What does racial mixing mean to you?
We gathered in Cape Town carrying questions that do not sit still. 

Questions inherited through borders, census forms, silences, migrations, skin, language and memory. We came together not to arrive at a single definition of racial mixing, but to dismantle the certainty that race itself was ever fixed.

The fragments mixed race, mixed heritage, Coloured, Black, cultural identity showed us that beneath the terminology lives something far deeper: the search for ourselves beyond colonial naming. We recognised how race has been used as a document, a border, a hierarchy. A way of deciding who belongs, who is human, who is closer to whiteness, who is granted legitimacy. And so we asked: what happens when we refuse those inherited measurements?

We began to understand racial mixing not as dilution, but as multiplicity. Not confusion, but convergence. We are not unfinished identities standing between worlds; we are worlds meeting, contradicting, colliding and creating anew. Our histories do not cancel one another out. They speak simultaneously.

Together, we wanted to challenge the essentialist paradigm that taught us race was biological destiny alongside Sylvia Wynter, James Baldwin, Hortense Spillers, Abdias do Nascimento, and activists who inspired our dialogue. We recognised how colonialism constructed categories in order to govern bodies, land and movement. The language of “purity” and “mixture” was never innocent. It carried violence within it. 

Even now, those echoes remain in how societies reward proximity to whiteness, in how some identities are made visible while others are questioned or erased.

We also recognised that identity cannot only be understood through oppression. There is creativity in our crossings. There is knowledge in hybridity. There is power in shared experience across contexts, continents and communities. We heard this in accents, in music, in the way we moved between languages, in the stories our families still carry. We understand culture not as something sealed, but as something constantly remade through encounter.

Click here for more Cape Town images and the full workshop gallery.