MIXED-RACE Britons are poised to overtake Indians to become the country’s largest ethnic minority within 25 years, the government’s new rights watchdog has forecast. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, said the mixed-race group was seeing an ‘astonishing rise’ and would reach 1.24m by 2020.
But while cross-racial marriages are becoming increasingly widespread and accepted, Phillips has warned that the children of such couples may face a new set of racial problems. He points to the risk of a generation falling victim to ‘identity stripping’, or being unsure which community they belong to.
Phillips, whose previously unpublicised comments were made in a recent speech, said the expansion in mixed-race Britons is not an uncomplicated prospect. The mixed-race Britons are young and they show the highest employment rates of any minority group.
But they also exhibit the highest rates of lone parenthood and family breakdown, in some cases three times the average. They suffer the highest rates of drug treatment . . . Many people talk of identity stripping children who grow up marooned between communities.
The warnings have provoked criticism from some who believe they are unnecessarily pessimistic. Val Hoskins, a trustee of the mixed-race support group People in Harmony, said: ‘The reason my group was started was in response to people like Enoch Powell saying mixed-race people were a cause of conflict, not being one or the other.’
‘Mixed-race people do not see themselves as marooned. It is other people who see them as not belonging.’
>> Jack Grimston <<
