In The Mix

The BBC’s season later this year on mixed-race people is an obvious delight to, in the words of Break Dancing Jesus, late of this Parish, “the Mulatto Hitler” to Robert Mugabe’s Black Hitler. In Britain today, one in five children under five is mixed-race, and no fewer than one in two children with an Afro-Caribbean parent also has a white parent.

But then, the Afro-Caribbean ethnic group is itself an invention in this country – each of the West Indies is distinct, but people from all of them were classified together when they moved here – and if anyone is mixed-race, then they are. Just look at them. Like African-Americans, or Saint Helenians, or Cape Coloureds, or Anglo-Indians, they are defined precisely by their mixed ancestry and by the culture thus formed.

If their almost Caucasian-looking grandchildren are still eating jerk chicken and listening to reggae, then they will be much like the White Jamaicans, also visibly mixed-race, and an integral part of Jamaican society with all that that entails.