Thursday 13 June 2013

Britishness, yorkshire, and ethnicity as a "coding bias"

I came across some of CoDE's latest work with the data from the 2011 UK census. I found their look at "Who feels British" really intriguing - the age patterns were especially telling. The website also leads to some workings papers on discussions of the classifications CoDE use, but the 2011 census used the updated ethnicity measures put together by the Office of National Statistics, which you can see the code framework for here. (I've been looking through the British Bone Marrow Registry recently and I'm under the impression that they, like the rest of the NHS, are using the same classification system across the UK for all kinds of treatment).

I've been playing around with ethnicity taxonomies quite a lot recently. They're so influenced by their locality - specificity can be magnified, reduced, or altogether removed depending on the state/institution doing the measurement.

The CoDE "Who feels British" data analysis uses the National Identity dataset. This is framed around participants' alignment with British, English, Welsh, Northern Irish, Other, or combination identities. An affinity to only an "other" identity implies a lack of connection to a sense of Britishness. 

I'm based in York, so I downloaded the Yorkshire and the Humber dataset tabulated by correspondents' ethnicity. In its raw form, census ethnicity data are collapsed into what the ONS calls "level 1" ethnicity as well as the less reductive "level 2". Black, African, Caribbean and Black British are subsumed into a total. Various articulations of whiteness (English, Welsh, Scottish, N. Irish, Irish, Traveller) are calculated as a "total white" statistic, and so on. Strangely, everybody who considers themselves to be "mixed" are absorbed into the contentious category of mixed/multiple ethnicities. So I could have parents from Bangladesh and China, and another person could have a father from Africa and a mother from Europe, and - if we marked ourselves as "mixed" in any way - we would be placed into the same level 1 category as one another.

With the Yorkshire dataset, I used the collapsed level 1 ethnicity data to calculate the percentages of people who considered themselves to be in some way British, English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or Irish. 

More white people in Yorkshire and the Humber think of themselves as British than the other groups.

I only ran some descriptive statistics to illustrate this and, though it's fairly obvious that this would be the case, looking at the population of Yorkshire illustrates the massive disparity by ethnicity:

In the 2011 census, there were 4,691,956 white people, 84,558 of mixed ethnicity, 385,964 who said they were asian, 80,345 black people and 40,910 people classified as 'other'.

Rogers Brubaker calls ethnicity a "coding bias". We can understand this in the same way that Judith Butler talks about matrices of cultural intelligibility.  Skin colour and other differences localised to the body (like normative gender behaviours such as make-up or facial hair) take precedence when we look at the people around us. We recognise race, we recognise gender. It's immediate and we don't need to think about it because it's embedded so thoroughly in our day-to-days.

I imagine somebody's sense of their own Britishness is heavily influenced by how much they believe themselves to represent what they understand to be British. I think the above image illustrates how 'white' Yorkshire is. It's probably not surprising, then, that more white people consider themselves to be British in these parts than do others since it's easier to find examples of white british people in York than it is to find people who are not. It sets ups a normative standard of what britishness is. 

Because of the precedence of race as a signifier of identity, it might well make sense that people who are not white are more likely to distantiate themselves from britishness if the normative british identity in one's locale is (in the coding framework of race) white. 

It would be interesting to compare the sense of Britishness within a locale that had a really different ethnic composition from Yorkshire, and anchor these data in the birthplaces of correspondents too but it took me long enough to code these charts in R-stat as it is. Here's the coding if anybody is interested:

> brit=c(97, 90, 78, 58, 47) 
> names(brit)=c("White", "Mixed", "Asian", "Black", "Other") 
> colours=c("green4", "green3", "green2", "green1", "greenyellow") 
> barplot(brit, ylab="Percentage", ylim=c(0,100), col=colours, las=2) 
> brit2=c(4691956,84558,385964,80345,40910) 
> colours=c("green","blue","red","yellow","purple") 
> labels=c("White","Mixed","Asian","Black","Other") 
> pie(brit2,labels=labels,col=colours)

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