixed Britannica, presented by George Alagiah, Sri Lankan–born BBC 1 television news anchor who is of Tamil descent and married to Frances, a white British woman. The couple have two “mixed race” sons. So Alagiah declared a personal interest in the subject.

The Mixed Britannica series explores the history of relationships of people from different ethnic backgrounds in the U.K. Not surprisingly, the first program broadcast covered the port areas which have  been home to seafarers from around the world since the mid- and late-19th century – Yemenis in South Shields, Chinese in Liverpool and the Limehouse area of London’s East End, and Black Caribbeans and West Africans, Somalis, and Yemenis in Tiger Bay.

One of those interviewed was Connie Ho, who was born in Limehouse in 1921 to a Chinese father and a white, English mother. Ho told Alagiah how she and other children of mixed ethnicities were taken to a room above a local restaurant to have their facial characteristics measured and eye colour recorded by eugenicists. This was at the same time that scientists in Germany were about to embark on a series of gruesome experiments with people from Jewish and other despised minority groups. It was only after the Second World War when the full horror of the Holocaust was revealed that British scientists realised the possible impact of their pseudo-scientific studies and pulled back from any further research that might stigmatise and threaten the lives of particular groups of people.

 

The documentary used archival film footage and still photographs to good effect. The Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, Surrey, which was opened in 1869 by orientalist Dr Gottleib Wilhelm Leitner, to provide visiting Muslim students with a place of worship was featured. It is the oldest purpose-built mosque in the UK (mentioned in an earlier post) and is an immense source of pride for the 10,000-strong Muslim (predominantly Pakistani) community that now lives in the Woking area. It was highlighted because it was the place where 22nd Sultan of Johor, reputed to be one of the world’s richest men, married a Glasgow-born white woman, Helen Bartholomew Wilson, the former wife of his physician, in 1930.

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