Social scientists claim that we now live in a 'post-race' society, where 'race' has been replaced by 'ethnicity'. Yet racism is endemic to British society and people often think in terms of 'black' and 'white'. With a marked rise in the number of children from mixed parentage, there is an urgent need to challenge simplistic understandings of 'race', nation and culture, and interrogate what it means to grow up in Britain and claim a 'mixed' identity.

Focusing on mixed-race and inter-ethnic families, this book not only explores current understandings of 'race', but it shows, using innovative research techniques with children, how we come to 'read' race. What influence do photographs and television have on children's ideas about 'race'? How do children use memories and stories to talk about racial differences within their own families? How important is the home and domestic culture in achieving a sense of belonging? Ali also considers, through data gathered from teachers and parents, broader issues relating to the effectiveness of anti-racist and multicultural teaching in schools, and parental concerns over the social mobility and social acceptability of their children.

Rigorously researched, this book is the first to combine children's accounts on 'race' and identity with contemporary cultural theory. Using fascinating case studies, it fills a major gap in this area and provides an original approach to writing on race.

Suki Ali is in the Sociology Department, London School of Economics.

"At a time when teachers and other professionals are searching for ways of understanding 'mixed race' and people who construct themselves as insiders to 'mixed-race' categories are debating how to represent themselves, Mixed Race, Post-Race makes an important and timely contribution to this area. It is an original, insightful and theoretically sophisticated analysis of the social representations, common-sense understandings and lived experiences associated with 'mixed race' ñ both Suki Ali's own and those of 8-11 year old children and their families. The book engages with the contradictions between contemporary cultural theory that focuses on the necessity of thinking 'post-race' and recognising hybridity and 'diaspora space' and the pervasiveness of racism and binary black-white thinking that both reproduces 'race' thinking and renders 'mixed-race' invisible.

Ali's empirical focus on mixed-race children and families explores everyday practices and identities in relation to 'race' and ethnicity at home and at school. The mix of autobiography, biography and ethnographic research in schools and with families in Mixed Race, Post-Race is methodologically innovative and challenges simplistic understandings of race, nation and culture and their intersections with gender and ethnicity. This vivid and clearly-written account will undoubtedly be widely read." --Anne Phoenix, Open University

"Mixed-Race, Post Race is a fundamental contribution to scholarship about the meanings that we attach to ideas of race and ethnicity. Suki Ali has managed to weave together challenging empirical research with original theoretical reflection to provide a timely analysis of mixed race identities. This is a remarkable study that needs to be read by all concerned with these issues academically and in everyday life." --John Solomos, City University, London