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Although my mother always wanted me to go out with the nice all-inveloping navy blue catholic girls from Seyfield Convent,

rather than the jaunty short cream skirt and red blizzard girls from Stretum House,

she accepted the girlfriends I brought home just as long as they passed the hygiene test.

No matter how pleasing their personality they simply had to have clean necks.

So when she began to voice her objection to my new teenage conquest, a mixed-race nurse

from older Hay called Anita, I absurdly expected it to be

concerned with the color of Anita's neck which was well indisputably brown,

but her concern was different. Just think said, as though reminding herself as well as me, just think

what colour your children will be. Well it was a remark I recall as I was reading a new paper which

tackles the question of racial dilution

happily, very happily, from a very different angle by asking multiracial parents with white partners

to consider the manner and extent to which their children might lose or abandon

any sense of racial distinctiveness.

Well that paper is called Keeping the Story Alive is Ethnic and Racial Dilution

inevitable for multiracial people and their children.

And its co-author is Mary Song, who's professor of sociology at the University of Kent and

cheese now with me.

I can remember when I first, I read this, I was getting a little time bit confused about

who these people were so just let's make it absolutely clear about the subjects of your

research first of all. Okay the subjects of the research grew out of in a sense the last project which I did which was I initially studied

...