Ethnicity Statistics as Tricky Tools in “Post-Racial” Britain

The inclusion of a “mixed and multiple ethnic” category in the UK census since 2001 has mobilized a post-racial discourse that sensationalizes Britain’s growing mixed-race population as representing Britain’s post-raciality. Two decades later, the 2011 census was linked up with National Health Service records to provide death statistics disaggregated by ethnicity. This article explores the consequences of these statistics for Britain’s claims of post-raciality, given that the Office for National Statistics reported the “mixed and multiple ethnic” category as dying at amongst the highest rates of suicide in the UK between 2012 and 2019. In this article, I use feminist data science methods to research the UK’s ethnicity statistics and surrounding discourses in order to analyze the co-existence of celebratory narratives of mixedness and high rates of suicide. Drawing on Rajani Bhatia’s articulation of the male/female sex ratio as a “tricky tool” for feminist struggle, I consider the UK’s ethnicity statistics as a tricky tool for research on mixedness at the intersections of the overrepresentation of mixed lives and the underrepresentation of mixed deaths in “post-racial” Britain.