No Longer A Black And White World?
For 21-year-old Jarneia Richard-Noel, the idea that being mixed race influences her behaviour is something that she’s very familiar with.
Could there be any truth in this? Could being mixed race have a bearing on an individual’s personality and behaviour?
Jarneia’s not alone; she’s one of more than one million mixed race people in the UK, with Londoners accounting for 400,000 of them according to the ONS’ 2011 Census. The National Statistics classification reported that they are the fastest growing ethnic minority group and will be the largest in the UK by 2020.
She refers to the slang term ‘lightie’ which is used to describe a mixed race or black person with a lighter skin tone, as well as the phrase ‘feeling yourself’, usually used when an individual is feeling confident.
“Oh, you give slow replies, oh, you’re feeling yourself, it’s ‘cos you’re a lightie. Oh you’re on your lightie behaviour. It’s stupid really.”
The definition of race has been met with varied views. Ann Morning, an Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University draws on her findings from interviewing over 40 biology and anthropology professors. “Almost 40 per cent described races as groups of people who share certain innate, inherited biological traits. In contrast, over 60 per cent argued that races do not correspond to patterns of human biological variation.”
Nikki Khanna, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont believes that race is a social construct. “Humans, regardless of race, are almost genetically identical – sharing 99 per cent of our DNA. We, as humans, created this thing called ‘race’. What is ‘black’ in Brazil is not what is ‘black’ in the US or in the UK. We, as humans, make race real every day – via prejudice, discrimination and racism. Though biologically race is fiction, socially we make it a reality.”
For mixed race individuals, Dr Peter Aspinall, a Sociology lecturer at the University of Kent explains that there is a “very large range” of factors that shape how mixed individuals define themselves.
“These might include, for example, how a person is socialised by his/her parents in their teenage years and earlier; influences of wider family members; the ethnic composition of the neighbourhood where a person is brought up; the ethnic composition of school environments.”
Aspinall goes on to list other factors. “The ethnic patterning of friendships; the ethnicity, race of partner or spouse; experiences of racism and discrimination; how the person feels other perceive them in ethnic and racial terms; and broader factors such as social class and living in deprived neighbourhoods.”
Nevertheless, race isn’t an important aspect of self-identity for all mixed race people. Aspinall discusses his findings from his 2013 survey with Miri Song. “A number of our mixed race respondents, including those who reported in the survey that their parents’ race/ethnicity was important to them, revealed in their interviews that their mixedness was not particularly central to their sense of selves…being British and being immersed in mainstream British culture was a taken-for-granted common denominator of experience”.
50-year-old Nathan Rogers* was born to a white mother and black father. He lives in Kent with his Caucasian wife, step son and his daughter from a previous relationship. He grew up in a care home from the age of six weeks in an environment with black, white and disabled children.
Like the respondents in Aspinall and Song’s survey, he doesn’t believe that his mixed race heritage is central to who he is. “The fact that we were parentless made all of us different in society. I feel that learning to deal with being ‘different’ shaped my identity but that was not to do with my race. I am British and I am who I am. Every mixed race person is different, people are just different.”
Khanna adds that phenotype, the way that someone looks, plays a significant role, but also notes that race isn’t static. “How one racially identifies may also change over one’s lifetime and change from context to context, for example someone of black-white ancestry may identify as multiracial as an adolescent and as black as an adult, or shift between identities depending on the situation or context.”
This is something that 20-year-old Zoe Mills identifies with. She was born to a white mother and Jamaican father and lives with her partner of four years in Stevenage. She refers to one of her best friends Rachel, who she’s known for over a decade. “If I chill with Rachel, I act like a white girl sometimes, I’m more well spoken too, but when I’m at work with my black guy friend Maxwell, I act different, the way I talk, the jokes, even my music taste and choice is different.”
A particular social psychological process that Sociology professor Khanna often writes about is the idea that people see themselves as others do. “Many of the people I interview self identity as black because that is how (they believe) they are viewed in larger society. In fact, Barack Obama once said he self-identifies as black because that’s how the world sees him. For many others as well, their self identity is rooted in how they think larger society views them.”
This is the case for 23-year-old Tracee*. She grew up in East London before making a career move to Geneva in December 2015. Tracee* was born to a mother of Ghanaian and Syrian descent and a Ghanaian father, yet she doesn’t see herself as mixed. “I’m not black, I’m human, but in the eyes of the world I am black, so I’ll check that box.”
After securing a scholarship to study in Brighton when she was 16, she went on to complete a degree in Political Science at the University of York with a stint in California. Last year, she graduated with a Masters in Comparative and International Education at the University of Oxford. “You are who you are, God blessed us all with life and talents, I don’t see my race as an impediment or handicap.”
Alana Butler, an instructor in School of Continuing Education (Psychology) at Ryerson University explains that this outlook is a concept known as hypo descent where racial identity is based on the minority culture.
“A person with one black and one white parent would still be considered black… Society still classifies race by skin colour/tone and mixed race individuals with dark skin, famous examples including Halle Berry, are labelled black. Whiteness is a guarded category of privilege and power so access to white racial identification is restricted,” she says.
Butler believes that racial identity development is an important means of survival. “Developing a sense of racial identity provides individuals with a form of cultural capital that can help them navigate in society.”
Within developing a sense of racial identity, Khanna’s research has shown that mixed race people often “perform race” to signal their identity. “People may alter the way they dress, talk, or even look to appear ‘more black’. In some cases, they may selectively date a particular group to signal their preferred racial identities to others.”
Makeda Lewis, a 20-year-old Psychology student from West London grew up in a predominantly Asian area. She was born to an Indian mother and Grenadian father.
She’s currently in a relationship with a black male which she believes is because her father ‘drummed in’ that she ‘should be with a black man’. “I don’t believe I ‘act black’ though ‘cos even though I have a lot of black friends, I don’t act anything like them. I love Tim Burton movies and Sci-Fi. That’s not to say all black people don’t like these things, it’s just my black friends are more interested in reality TV shows and going clubbing.”
Breeding and genetics studies have confirmed that genes influence personality, but are shaped depending on context. For example, people with a specific gene have a higher risk of depression and antisocial behaviour that can only be triggered if they experience extreme stress or bad treatment during their childhood.
However, Michael J Frank, Psychology Professor at Brown University believes that genes don’t directly influence behaviour.
“They do influence aspects of behaviour by affecting its neural underpinnings. In our research, we have found that genetic variants linked to differing dopamine function in the striatum,” he says.
When dopamine works within the striatum of the brain, it provides feelings of pleasure and the reinforcement to continue to participate in “rewarding” activities such as eating, sex or drug abuse.
Frank’s research with his team has found that differing genetic variants influence the way dopamine works and the extent of which people learn from the positive or negative consequences of their decisions.
“The influence of these same individual genes may not translate to clear effects on personality variables”, he says, “still, the impact of many clusters of such genes could certainly do so.”
The extent to which a mixture of gene variants can affect an individual has yet to be uncovered.
“Studying the impact of genes across races is complicated, some traits and mental illnesses are known to be heritable via genes but this does not mean that we know the specific genes involved or even whether there are only a few relevant ones or several hundred… then it becomes difficult to know if any effect of a given gene on behaviour is related to the ones under study or to any number of others ones,” adds Frank.
So does race have a bearing on how a mixed race individual behaves? “My mother is a single parent who taught us about our ethnic background from a very young age, we understood teachings and values from a different perspective. I feel that my whole life has been shaped by my races and has made me into the person I am today,” Zoe admits.
*Name changed to anonymise case study
