The construction and understanding of mixed-race identities at a superdiverse youth football club: Hybridity, confusion and contra-fusion

Abstract

Using the findings of two years’ ethnographic fieldwork, the article examines the construction and understanding of mixed-race identities at a football club situated in a superdiverse area of London. It describes how the characteristics of superdiversity together with the dynamic between parents/guardians, children, coaches and scouts shape people’s perceptions of the ethnic options available to mixed-race young people. I try to show how assertions relating to these ethnic options are consistent with understandings of hybridity. More specifically, there is a tension between fusion and preservation and in some instances a slippage between discourses of biology and culture. This reflects confusion about mixedness and leads to what I have called ‘contra-fusion’: a way of reasoning that resists the formation of integrated mixed identities by emphasising the preservation of raced and gendered inheritances in the constitution of mixedness.