race, miscegenation, and the idea of a round world

In the aftermath of the horrific racially-motivated killing of a black teenager in Liverpool on Friday (Anthony Walker was brutally murdered with an axe while walking his white girlfriend home) the Guardian publishes an article on multiculturalism and miscegenation in Britain that cites a study showing the UK has "the highest level of mixed-race relationships in the developed world."

Although I'm not sure the distinction between the US and UK is quite so stark as the article makes out (Britain too has its deeply racist face, although racism's manifestations are often different here than in the US) the author's celebration of London as the one city where her mixed family feels "not unnnoticed," yet not "permanently commented upon" is heartening. I'm reminded of a line from Richard Rodriguez's essay "India," in the wonderful book Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. He writes,

Mexico City is the capital of modernity, for in the sixteenth century, under the tutelage of a curious Indian whore, under the patronage of the Queen of Heaven, Mexico initiated the task of the twenty-first century--the renewal of the old, the known world, through miscegenation. Mexico carries the idea of a round world to its biological conclusion.

Rodriguez writes about the legacy of conquest, rape, and imperialism--and the subversion of that same conquistadores' legacy--that gave birth to a mestizo Mexico in the new world. In London, the imperial periphery has come to colonize the metropolis, and the immigrant communities that Rushdie once called "the new empire within Britain" are now slowly, hopefully carrying out the task of the round world. Anthony Walker's death is a heartbreaking sign of how far there is left to go, but a defiant and heartfelt embrace of hybridity (with all the complication, discomfort, danger that it may imply) strikes me as the best possible response to the bigoted bastards who killed him.