London mixed race

Where I grew up, a mixed-race family was something of an anomaly. Families, according to our neighbours — and the pictures on cereal boxes, board games and holiday brochures — meant a white mother and a white father and two children, preferably a boy and a girl, ideally blonde. The father went to work in a suit; the mother stayed home and sang along to Radio 1 while doing the housework. My mother was from Guyana and wore her hair in a short Afro. She liked jumpsuits and jewellery and, shockingly, worked full-time.

Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor will join the ranks of those second-generation mixed-race people who challenge our very perceptions of ethnicity and black identity. In fact, the changing face of mixed-race Britain is something we barely notice even as we are looking directly at it. Perhaps that is the point. Back in the early s we were vaguely aware that young celebrities, such as the late reality TV star Jade Goody or footballer Ryan Giggs, had a black grandparent. But they rarely discussed it or talked of how they perceived themselves. Most of us watch the actor Stephen Graham , or cheer footballers Ross Barkley and Kieran Trippier without registering their ethnicity. Did you just presume they were white?

Mixed is an ethnicity category that has been used by the United Kingdom 's Office for National Statistics since the Census. Colloquially it refers to British citizens or residents whose parents are of two or more different races or ethnic backgrounds. Mixed race people are the fastest growing ethnic group in the UK and numbered 1.

L ast year the photographer Tenee Attoh began taking portraits of multiracial friends and acquaintances against a mottled black background at the Bussey Building in Peckham, southeast London. Born in the UK, she spent most of the first 23 years of her life in Accra and Amsterdam, shuttling between cities and cultures, an experience she found enlightening but problematic. Working in London, Attoh heard similar stories from other mixed-race people, and soon she began publishing her images online at mixedracefaces. Following the death of her mother, to whom the series is dedicated, the project helped Attoh dissect her own multiracial experience — what it means to be connected to two worlds at once, and how society perceives that condition — but it has also sparked an open forum on diversity.