The article's premise is spot-on about mixed-race Britons playing a role in finding our way through the mess that we've made of identity politics but preciously

The article's premise is spot-on about mixed-race Britons playing a role in finding our way through the mess that we've made of identity politics but preciously for the opposite reason that they seem to suggest. > Yet much of the focus on symbolic and systemic racism overlooks the growing significance of mixed-race Britons, who often defy labels. The attitudes of this group will be crucial in determining the future direction of identity politics. Mixed-race Britons don't exist as a cohesive group of people that share a single identity and world view. Perhaps there are clusters of communities that share similar characteristics but being mixed-race can mean having any number of different cultural heritages. Presenting them as one group who's views sit on a scale between Black and White is almost comically presumptive of the idea that there is a common identity here in the first place. While there isn't necessarily a common identity, there is a shared experience of being mixed-race. It's the experience of being between two cultures and therefore growing up with a strong and consistent awareness of the role our culture plays in shaping who we are. Not only that, growing up as a mixed-race person often also comes with the demand from others that you pick-sides (sometimes literally like Mr. Rees experience during the race riots). This constant pressure to understand who you are in relation to who others are is the root problem that identity politics brings up. Forcing others to categorize the world in the same way you do is the root problem on everyone's mind. The reason this often results in polemical debate is because the different camps feel threatened by the other in how forceful the others are in pushing their own world-views at the potential expense of their own. Identity politics asks us to pick a side and it seems tempting to actually do just that. I think the experiences of mixed-race people help us to understand what it can mean to have an single identity shaped by very different and contrasting world-views. Mixed-race people live with the same kinds of tensions that society as a whole needs to learn to live with. To live with tensions means to accept that there is a difference. We desperately need to defuses the threat of one view annihilating the other. This gives room for meaningful discussion and debate about the relative influence and forcefulness of individual world-views. It depolarizes the extremes and helps us establish a new common identity that gives room for both world-views to coexist. I hope the shared experiences of mixed-race people (and 2nd generation migrants for that matter) will go some way to helping us all learn to coexist in an otherwise increasingly fragmented world. They hold answers not because there are a growing demographic of moderates but because they have lived experience of holding together the tensions that come from different ways of seeing the world.