Mixed Race Studies

‘I shouldn’t have to defend my Irishness’ – tackling the identity struggles faced by mixed race Irish

The Irish Post
2016-10-10

Erica Doyle Higgins, Digital Reporter

The above image of Lorraine Maher Faissal as a child is the main image of the #IAmIrish Project. (Picture: Lorraine Maher Faissal)

FOR the first time a photography exhibition celebrating mixed race Irish has gone on display in the London Irish Centre. 

#IAmIrish is a project founded by Lorraine Maher Faissal is running during Black History Month and features 25 photographs of mixed race Irish people.

Ms Maher Faissal says she hopes this exhibition becomes a way to celebrate diversity, and opening the dialogue on being mixed race and Irish.

“I hope this project is part of the solution in opening up dialogue in understanding and to dispel the idea that if you are from a non-white community, you are automatically an immigrant,” she said.

“ The project is a creative conversation mapping the roots, the lives and experiences of Irish people who happen to be mixed race,” Ms Maher Faissal added.

“October is Black History Month so what better time to celebrate as an Irish woman of colour than here at the London Irish Centre?” creator Lorraine Maher Faissal told The Irish Post…

Read the entire article here.

Britain’s Black Past

BBC Radio 4
2016-10-03

The Invisible Presence

Professor Gretchen Gerzina explores a largely unknown past – the lives of black people who settled in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

She reveals a startling paradox – although Britain was at the heart of a thriving slave trade, it was still possible for many black people to live here in freedom and prosperity. A few even made it to the very top of fashionable society.

But there were others who were brought over by slave-owners from the West Indies and who were never free, despite living for the rest of their lives in Glasgow or Bristol or London. Some took the law into their own hands, and managed to free themselves, others went further and advocated violent revolution. Free or unfree, they all saw Britain as a place of opportunity that could become a home.

Over two weeks, Professor Gerzina travels across Britain and talks to historians, unearthing new evidence about Britain’s black past. From a country estate in Chepstow, via the docks of Liverpool, to grand houses in London and Bristol, she evokes the daily texture of black people’s lives.

In the first programme in the series, Professor Gerzina travels to Sunderland Point to discover a remote grave in the corner of a windswept field – a memorial to a young black cabin boy, abandoned on the coast by his slave-owning master. This poignant story sparks questions about how we remember black figures from the past.

Listen to the episode (00:13:15) here.

Jackie Kay announces makar’s tour of all the Scottish islands

The Guardian
2016-10-07

Libby Brooks, Scotland Correspondent

The poet has revealed plans for ‘an odyssey’ that will take in overlooked parts of Scotland and form the basis of a long poem about the country

As the UK lurches towards xenophobia, it is a writer’s responsibility to “tell the time”, says Scotland’s national poet Jackie Kay.

Kay, whose complex relationship with her Scottish identity provides inspiration for much of her work, warned that poets should not shy away from addressing current and acute political divisions…

Read the entire article here.

An extraordinary life: Elizabeth Anionwu

Nursing Standard
2016-10-02

Thelma Agnew, Commissioning Editor

Elizabeth Anionwu

Celebrated nurse Elizabeth Anionwu spent 9 years in care as a child, and her early life was marked by racism and the stigma of illegitimacy.  In her new book she reveals how she found her Nigerian father, and why being an ‘outsider’ made her a better nurse

Before she sat down to write her autobiography, Elizabeth Anionwu interviewed 30 friends and relatives. There were details she couldn’t remember, gaps she needed to fill.  But she also did it because she was determined that this would not be an ‘I, I, I’ memoir; she wanted other people’s perspectives.

These reflections on Professor Anionwu at different stages in her life – from the thoroughly English nursing student of the 1960s to the ‘radical health visitor’ of the 70s and today’s eminent professor and campaigner, proud of her Nigerian and Irish heritage – are peppered through Mixed Blessings from a Cambridge Union.

People who knew her 50 or 40 years ago recall a bright, politically curious young woman, who, despite her shyness, was prepared to ask difficult questions. She almost failed her health visiting course after daring to challenge a service’s dubious approach to collecting data on patient ethnicity.

The reflections also deliver one of the book’s jolting moments.  A friend, Janet, says: ‘You were doing well in nursing, but I do remember saying to my sister it’s a shame that Elizabeth will never be able to go very far in nursing because of her colour…

Read the entire article here.

The Black Prince of Florence: A Medici Mystery

University of York
Room K/133, King’s Manor
York, United Kingdom
Tuesday, 2016-10-18, 19:00 BST (Local Time)

Black History Month Lecture

Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe. Her first book, The Divorce of Henry VIII, was published in 2012 and brought to life the world of the papal court at the time of the Tudors. She broadcasts frequently on Renaissance and broader history: She is a 2015 BBC New Generation Thinker and was an adviser to the set team on the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall. She is currently Associate Professor in History and Heritage at Swansea University, has held fellowships at the British School at Rome and the European University Institute, and has taught at Royal Holloway, Durham and Sheffield Universities. In her previous career she worked in politics and the media, including at the BBC Political Unit.

For more information, click here.

‘Growing up in Ireland I was the only black person’

The Irish Times
2016-09-30

Anthea McTeirnan

Lorraine Maher, aged nine and today, who is curating the exhibition of photos of mixed-race Irish people at the London Irish Centre in Camden.

A new exhibition in London challenges the perceptions of what Irish people look like

Lorraine Maher’s son Aaron died from cancer two years ago. Aaron, who along with his brothers, Dwayne, Darnel and Rù-ffel, had visited his mother’s homeplace in Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary, many times and met his Irish family often, was proud to be Irish. Aaron would have chosen to play soccer for the Republic of Ireland, no doubt about that. He was also a fervent Tipperary supporter.

Maher visits his grave often.

“In the graveyard in London, he has his Irish flag and his Tipperary flag on his grave with his St Lucia flag.”

His dad is from St Lucia, and Aaron was proud of his dual heritage.

Aaron’s photograph is on his gravestone, too. “I see people looking at the grave like they are thinking: what has Ireland got to do with him?”

But Aaron was proud of his Irishness, she says. “He had two heritages and both made him proud.”

Even though it is now more common in Britain to use the term “dual heritage” rather than “mixed race”, Maher is not completely sold on the newer description.

“It is challenging because my only heritage is Irish,” she says. “So that is what the conversation I wanted to have is about. For mixed-race Irish people our ancestry, our roots, our blood are Irish.”…

…Maher was never an “immigrant”. She grew up in 1960s-1970s Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary, where she was the only black person she knew. After Presentation Convent Primary, she moved to Scoil Mhuire in Greenhill.

“I’m mixed race. I identify as a black woman from Ireland, who is quite pale,” she laughs. “The only heritage I ever had was Irish heritage.” Maher is aware of her other ancestry, “but it is not important at the moment for me”, she says…

Read the entire article here.

This Movie Was Nearly Lost. Now They’re Fighting to Save It.

The New York Times
2016-09-23

John Anderson

Richard Romain in the 1982 film “Cane River.” Credit IndieCollect

When it debuted in 1982, “Cane River” was already a rarity: a drama by an independent black filmmaker, financed by wealthy black patrons and dealing with race issues untouched by mainstream cinema. Richard Pryor had even tried to take it to Hollywood.

But since a negative resurfaced two years ago, it has attained a certain mythic quality, connecting a disparate group of people across the country: New York preservationists dedicated to restoring it; a cultural historian in Louisiana devoting an academic paper to it; an archivist in Los Angeles fascinated with it. And the director’s son, the music journalist and filmmaker Sacha Jenkins, who knew about the film but has never seen it, and who has been left with a question no small number of sons have asked about their fathers.

“Who was this guy?”…

…Cane River itself is a historically multicultural area in Natchitoches Parish in Louisiana, and the movie, in addition to being a Romeo-Juliet romance, deals with land swindles perpetrated against people of color, and “colorism”— that is, social hierarchy as dictated by skin tone.

“It’s a common issue, because there was a lot of intermarriage and, of course, slavery,” said Carol Balthazar, who was Horace Jenkins’s partner, and whose family history provided the movie’s historical backdrop…

…Ms. Spann watched a bootleg DVD of “Cane River.” “I can’t think of any film that dealt with colorism in such a serious way,” she said. She is writing a paper on “Cane River” for the Louisiana Historical Society, and said some of the scenes seemed too long. Debra I. Moore, who edited the film in 1980, said there’s a good reason for that…

Read the entire article here.

Reflections on Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

International Slavery Museum
Dr Martin Luther King Jr building, Albert Dock
Liverpool, United Kingdom
2016-09-21, 13:00-16:00 BST (Local Time)

Dr Mark Christian, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Black Liverpool and grassroots education in L8

There remains a burning need in today’s society for Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s message, and his hope of a Beloved Community to prevail:

• where all people share equally in the wealth of the earth,
• where poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it;
• where racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood;
• where international disputes are resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of by military power;
• for love and trust to triumph over fear and hatred,
• and for peace with justice to prove more powerful than war and military conflict.

The city of Liverpool’s history of fighting racism and discrimination goes back centuries. At this free talk, Dr Mark Christian, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York, himself a product of grassroots education in Liverpool (Charles Wootton Centre/College and L8 Access to Higher Education), will reflect on Dr King’s ideas from the perspective of Black Liverpool.

Following Mark’s talk, there will be a panel discussion and the opportunity for the audience to consider the role of education and the empowerment of marginalised groups in Liverpool.

For more information, click here.

Black History Month – #IMIRISH Exhibition Launch

London Irish Center
50-52 Camden Square
London, United Kingdom, NW1 9XB
2016-10-06 through 2016-10-31, 19:00 BST (Local Time)

#Iamirish a Photography Exhibition launching a series of workshops and debates linking those of mixed race heritage to their Irish family ancestry.

The Exhibition will be opened by Dan Mulhall, Ireland ’s Ambassador to the UK.

This project will map the roots, lives and experiences of mixed race Irish people creating intimate portraits which challenge perceptions of what it looks like to be Irish and open up people’s minds to the wonderful diversity of the Irish people.

Launching the project in October to coincide with Black History Month, in the centenary year of Irish Independence, is a unique and powerful opportunity to weave these celebrations of Black and Irish heritage together and put diversity in full focus.

2016 marks the centenary of the Republic of Ireland, an opportunity to remember the country’s history and the heritage and traditions of its people. This project embraces that spirit to celebrate the voices and the lives of independent, Irish people everywhere who happen to be mixed race. Drawing strong lines between the portraits and their family crests, we seek to dispel the idea that if you are from a non-white community, you are automatically an immigrant.

‘For mixed race Irish people in reality our ancestry, our roots, our blood are Irish and we are proud of it.’

For more information, click here.

Mixed Blessings from a Cambridge Union

Camden Review
2016-09-15

Angela Cobbinah

Elizabeth Anionwu

THE early years of one’s life normally follow a predictable path with any unexpected twists and turns suitably documented for posterity.

But it was not until she was in her 60s that Elizabeth Anionwu, one of the country’s most senior nurses, was able to discover why she ended up spending the best part of her childhood in the care of Roman Catholic nuns.

The revelations came in the form of a thick blue dossier containing almost 60 documents handed over to her from a Catholic children’s home in Birmingham.

“It consisted mainly of letters dating back to my time in my mother’s womb to when I left care, and the words that jumped out of the pages took my breath away,” recalls Elizabeth. Up until then I had a few bits of oral history passed down, but literally only bits.”

Her mother, the darling daughter of devout Irish Catholics living in Liverpool, had fallen pregnant while studying classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. The frantic back and forth correspondence between the family and the reverend in charge centred on concealing the pregnancy and whether the baby should eventually be adopted.

“There was a great deal of stigma surrounding illegitimacy in those days but this was only the start of the drama – at this stage, my grandparents were unaware that my father was from Nigeria.”.

Despite their renewed shock, they supported her mother’s desire to keep the baby but insisted that Elizabeth be placed in a children’s home at the age of six months so she could resume her studies. But, as her mother reveals in further correspondence, she planned to marry her father, who was also studying at Cambridge, and bring her baby home again.

What happens next is told in Elizabeth’s forth­coming autobiography, Mixed Blessings from a Cambridge Union, how she did not get to live with her mother until she was nine, but then only briefly because of her step­father’s hostility, and only met her father at the age of 24…

Read the entire article here.