Is it time to ditch the term ‘black, Asian and minority ethnic’ (BAME)?

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The peoples of Europe are of such mongrel origin that any attempt at classification according to only two characteristics (colour of eyes and hair) would exclude two-thirds of the population in any region studied; the addition of a third characteristic (cranial formation) would leave us with a still smaller fraction of the population presenting the required combination of all three characteristics; and with the inclusion of stature and nasal index, the proportion of «pure» types would become infinitesimal.

We may take it then that there are no pure human races; at the very most it would be possible to define a pure race in terms of the incidence of one selected somatic characteristic, but never in terms of all or even of the majority of hereditary traits. Nevertheless there is a widespread belief that there was a time in antiquity when racial types were pure, that miscegenation is of relatively recent date, and that it threatens humanity with a general degeneration and retrogression. This belief lacks the slightest support from science. The mixing of races has been going on since the very beginning of human life on earth, though obviously the improvement of communications and the general increase in population has stimulated it in the last two centuries. Migration is as old as the human race, and automatically implies cross-breeding between groups.

Juan Comas, Racial Myths (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 1951), 12-13.

Is it time to ditch the term ‘black, Asian and minority ethnic’ (BAME)?

Is it time to ditch the term ‘black, Asian and minority ethnic’ (BAME)?

The Guardian
2015-05-22

Lola Okolosie, Joseph Harker, Leah Green, and Emma Dabiri

This week, former chairman of the commission for racial equality Trevor Phillips gave a speech in which he suggested that phrases such as black and minority ethnic (BME) and black, Asian and minority ethnic (Bame) have become outdated, existing purely “to tidy away the messy jumble of real human beings who share only one characteristic – that they don’t have white skin”. He said the acronyms could be divisive, and actually served to mask the disadvantages suffered by specific ethnic and cultural groups. Instead, Phillips suggested, we could potentially adopt terms commonly used in the US, such as “visible minorities” or “people of colour”. Here, four writers discuss the issue…

…Leah Green: ‘I don’t feel multiple heritage – I feel mixed race’…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Emma Dabiri, Joseph Harker, Leah Green, Lola Okolosie, The Guardian, Trevor Phillips

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 15th, 2016 at 20:46Z and is filed under Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

Is it time to ditch the term ‘black, Asian and minority ethnic’ (BAME)?

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