6 - ‘Ghanaian first’: Nationality, Race and the Slippery Side of Belonging for Mixed-Race Ghanaians
Africa Development,
Vol. 47 No. 4 (2022): Africa Development
Abstract
This article explores the multifaceted ways in which race impacts on processes of identification with the Ghanaian nation for mixed-race Ghanaians. Using a constructionist approach to identity, which highlights the agency of actors, the article underscores the shifting and racialising nature of national identity in transnational contexts. The article argues that whether they were born and raised in Ghana or they grew up in a Western country, mixed-race Ghanaians mainly identify as ‘Ghanaian first’. Their affiliation to Ghana stems both from growing up in the country and from being identified as black outsiders in countries of the white Western world. In both contexts, identifying as a Ghanaian is a source of pride and empowerment. However, their membership of the Ghanaian nation is often contested in their everyday life by the majority black-identified Ghanaian population, based on ethnoracial (non)authenticity premises. As such, mixed-race Ghanaian participants actively shape their Ghanaianness to justify their right to belong.
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- Agyeman, E.A. and Amoako-Gyampah, A. K., 2019, Cross-Cultural Ties between Ghana and Egypt: The Agency of the Egyptian Community in Accra, Ghana, African Human Mobility Review, p. 1637.
- Akyeampong, E., 2004, Memories of place and belonging: identity, citizenship, and the Lebanese in Ghana, Ghana Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 25–42.
- Allouche-Benayoun, J., 2008, Issus de couples mixtes: une identité à construire, in Lamine, A.-S., Lautman, F. and Mathieu, S., eds., La religion de l’autre, Paris: L’Harmattan. pp. 69–82.
- Ampofo, A. A., Okyerefo, M. P. and Pervarah, M., 2009, Phallic Competence: Fatherhood and the Making of Men in Ghana, Culture, Society and Masculinities, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 59–78.
- Anderson, B., 2006, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London, UK: Verso Books.
- Appiah, K. A., 1992, In my father’s house: Africa in the philosophy of culture, London, UK: Methuen.
- Asante, G., 2016, Glocalized whiteness: Sustaining and reproducing whiteness through ‘skin toning’ in post-colonial Ghana, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 87–103.
- Aspinall, P. J., 2003, The conceptualisation and categorisation of mixed race/ ethnicity in Britain and North America: Identity options and the role of the state, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 269–296. Aspinall, P. J. and Song, M., 2014, Capturing ‘mixed race’ in the decennial UK censuses, in King-O’riain, R., Small, S., Mahtani, M., Song, M. and Spickard, P., eds, Global Mixed Race, New York and London, UK: New York University Press, pp. 213–237.
- Bratter, J., 2007, Will Multiracial Survive to the Next Generation? The Racial Classification of Children of Multiracial Parents, Social Forces, Vol. 86, No. 2, pp. 821–849.
- Bruner, E. M., 1996, Tourism in Ghana, American Anthropologist, Vol. 98, No. 2, pp. 290–304.
- Brunsma, D. L., 2005, Interracial Families and the Racial Identification of Mixed- Race Children: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Social Forces, Vol. 84, No. 2, pp. 1131–1157.
- Ceuppens, B. and Geschiere, P., 2005, Autochthony: local or global? New modes in the struggle over citizenship and belonging in Africa and Europe, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 34, pp. 385–407.
- Childs, E. C., Lyons, A. and Jones, S. L., 2021, Migrating mixedness: Exploring mixed identity development in New York City, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 782–801.
- Choudhry, S., 2010, Multifaceted identity of interethnic young people: Chameleon identities, Farnham and Burlington, UK: Ashgate Publishing.
- Darby, P., 2013, ‘Let us rally around the flag’: Football, nation-building, and pan- Africanism in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, The Journal of African History, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 221–246.
- Darkwah, A. K. and Ampofo, A. A., 2008, Race, gender and global love: non- Ghanaian wives, insiders or outsiders in Ghana? International Journal of Sociology of the Family, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 187–208.
- De Witte, M. and Spronk, R., 2014, Introduction. ‘African’: A Contested Qualifier in Global Africa, African Diaspora, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 165–176.
- Edwards, R., Ali, S., Caballero, C. and Song, M., eds, 2012, International perspectives on racial and ethnic mixedness and mixing, London, UK: Routledge.
- Gallissot, R., 1987, Sous l’identité, le procès d’identification, L’Homme et la Société, Vol. 83, No. 1, pp. 12–27.
- Geoffrion, K., 2016, Femmes blanches en Afrique subsaharienne. De la coopération internationale à la mixité conjugale, Cahiers d’études africaines, No. 221–222, pp. 127–152.
- Gilliéron, G., 2022, Narratives of belonging in transnational contexts: The multidimensional experience of mixedness, in Le Gall, J., Therrien, C. and Geoffrion, K., Mixed Families in a Transnational World, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 88–106.
- Ghana Statistical Service, 2013, 2010 Population and Housing Census.
- Gordon, M. M., 1964, Assimilation in American life: The role of race, religion, and national origins, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Gullickson, A. and Morning, A., 2011, Choosing race: Multiracial ancestry and identification, Social Science Research, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 498–512.
- Hage, G., 2005, A not so multi-sited ethnography of a not so imagined community, Anthropological Theory, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 463–475.
- Haritaworn, J., 2007, Beautiful beasts. Ambivalence and distinction in the gender identity negotiations of multiracialised women of Thai descent, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 30, No. 5, pp. 391–403.
- Haritaworn, J., 2009, Hybrid Border-Crossers? Towards a Radical Socialisation of ‘Mixed Race’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 115–132. Hill, L., 2010, Black berry, sweet juice: On being black and white in Canada, Toronto: Harper Collins Canada.
- Joseph‐Salisbury, R., 2019, Wrangling with the Black monster: young Black mixed‐ race men and masculinities, The British Journal Of Sociology, Vol. 70, No. 5, pp. 1754 –1773.
- Kalua, F., 2009, Homi Bhabha’s Third Space and African identity, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 23–32.
- King-O’Riain, R., 2014, Global mixed race: A conclusion, in King-O’Riain, R., Small, S., Mahtani, M., Song, M. and Spickard, P., eds., Global Mixed Race, New York and London, UK: New York University Press, pp. 263–280.
- Kobo, O., 2010, ‘We are citizens too’: the politics of citizenship in independent Ghana, The Journal of Modern African Studies, pp. 67–94.
- Le Gall, J. and Meintel, D., 2015, Cultural and Identity Transmission in Mixed Couples in Quebec, Canada: Normalising Plural Identities as a Path to Social Integration, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 662, No. 1, pp. 112–128.
- Lindner, U., 2009, Contested concepts of ‘white’/‘native’ and mixed marriages in German South-West Africa and the Cape Colony 1900–1914: A histoire croisée’, Journal of Namibian Studies: History Politics Culture, Vol. 6, pp. 57–79.
- Maalouf, A., 2014, Les identités meurtrières, Paris: Grasset.
- Mckenzie, L., 2012, Finding value on a council estate: Voices of white mothers with mixed-race children in St-Anns, Nottingham, in Edwards, R., Ali, S., Caballero, C. and Song, M., eds, International perspectives on racial and ethnic mixedness and mixing, London, UK, and New York: Routledge, pp. 92–107.
- Mahtani, M., 2006, Interrogating the hyphen-nation: Canadian multicultural policy and ‘mixed race’ identities’, in Bolaria, B. S. and Hier, S. P., eds, Identity and belonging: Rethinking race and ethnicity in Canada, Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press Inc, pp. 163–177.
- Mahtani, M., Kwan-Lafond, D. and Taylor, L., 2014, Exploring the mixed race nation: Mixed race identities in the Canadian context, in King-O’Riain, R., Small, S., Mahtani, M., Song, M. and Spickard, P., eds, Global Mixed Race, New York and London, UK: New York University Press, pp. 238–262.
- Mahtani, M. and Moreno, A., 2001, Same Difference: Towards a More Unified Discourse in Mixed Race theory, in Parker, D. and Song, M., eds, Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’, London, UK: Pluto Books, pp. 65–75.
- Manuh, T., 1998, Ghanaians, Ghanaian Canadians, and Asantes: Citizenship and identity among migrants in Toronto, Africa Today, Vol. 45, No. 3/4, pp. 481–493.
- Mensah, J., Firang, D., Awafo, V., Odartei, G. and Duodu, E. C., 2018, Estimating and Appraising a Diasporic Population for Diaspora Engagement: Methodological Options in the Case of Ghanaians in Canada, Canadian Journal of Tropical Geography, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 1–9.
- McDonnell, E. M. and Fine, G. A., 2011, Pride and shame in Ghana: Collective memory and nationalism among elite students, African Studies Review, Vol. 54, No. 3, pp. 121–142.
- Mphahlele, E., 1974, The African Image, New York: Praeger Publishers.
- Paragg, J., 2015, ‘Canadian-first’: Mixed race self-identification and Canadian belonging, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 21–44.
- Paragg, J., 2017, ‘What are you?’: Mixed race responses to the racial gaze, Ethnicities, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 277–298.
- Park, R. E., 1928, Human migration and the marginal man, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 6, pp. 881–893.
- Pierre, J., 2012, The predicament of blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the politics of race, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Quayson, A., 2014. Oxford Street, Accra, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Ray, C. E., 2009, ‘The white wife problem’: Sex, race and the contested politics of repatriation to interwar British West Africa, Gender and History, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 628–646.
- Ray, C. E., 2015, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
- Rocha, Z. L. and Yeoh, B. S., 2021, Hierarchies of mixedness: Hybridity, mixed-race racisms and belonging for Eurasians in Singapore, Ethnic and Racial Studies, pp. 1–19.
- Rockquemore, K. A., 2006, Between black and white: Exploring the biracial experience, in Bolaria, B. S. and Hier, S. P., eds, Identity and belonging: Rethinking race and ethnicity in Canadian society, Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press Inc, pp. 147–161.
- Stonequist, E. V., 1935, The Problem of the Marginal Man, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 1–12.
- Storrs, D., 1999, Whiteness as stigma: Essentialist identity work by mixed‐race women, Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 187–212.
- Tsuda, T., 2014, ‘I’m American, not Japanese!’: the struggle for racial citizenship among later-generation Japanese Americans, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 405–424.
- Twine, F. W., 1996. Brown skinned white girls: Class, culture and the construction of white identity in suburban communities, Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 205–224.
- Twumasi-Ankrah, Y., 2019, Being Black, being British, being Ghanaian–A Discussion on Belonging, Graduate Journal of Social Science, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 12–35.
- Unterreiner, A., 2015, Enfants de couples mixtes: liens sociaux et identités, Rennes: PUR.
- Van Zyl-Hermann, D. and Boersema, J., 2017, Introduction: the politics of whiteness in Africa, Africa, Vol. 87, No. 4, pp. 651–661.
- Waring, C. D. L and Purkayastha, B., 2017, ‘I’m a different kind of biracial’: how black/white biracial Americans with immigrant parents negotiate race, Social Identities, Vol. 23, No. 5, pp. 614–630.
- Yuval-Davis, N., 2006, Belonging and the politics of belonging, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 197–214.
References
Agyeman, E.A. and Amoako-Gyampah, A. K., 2019, Cross-Cultural Ties between Ghana and Egypt: The Agency of the Egyptian Community in Accra, Ghana, African Human Mobility Review, p. 1637.
Akyeampong, E., 2004, Memories of place and belonging: identity, citizenship, and the Lebanese in Ghana, Ghana Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 25–42.
Allouche-Benayoun, J., 2008, Issus de couples mixtes: une identité à construire, in Lamine, A.-S., Lautman, F. and Mathieu, S., eds., La religion de l’autre, Paris: L’Harmattan. pp. 69–82.
Ampofo, A. A., Okyerefo, M. P. and Pervarah, M., 2009, Phallic Competence: Fatherhood and the Making of Men in Ghana, Culture, Society and Masculinities, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 59–78.
Anderson, B., 2006, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London, UK: Verso Books.
Appiah, K. A., 1992, In my father’s house: Africa in the philosophy of culture, London, UK: Methuen.
Asante, G., 2016, Glocalized whiteness: Sustaining and reproducing whiteness through ‘skin toning’ in post-colonial Ghana, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 87–103.
Aspinall, P. J., 2003, The conceptualisation and categorisation of mixed race/ ethnicity in Britain and North America: Identity options and the role of the state, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 269–296. Aspinall, P. J. and Song, M., 2014, Capturing ‘mixed race’ in the decennial UK censuses, in King-O’riain, R., Small, S., Mahtani, M., Song, M. and Spickard, P., eds, Global Mixed Race, New York and London, UK: New York University Press, pp. 213–237.
Bratter, J., 2007, Will Multiracial Survive to the Next Generation? The Racial Classification of Children of Multiracial Parents, Social Forces, Vol. 86, No. 2, pp. 821–849.
Bruner, E. M., 1996, Tourism in Ghana, American Anthropologist, Vol. 98, No. 2, pp. 290–304.
Brunsma, D. L., 2005, Interracial Families and the Racial Identification of Mixed- Race Children: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Social Forces, Vol. 84, No. 2, pp. 1131–1157.
Ceuppens, B. and Geschiere, P., 2005, Autochthony: local or global? New modes in the struggle over citizenship and belonging in Africa and Europe, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 34, pp. 385–407.
Childs, E. C., Lyons, A. and Jones, S. L., 2021, Migrating mixedness: Exploring mixed identity development in New York City, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 782–801.
Choudhry, S., 2010, Multifaceted identity of interethnic young people: Chameleon identities, Farnham and Burlington, UK: Ashgate Publishing.
Darby, P., 2013, ‘Let us rally around the flag’: Football, nation-building, and pan- Africanism in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, The Journal of African History, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 221–246.
Darkwah, A. K. and Ampofo, A. A., 2008, Race, gender and global love: non- Ghanaian wives, insiders or outsiders in Ghana? International Journal of Sociology of the Family, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 187–208.
De Witte, M. and Spronk, R., 2014, Introduction. ‘African’: A Contested Qualifier in Global Africa, African Diaspora, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 165–176.
Edwards, R., Ali, S., Caballero, C. and Song, M., eds, 2012, International perspectives on racial and ethnic mixedness and mixing, London, UK: Routledge.
Gallissot, R., 1987, Sous l’identité, le procès d’identification, L’Homme et la Société, Vol. 83, No. 1, pp. 12–27.
Geoffrion, K., 2016, Femmes blanches en Afrique subsaharienne. De la coopération internationale à la mixité conjugale, Cahiers d’études africaines, No. 221–222, pp. 127–152.
Gilliéron, G., 2022, Narratives of belonging in transnational contexts: The multidimensional experience of mixedness, in Le Gall, J., Therrien, C. and Geoffrion, K., Mixed Families in a Transnational World, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 88–106.
Ghana Statistical Service, 2013, 2010 Population and Housing Census.
Gordon, M. M., 1964, Assimilation in American life: The role of race, religion, and national origins, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gullickson, A. and Morning, A., 2011, Choosing race: Multiracial ancestry and identification, Social Science Research, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 498–512.
Hage, G., 2005, A not so multi-sited ethnography of a not so imagined community, Anthropological Theory, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 463–475.
Haritaworn, J., 2007, Beautiful beasts. Ambivalence and distinction in the gender identity negotiations of multiracialised women of Thai descent, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 30, No. 5, pp. 391–403.
Haritaworn, J., 2009, Hybrid Border-Crossers? Towards a Radical Socialisation of ‘Mixed Race’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 115–132. Hill, L., 2010, Black berry, sweet juice: On being black and white in Canada, Toronto: Harper Collins Canada.
Joseph‐Salisbury, R., 2019, Wrangling with the Black monster: young Black mixed‐ race men and masculinities, The British Journal Of Sociology, Vol. 70, No. 5, pp. 1754 –1773.
Kalua, F., 2009, Homi Bhabha’s Third Space and African identity, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 23–32.
King-O’Riain, R., 2014, Global mixed race: A conclusion, in King-O’Riain, R., Small, S., Mahtani, M., Song, M. and Spickard, P., eds., Global Mixed Race, New York and London, UK: New York University Press, pp. 263–280.
Kobo, O., 2010, ‘We are citizens too’: the politics of citizenship in independent Ghana, The Journal of Modern African Studies, pp. 67–94.
Le Gall, J. and Meintel, D., 2015, Cultural and Identity Transmission in Mixed Couples in Quebec, Canada: Normalising Plural Identities as a Path to Social Integration, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 662, No. 1, pp. 112–128.
Lindner, U., 2009, Contested concepts of ‘white’/‘native’ and mixed marriages in German South-West Africa and the Cape Colony 1900–1914: A histoire croisée’, Journal of Namibian Studies: History Politics Culture, Vol. 6, pp. 57–79.
Maalouf, A., 2014, Les identités meurtrières, Paris: Grasset.
Mckenzie, L., 2012, Finding value on a council estate: Voices of white mothers with mixed-race children in St-Anns, Nottingham, in Edwards, R., Ali, S., Caballero, C. and Song, M., eds, International perspectives on racial and ethnic mixedness and mixing, London, UK, and New York: Routledge, pp. 92–107.
Mahtani, M., 2006, Interrogating the hyphen-nation: Canadian multicultural policy and ‘mixed race’ identities’, in Bolaria, B. S. and Hier, S. P., eds, Identity and belonging: Rethinking race and ethnicity in Canada, Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press Inc, pp. 163–177.
Mahtani, M., Kwan-Lafond, D. and Taylor, L., 2014, Exploring the mixed race nation: Mixed race identities in the Canadian context, in King-O’Riain, R., Small, S., Mahtani, M., Song, M. and Spickard, P., eds, Global Mixed Race, New York and London, UK: New York University Press, pp. 238–262.
Mahtani, M. and Moreno, A., 2001, Same Difference: Towards a More Unified Discourse in Mixed Race theory, in Parker, D. and Song, M., eds, Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’, London, UK: Pluto Books, pp. 65–75.
Manuh, T., 1998, Ghanaians, Ghanaian Canadians, and Asantes: Citizenship and identity among migrants in Toronto, Africa Today, Vol. 45, No. 3/4, pp. 481–493.
Mensah, J., Firang, D., Awafo, V., Odartei, G. and Duodu, E. C., 2018, Estimating and Appraising a Diasporic Population for Diaspora Engagement: Methodological Options in the Case of Ghanaians in Canada, Canadian Journal of Tropical Geography, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 1–9.
McDonnell, E. M. and Fine, G. A., 2011, Pride and shame in Ghana: Collective memory and nationalism among elite students, African Studies Review, Vol. 54, No. 3, pp. 121–142.
Mphahlele, E., 1974, The African Image, New York: Praeger Publishers.
Paragg, J., 2015, ‘Canadian-first’: Mixed race self-identification and Canadian belonging, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 21–44.
Paragg, J., 2017, ‘What are you?’: Mixed race responses to the racial gaze, Ethnicities, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 277–298.
Park, R. E., 1928, Human migration and the marginal man, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 6, pp. 881–893.
Pierre, J., 2012, The predicament of blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the politics of race, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Quayson, A., 2014. Oxford Street, Accra, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ray, C. E., 2009, ‘The white wife problem’: Sex, race and the contested politics of repatriation to interwar British West Africa, Gender and History, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 628–646.
Ray, C. E., 2015, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Rocha, Z. L. and Yeoh, B. S., 2021, Hierarchies of mixedness: Hybridity, mixed-race racisms and belonging for Eurasians in Singapore, Ethnic and Racial Studies, pp. 1–19.
Rockquemore, K. A., 2006, Between black and white: Exploring the biracial experience, in Bolaria, B. S. and Hier, S. P., eds, Identity and belonging: Rethinking race and ethnicity in Canadian society, Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press Inc, pp. 147–161.
Stonequist, E. V., 1935, The Problem of the Marginal Man, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 1–12.
Storrs, D., 1999, Whiteness as stigma: Essentialist identity work by mixed‐race women, Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 187–212.
Tsuda, T., 2014, ‘I’m American, not Japanese!’: the struggle for racial citizenship among later-generation Japanese Americans, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 405–424.
Twine, F. W., 1996. Brown skinned white girls: Class, culture and the construction of white identity in suburban communities, Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 205–224.
Twumasi-Ankrah, Y., 2019, Being Black, being British, being Ghanaian–A Discussion on Belonging, Graduate Journal of Social Science, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 12–35.
Unterreiner, A., 2015, Enfants de couples mixtes: liens sociaux et identités, Rennes: PUR.
Van Zyl-Hermann, D. and Boersema, J., 2017, Introduction: the politics of whiteness in Africa, Africa, Vol. 87, No. 4, pp. 651–661.
Waring, C. D. L and Purkayastha, B., 2017, ‘I’m a different kind of biracial’: how black/white biracial Americans with immigrant parents negotiate race, Social Identities, Vol. 23, No. 5, pp. 614–630.
Yuval-Davis, N., 2006, Belonging and the politics of belonging, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 197–214.