Race, place, love and family: Narratives from Black mixed-race families in a semi-rural/suburban town in England

This thesis is a narrative ethnography of Black (and white) mixed-race families living in a semi-rural/suburban town in the English West Midlands. Tracing migration histories from Jamaica and Saint Kitts to Birmingham and Bromsgrove between 1948 and 2019, it is a complex multi-generational portrait of family life. Based on the narratives of twenty-two individual and family ethnographic interviews over an eighteen-month period, a research methodology that focussed on the wider social contexts of place uncovered the coexistence of an often silent family love with racism (hooks, 2000). I also explore the intricate ways in which race is socially reproduced in familial and social relationships amid the heightened monitoring of racialised boundaries of belonging routinely found in semi-rural/suburban places.

Using the concepts of hegemonic whiteness and cultures of racism, the thesis shows how Black mixed-race families in semi-rural/suburban places become susceptible to both negotiating and reproducing the unspoken power dynamics of dominating cultures, which demand the consent of both the (white) racial majority and the racially minoritised. It is a demonstration of the active struggle to maintain the imaginations of (white) place, written with sensitivity not only to the way these processes intimately pervade familial relationships, but also to how people still resist these everyday and mundane interpersonal, structural and systemic (intimate) negotiations. The thesis contributes to the sociology of race and racism, mixed-race studies, ethnographies of race and class and (matricentric) family studies.