Mixed Blessings: a reflection

Chapel Member Sabrina Edwards co-led the Mixed Blessings workshop in November with Rev Kate Dean and Emily Momoh of the Camden Black History project. Here she reflects on her experience and why workshops like this one are needed.

The Mixed Blessing: Growing Up Mixed-Race in Britain

Like many Mixed-Race people in Britain, I grew up learning to navigate a world that didn’t quite know what to do with me. And while my experiences felt intensely personal, the research shows they are anything but.

The Mixed ethnic group is the fastest-growing in the UK. Over 1.2 million people identified as Mixed-Race in the 2021 Census - more than double the figure in 2001 - and in some city schools, Mixed-Race children now outnumber Black or Asian students. Yet despite this visibility, our experiences remain under-researched, under-discussed, and often misunderstood.

This is my story - but it’s also a story about Britain, about identity, and about the systems that still struggle to make room for people who don’t fit neatly into a single box.

The Landscape: What It Means to Be Mixed-Race in Britain Today

The data paints a complex picture:

• Mixed-Race pupils - especially White and Black Caribbean - are around three times more likely to be permanently excluded than their White peers.

• GCSE attainment sits consistently below White British and Indian groups, even when Mixed-Race students outperform some other minority groups.

• Employment rates for Mixed-Race adults hover around 65%, far below White British peers.

• Mixed-Race adolescents experience the highest rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm of any ethnic group.

• The Lammy Review found Mixed-Race youth were more likely than Black youth to receive custodial sentences for the same offences.

• Mixed-Race young adults - particularly care leavers - are at heightened risk of homelessness.

  
  

Despite being disproportionately affected in so many areas, Mixed-Race people are often collapsed into “Other,” “BME,” or “ethnic minority,” erasing their specificity.

My story sits directly inside these patterns.

A Childhood of Watching, Noticing, Learning Too Early

I developed a deep sense of justice long before I had the language for it. I remember watching old comedies and films - Carry On, James Bond, westerns - and laughing along because everyone else was, even though something inside me recoiled. The stereotypes didn’t sit right. The jokes weren’t funny. I knew that before I even knew why.

Growing up mixed often means growing up with multiple cultural lenses. You learn to read the room early. You develop a heightened awareness of race because you’re constantly being reminded of it.

Both my parents immigrated to the UK - my dad from Grenada, my mum from Italy. They each carried their own experiences of being “other” in Britain, which meant the messages I absorbed about identity were layered, sometimes contradictory, sometimes painful.

At nine years old I confidently broke myself down into neat portions of Scottish, Portuguese, Grenadian and Italian. This conversation stayed with me for decades. It wasn’t until adulthood, when I entered my details into the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database, that I discovered the Scottish ancestor was not the product of romance but likely a slave owner. The numbers I playfully assigned myself as a child were rooted in a history of violence I had never been taught.

Mixed-Race families often carry these colonial entanglements: unspoken, half-known, quietly shaping identity.

Hair, Colourism and the Body as Public Property

My childhood summers in Italy were filled with sun, sea, and a constant sense of being watched. People would stop and stare - sometimes with curiosity, sometimes with something colder. My hair was always a talking point:

“Why does it get shorter when it’s wet?”“Why doesn’t it even look wet?”

Some questions were innocent. Some weren’t. All reminded me that my appearance was open for public comment.

In London, things weren’t that different. I was told I had “good hair,” meaning: not too kinky, not too difficult. Not too Black. At a youth club in Dagenham, white boys laughed as they touched my curls, recoiling at the “greasiness” of my afro hair products. Shame settled in, quietly.

Sociologist Margaret Hunter calls this aesthetic capital - when proximity to whiteness becomes a form of currency.But even privilege comes with loneliness.

Mixed-Race children learn early that their bodies are sites of fascination, projection, and sometimes disgust. You don’t get to simply be. You are always being interpreted.

Schooling: Underestimation, Curriculum Violence and Bicultural Survival

Back in Tottenham, a diverse environment didn’t guarantee acceptance. I spent much of my childhood as “one of the only.” In dance lessons, in clubs, in the spaces where identity is sharpened, I felt out of place. Beauty was defined by pale skin and straight hair - and I had neither.

My third junior year teacher, Mr Tharp, was the first and last teacher to teach me anything positive about Black history. Ancient Egypt. African inventions. Hairstyles. Creativity. Joy. That brief window of pride closed quickly; secondary school returned me to the colonial curriculum: Blackness beginning and ending with slavery.

Colourism ran deep. Words like blick, red-skin, coolie, half-caste floated through corridors like they meant nothing - and everything. I was misread constantly. Too light for some. Too Black for others. Never quite right.

And then there were the lowered expectations. Teachers predicted B’s where I knew I was capable of A’s. I had to ask to be entered for higher-tier maths. I had to ask to see the GCSE marking criteria. Had I not demanded more, nobody would have offered it.

I refused to be a statistic. But I shouldn’t have had to refuse alone.

Workplace Racism: Shrinking to Fit and the Weight of Palatability

As a teacher and later a leader, I learned another truth about being Mixed-Race in Britain: you’re always managing how Black you’re allowed to be.

I learned to neutralise myself - soften tone, edit expressions, minimise anger, avoid being “too” anything. I feared being accused of “playing the race card” if I named injustice.

There were moments I will never forget:

• A tutor questioning whether I would “fit in” at a university like Exeter.

• A colleague asking if I could swim because “Black people have denser bones.”

• Being passed over for roles while less-experienced white staff moved ahead.

• Being told to “lower my expectations” when I applied for senior leadership positions.

  
  

These interactions weren’t isolated. Research shows racialised educators - especially of Mixed heritage - remain underrepresented in senior leadership and are frequently underestimated or funnelled into pastoral roles.

My lighter skin sometimes shielded me. But it also meant I was misread, misunderstood, and used to make others comfortable.

I was Black - but not too Black.

Friendship, Belonging, Loss and the Spaces We Feel Most Ourselves

As an adult, I’ve built friendships across communities - White, Asian, Mixed-Race. But I’ve had surprisingly few Black friends. For a long time, I wondered why. Was it circumstance? Work environments? How I saw myself? How others saw me?

The death of one of my earliest Black friends forced me to confront this. It made me think deeply about belonging, connection, and where I feel most understood. I’ve learned that I am most myself around people who don’t shy away from discussing whiteness, race, or identity. People who don’t require me to translate my experience.

Mixed-Race people often become experts in racial agility - code-switching, bridging cultures, understanding multiple perspectives at once. These skills have shaped my leadership, my empathy, and my ability to see injustice clearly.

The Boxes We Tick - and the Ones That Don’t Yet Exist

When I was born, there wasn’t even a box for someone like me. The 1991 census forced us into categories that didn’t fit. It wasn’t until 2001 that “Mixed” appeared at all.

Now, I tick “Black – Mixed Other” for my children. But I often wonder what they’ll choose for themselves. Whether these boxes help us understand identity, or whether they simply remind us that Mixed-Race people have never neatly fit inside the racial binaries Britain still clings to.

Mixed-Race visibility destabilises old categories. It forces institutions to confront the inadequacy of racial labels. It reveals how whiteness has shaped systems not designed for multiplicity.

The Language of Identity: Terms, Tensions and the Questions We Don’t Ask Enough

Today, there is a wide - and growing - vocabulary for describing who we are: mixed race, mixed ethnicity, mixed heritage, biracial, multiracial, people of colour, global majority.Each term carries its own history, its own politics, its own emotional resonance. And for many of us, the language we choose shifts over time - shaped by confidence, community, age, and experience.

Yet the deeper truth is this: nearly all these terms exist in relation to whiteness.

Race itself is a social construct, invented to categorise, divide and rank human beings. And as racial categories were created, whiteness was invented alongside them - not simply as one category among many, but as the invisible standard, the baseline, the norm. The reference point against which all other identities are measured.

This raises questions that Mixed-Race people know intimately:

• At what point does a Mixed-Race person become “white”?

• Is it when they’re white-presenting?

• When others read them as white (otherwise known as ‘passing’?

• When their proximity to whiteness affords them safety that others do not get?

• Or does whiteness remain a social status they can access but never fully inhabit?

  
  

None of this is simple.

There were many aspects of identity I couldn’t cover in the workshop:the evolution of racial terminology, the invention of whiteness, the politics of “global majority,” the discomfort of labels, and the question of who gets to define us.

These conversations matter - and they sit at the heart of what it means to be Mixed-Race in a society still organised around racial boundaries it insists are meaningless.

A Mixed Blessing

The challenges are real - in education, mental health, employment, criminal justice. But the story is not only one of struggle.

Research shows that many Mixed-Race people develop resilient, reflective, grounded identities in adulthood. We draw strength from our multiplicity. We learn to empathise deeply, navigate complexity, and build bridges in places where others see only boundaries.

Our identities are not puzzles to be solved; they are resources to be drawn from.

Reflection

This workshop affirmed that we need more spaces where people can speak honestly about identity without fear of being dismissed.

Spaces where people can say:“This happened to me,”and have others respond,“I see you. That happened to me too.”

The recent Mixed Blessings Workshop in November created space for honest sharing and meaningful connection among people with mixed ethnic heritage. Yasmen, one of the attendees, described what made the gathering so special: read her blog post here.