Black Mixed-Race British Males and the Role of School Teachers: New Theory and Evidence

Abstract

Whilst there remains a crisis of Black marginality both inside and outside of the British academe, the Black mixed-race1 male is yet further overlooked in scholarly work. To advance our understanding of Black Britain, as this collection seeks to do, we must consider the growing Black mixed-race population. Whilst education has been a key site for Black activism (Andrews, 2014; Warmington, 2014), the Black mixed-race male, despite notably low attainment and high exclusion rates, remains a salient omission from the activist and scholarly work focusing on ethnic minority educational experiences (Tikly et al., 2004; Williams, 2011). In highlighting both commonalities and differences between Blackness and Black mixedness, this chapter does not seek to do the politically damaging work of fragmenting Britain’s Black population but rather, to move towards a reconceptualisation of Blackness that adequately reflects the experiences of a growing segment of its population. As Stuart Hall (1996, 443) teaches us:[t]here is no sense in which a new phase in black cultural politics could replace the earlier one. Nevertheless it is true that as the struggle moves forward and assumes new forms, it does to some degree displace, reorganize and reposition the different cultural strategies in relation to one another.