Examining ethnic fluidity among Britain’s Asian diaspora: A longitudinal study

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table Six: Racial Experiences and Perspectives of Asian People and Asian Americans

Abstract

It is well-known that race and ethnicity are mutable and impermanent. However, most of what we know about within-person changes in these identities comes from literature on Black-white racial boundary crossing in the US & Latin America. As such, existing theories on racial fluidity may not apply as well to cases of ethnic fluidity, given the multidimensional nature of ethnicity, and for a group like the Asian diaspora who are racialized adjacent to the Black-white binary. To address these theoretical and empirical gaps, I draw on theories of racialized assimilation and ethnic boundary making, and unique longitudinal data from the England and Wales Census, to ask: How does self-declared ethnicity change among members of the UK’s Asian diaspora and what explains these changes? Descriptive results reveal that ethnic fluidity is far more common among the diaspora than racial fluidity. Instead of moving to white, Black, or Other categories, most Asian ethnic group members who experience change move to another Asian category, including to and from Other Asian. This demonstrates that the multifaceted nature of ethnicity, and the varied ways one can identify, contributes to ethnic fluidity because of the difficulty to select just one option. Furthermore, I argue that while ethnic fluidity operates on a more granular level, it is still ultimately structured by racial boundaries, even in a context that does not officially classify by race. Hence, this study’s findings suggest that researchers interested in racial and ethnic inequalities ought to incorporate notions of fluidity, to advance our understanding of how both race and ethnicity shape the life chances and everyday experiences of racialized people.

Author

• Victoria Tan, University of Oxford