In a week when a lady-in-waiting demanded of a woman from Hackney “where are you really from?”, the results arrived of the 2021 census, which asked what felt to some a similar question.
The Office for National Statistics asked the people of England and Wales to tick one of 19 ethnicity boxes and it has emerged there are now 2.5m households with members of more than one ethnicity – a 25% increase on 2011.
The areas with the most mixed households were in London – Hackney and Lambeth (each at 27%), and outside the capital the most mixed households were in Oxford, Cambridge and Reading. More than a 10th of the population now live with people of more than one ethnicity.
But how easy is it to be part of this vanguard of an increasingly blended Britain?
Jonathan, a white British surgeon born in Scotland, who is married to a British Asian woman born in St Albans, said his three children “have all been asked ‘where are you really from?’, very much like the woman at Buckingham Palace.
“Lots of what some would call ‘ignorance’ I would call racism. It has really angered me that my children or wife can never be from St Albans if they are brown. They are always made to feel slightly ‘other’.”
People living in mixed households contacted by the Guardian spoke of the joys of cultural exchange between extended families, sharing different cuisines and languages as well as tensions over differing social norms – from views on the acceptability of inviting yourself round to expectations about which gender should be the main breadwinner.
In one home, siblings of the same parents ticked different boxes: one white British, the other black British because that is how they saw themselves. There were people who just wanted to answer British, and others who couldn’t see a box that covered their children.
“It’s such a crazy range of options,” said Keisha Davy-Barlow, 27, who has parents of Jamaican heritage and whose husband, Adam, is a white British man. “It’s not how we talk about ethnicity now … If you ask me, I am British.”
Rachael Carden, 57, an academic in Brighton with an Indian father and white British mother, who is married to a white man with whom she has two children, said: “Culturally, educationally, I am white British, but I look brown.”
She says she gets “fed up with survey questions and sometimes I just put white British”, adding that she knows “lots of mixed race people who have done the same thing”. Carden said that being asked to define different ethnicities in the same family felt intrusive and wasn’t a discussion white families were asked to have.
She also noted: “Mixed race people have been subsumed into the agglomeration of the contested term BAME, which absurdly would suggest that all people who are not white (ie black, Asian and minority ethnic) are somehow the same.”
Life in one of Britain’s growing mixed ethnicity households is “for the most part plain sailing”, said Keisha, but added: “You get the occasional odd feeling from somebody. You can see the questions in their minds.”
She said: “You might get people saying things like, ‘Oh my God you are going to have the most beautiful brown babies’.”
Her husband, Adam, added: “That’s a common one”
There have been moments when Adam learned the hard way about the bias faced by black people. “What got me was the first time you noticed a security guard following me round Sainsbury’s and you were livid,” said Keisha, who said she had experienced that often.
James, a white British man in a Derbyshire village married to a Chinese woman, said their experience of racism has been limited to a couple of occasions such as “an old man asking if she is feeding chop suey to the ducks in the park”.
“All my family and friends were so bowled over by her personality that if they had any prejudice it was soon defeated,” he said.
