Mixed Race Studies

Black Welsh Identity: the unspeakable speaks.

British Broadcasting Corporation
North West Wales
2006-05-30

Isabel Adonis, Writer and Artist

Isabel Adonis was born in London and brought up in Llandudno, the Sudan and Nigeria. She spent 21 years in Bethesda before returning to Llandudno. She helped found Timbuktu, a new international arts and literary journal.

This piece won the best article award for 2002 in New Impact magazine.

“I am a woman. When I look in the mirror I see a woman. When other people look at me they see a woman. I know what a woman is and I am one. Once when I was a child, in Africa, I had my hair cut very short and the other children started calling me ‘El Walad’ – The Boy. It was very distressing, but I didn’t start feeling like a boy, and the children wouldn’t have been teasing me if they had really thought I was one.

If anyone asks me what it feels like to be a woman, I’m stuck for an answer. There doesn’t seem to be any other thing for it to be like or unlike; it feels normal, natural, un-problematic. It doesn’t feel like anything at all: – what does it feel like to be human?…

…I am Welsh. My mother was born and brought up in North Wales, speaking Welsh. I have lived most of my life in Wales. When I look in the mirror I see brown skin and African features. When other people look at me they see an exotic, a foreigner.

If anyone asks me what it feels like to be a black Welsh woman, I’m stuck for an answer. It doesn’t feel like anything at all; it feels like being human. I am my natural colour, and I live in my natural home, no problem.

But as soon as I step out of the front door, there is a problem. Most of the people who meet me are thrown into confusion and conflict. They like to think of themselves as being tolerant, accepting, unprejudiced etc. so they try to treat me as normal although their senses scream out that I am different. They try to be sensitive, avoid the word ‘black’, avoid the subject that is always on their minds. Many prefer to avoid me if possible, they find it a strain…

Read the entire essay here.

Stories and survival’: An Interview with Jackie Kay

Wasafiri
Volume 25, Issue 4, 2010
pages 19-22
DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2010.510366

Maggie Gee

Jackie Kay has had a glittering career as a writer of poetry, fiction and drama for both adults and children. She was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted by a white couple at birth and was brought up in Glasgow. Her first collection of poetry, The Adoption Papers (1991), explored the experience of adoption and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Subsequent poetry books include Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998), Life Mask (2005) and Darling (2007). Her bold and original short stories are collected as Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002) and Wish I Was Here (2006). Her work has been widely anthologised and she has written drama for stage, radio and television. Her first novel, Trumpet, published in 1998, was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize. Jackie Kay lives in Manchester and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. In 2006, she was awarded an MBE for services to literature. Jackie Kay’s memoir, Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey, which she discusses in the following interview, was published in May of this year.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race Britain: charting the social history

The Guardian
2011-10-04

Laura Smith

While mixed race is one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the UK, there is nothing new in people from different cultures getting together

Olive was just 15 when she met the man who was to become her husband. It was 1930s Cardiff and the trainee nurse had become lost on her way home from the cinema to the Royal Infirmary. “I stopped and asked this boy the way to Queen Street. And we started talking and I think we fell in love there and then.”

The “boy” Olive met on the street that night was Ali Salaman, a young Yemeni working as a chef in his own restaurant, the Cairo Café, a popular hang-out in the city’s Tiger Bay neighbourhood. Despite being told by her priest that she was marrying a heathen, the Methodist teenager married Ali Salaman when she was 16 and they went on to have 10 children.

With mixed race now measured in the national census and one of the fastest growing ethnic groups, it is often viewed as a contemporary phenomenon. But Chamion Caballero, senior research fellow at London South Bank University’s Weeks centre, says: “There is a long history of racial mixing in the UK that people don’t talk about.”

Caballero has co-authored as yet unpublished research with Peter Aspinall, reader in population health at the University of Kent, that puts contemporary mixing into perspective.

It demonstrates that unions between white British women and men from immigrant communities were commonplace in areas where they were thrown together in the 1920s, 30s and 40s: from South Shields and Liverpool’s Toxteth to Cardiff’s Tiger Bay and London’s Docklands. The Era of Moral Condemnation: Mixed Race People in Britain, 1920-1950, shows that although they faced prejudice from some, mixed race families created new communities in which those from different backgrounds swapped cultural traditions. It also explores how official perceptions of mixed race families contrasted with the way people experienced it…

…Aspinall says the dominance of eugenics during this period was central to such attitudes. “If you look at the aims of the British Eugenics Society in the 1930s there was this explicit statement about the dangers of what they called race crossing,” he says. Marie Stopes, then a prominent eugenicist, advocated that all “half castes” should be “sterilised at birth”. Connie Hoe, the daughter of a Chinese father and white mother, was one of dozens of mixed race children who were experimented on by the eugenics society to test the relationship between physical appearance and intellect…

Read the entire article here.

Editorial: The Illusion of Inclusion

Wasafiri
Volume 25, Issue 4 (2010)
pages 1-6
DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2010.510357

This special issue of Wasafiri – ‘Black Britain: Beyond Definition’ – focuses on writers who are of black and mixed heritage. Labelling us in this way can, of course, be problematic. The badge ‘black writer’ or ‘Black British writer’ or ‘postcolonial writer’ isn’t one many of us deliberately choose to wear. It has a homogenising, ghettoising effect. Why should the profession to which we belong always be qualified in this way? Martin Amis and Ian McKewan only ever get labelled ‘white male writers’ to draw attention to their role in the status quo. Most of the time they are simply ‘writers’ or ‘British writers’.

The label may be frustrating, but in this context it provides us with a convenient shorthand for assessing a literature sector to which we have always had limited access. Grouping everyone together in this way allows us to explore some important questions: What is Britain like for black people today, both in terms of the wider society and the literature sector? Who is writing what? Who is getting published? Who isn’t?

The answers we get reveal that the society we inhabit in 2010 is still far from egalitarian although, compared with some of our European neighbours, we do now enjoy a degree of integration that is positive and progressive. That said, at an organisational level, there is a subtle, often unconscious or unthinking discrimination that is deeply pernicious and alienating for those who are excluded by it. And this needs once again to become the focus of national debate.

…The Obama Effect

Ever since Barack Obama became US President, a noticeable shift has been taking place in the British media’s conversations about race. The ceiling, some decided, really is made of glass and not the reinforced concrete they’d previously assumed. The term ‘post-racial’ has started to be bandied around as if his singular success meant the sudden emergence of a meritocratic society here in the UK.

There is now a sense that those who still dare to mention the R-word are just pesky killjoys. Fingers point towards Obama or any number of black figureheads in this country. In the same way that feminism became a dirty word in the nineties with women declaring ‘I’m not a feminist but … ’, likewise with racism. It’s just not that cool any more to point it out…

…In today’s UK, 48% of Black Caribbean men and 34% of Black Caribbean women have white partners, and one in ten children lives in a mixed-race family (Platt 6). This suggests the triumph of love over loathing, integration over separation, connection over tribalism. Inter-racial couples are not pelted with pebbles by Outraged of Suburbia when they go for their Sunday passeggiata through the local park. Cute black babies are very on trend; so fashionable, in fact, that famous people travel many thousands of miles to adopt them. And we all know that, for a long time now, the pampered princes of our national sport, once a bastion of racism, are as black as they are white.

While there are many such pointers to a more inclusive society, the racial hierarchies and infrastructure still exist. We may have detected some subsidence in that creepy Victorian house, built on the proceeds of empire and overlooking the graveyard of slavery, but the wrecking ball ain’t smashed it down to the ground yet…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Britannia – marrying an alien

BBC Two
2011-10-02

George Alagiah, Host

Nearly 100 years ago, Chinese seaman Stanley Ah Foo arrived in Liverpool to start a new life. He soon fell in love—but laws at the time meant that his English bride, Emily, was only able to marry if she gave up her British nationality and became a so-called alien herself.

In Mixed Britannia—a new three-part series for BBC 2—George Alagiah explores the often untold stories of Britain’s mixed-race communities. He met Stanley and Emily Ah Foo’s daughters, Doreen and Lynne, who told the remarkable story of how their parents met, and the restrictions placed upon them.

The first episode of Mixed Britannia will be broadcast on BBC 2 at 20:00Z (21:00 BST) on Thursday, 2011-10-06.

View the video clip here (00:02:11).

Black and white twins

The Guardian
2011-09-23

Joanna Moorhead

James and Daniel are twins. What sets them apart is that one is white and one is black—and the differences don’t end there, as Joanna Moorhead discovers

The two teenage boys sitting on the sofa opposite are different in almost every way. On the left is James: he’s black, he’s gay, he’s gregarious, and he’s academic. He’s taking three A-levels next summer, and wants to go to university. Daniel, sitting beside him, is white. He’s straight, he’s shy, and he didn’t enjoy school at all. He left after taking GCSEs, and hopes that his next move will be an apprenticeship in engineering.

So, given that they are diametrically opposed, there is one truly surprising thing about James and Daniel. They are twins. They were born on 27 March 1993, the sons of Alyson and Errol Kelly, who live in south-east London. And from the start, it was obvious to everyone that they were the complete flipside of identical. “They were chalk and cheese, right from the word go,” says Alyson. “It was hard to believe they were even brothers, let alone twins.”…

Read the entire article here.

Lone mothers of mixed racial and ethnic children in Britain: Comparing experiences of social attitudes and support in the 1960s and 2000s

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 34, Issue 6, November-December 2011
Pages 530-538
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2011.06.007

Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology
University of Southampton

Chamion Cabellero, Senior Research Fellow
Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

This article places side-by-side the views from lone mothers bringing up children from mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in mid-1960s and early 2000s Britain, to consider whether the sorts of social attitudes and support these mothers experienced have changed or persisted over the past half century. The analysis compares and contrasts the general social and official attitudes that lone mothers of mixed children feel that they encounter, the support they receive from the fathers of their children, and their relationships with their own and the father’s wider family, the neighbourhood and friendship networks they draw on, and the formal supports available to them across time. The article concludes by considering some indicative trajectories of change and constancy that looking at these social attitudes and supports reveals, around negative assessments and their social expression, expectations of fathers, the availability of wider family, and the importance of informal daily support from other mothers in the same situation.

Read or purchase the article here.

Neither White Nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction

New York University Press
1978
280 pages
ISBN-10: 0814709966; ISBN-13: 978-0814709962
9 x 6 x 1 inches

This book is out of print.

Judith R. Berzon

The mulatto character has captured the imagination of American novelist in every period of our literature.  For American writers, the mulatto has long signified a “marginal man,” caught between two cultures and between the boundaries of the American caste system. As such, the mulatto’s biological and psychological responses to his status—attraction and repulsion to both the white an non-white castes—have frequently been fictionalized.

Neither White Nor Black is the first comprehensive study of the mulatto character in American fiction.  It is interdisciplinary in approach, drawing from literature, history, sociology, psychology and biology, and assessing the influence of racist ideology, social mythology and historical reality upon the portrayal of the mulatto character.  Dr. Berzon examines how the self-concepts of mixed-blood characters are affected by black-white mythology and explores the roles mulattoes have played in American culture.  Among the 19th an 20th-century black and white authors examined here are Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren and John A. Williams.

In Part I of the book, Dr. Berzon provides an introduction to the historical, sociological and scientific backgrounds of the fiction; an overview of the novels; and a discussion of the most prevalent sterotype—“the tragic mulatto.”  Part II defines and illustrates the forms of adjustment to marginality.  Each chapter is organized around a specific mode of adjustment—passing for white, becoming a member of the black bourgeosie, working as leader of his/her race, and failing to achieve identification with either the white or black group.  In the Postscript, Dr. Berzon examines three novels of the 1970s by important black authors—John A. Williams, Ernest J. Gaines, and John Oliver Killens.  Her study is enriched by the recently published but crucial historical scholarship such as Roll, Jordan Roll by Eguene Genovese, White Over Black by Winthrop Jordan, an The Black Image in the White Mind by George Fredrickson, as well as the earlier work by Addison Gayle Jr., The Black Aesthetic.

In Neither White Nor Black, Dr. Berzon reveals the recurring themes in the portrayal of the mulatto character throughout several periods of the 19th and 20th-century American history.  Central to the portrayal of the mulatto during all these periods is the quest for identity, and Dr. Berzon, through her illuminating analysis, provides her readers, whether students of Black studies, American studies, Southern history, literature, or intellectual history, with an essential understanding of that quest and of the role of the mulatto in American society.

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities [Review: DaCosta]

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
Volume 40, Number 5 (September 2011)
pages 571-572
DOI: 10.1177/0094306111419111i

Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Associate Professor
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities, by Sultana Choudhry. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 219 pp. cloth. ISBN: 9780754678601.

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities is a study of identity choices among South Asian/white individuals in the United Kingdom. The term “South Asian” refers here to peoples with ancestry from the Indian subcontinent, including India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Sultana Choudhry situates her study primarily in the social psychology literature and in the growing body of social science literature on mixed race or, to use the author’s preferred term, “interethnic” people in the Anglophone world. In focusing on South Asian/white interethnics, the author begins to fill a gap in both literatures. She rightly points out that there is a relative dearth of research on South Asian/white interethnics in Britain, despite the fact that they comprise a substantial proportion of interethnics in a society in which interethnic births are on the rise.

This is a multi-method study, incorporating semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis, retrospective diary accounts of factors that influenced respondents’ ethnic identity choices and a survey of 87 interethnics of a variety of ethnoracial combinations. While the majority of respondents were interethnic, some phases of the study include monoethnic respondents, including some parents of the interethnic respondents.

While I applaud this use…

Purchase or purchase the review here.

Speaking from the Margins: The Voice of the ‘Other’ in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay

Academica Press
2010-06-15
124 pages
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-933146-92-8/ 1933146-92-3

Özlem Aydin

Speaking from the Margins: The Voice of the ‘Other’ in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay studies Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay as poets who identify and represent some key forms of “otherness” may take in the British society of the 1980s and the 1990s. Indeed, although Duffy’s poetry is political and concerned with the British society of the 1980s and the 1990s, particularly with the condition of the underprivileged and people pushed to the margins of society as a result of Thatcherite policies, criticism of her poetry is more concerned with her feminist representation of gender in her work. Thus, it is important that her poetry of the 1980s and the 1990s is recognised as a poetry of the “other” as Duffy in this poetry gives specifically a panorama of Thatcherite Britain through the voice of the “other”. Similarly, this thesis analyses Jackie Kay’s poetry as a poetry which is critical not only of Britain but also is particularly concerned with the condition of the racial and the sexual other in the 1980s and the 1990s Britain. Although “The Adoption Papers” has often been discussed and analysed mostly by focusing on the issues of identity and adoption, “Severe Gale 8”, the sequel to “The Adoption Papers”, Other Lovers and Off Colour have not been the focus of much academic study from the aspect of the voice given to the racial and the sexual other.

This research monograph studies Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy as poets representing the voice of the “other” in the 1980s and the 1990s British society because there is a considerable lack of criticism on this particular aspect of their poetry. The works of these two poets are part of contemporary British poetry in which as Kennedy puts it “the heterogeneity of the ‘ex-centric’, the marginal and the peripheral is raided in order to revitalise and refurbish the homogeneity of the centre. Diversity is used to underwrite a new uniformity” (“Mapping Value”).

• Introduction
• Overview of the 1980s and the 1990s poetry scene in the United Kingdom given to serve as a background framework for the poetry of the two poets under study.
• Part I: The Voice of the “Other” in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy
  • After a brief introduction to the social and economic background of contemporary British society and its impact on the poetry of the 1980s and the 1990s, the voice of the “other” in selected poems of Carol Ann Duffy from her poetry collections Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990) and Mean Time (1993) will be studied in Chapter I.
• Part II: The Voice of the “Other” in the Poetry of Jackie Kay
  • The poetry of Jackie Kay from The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993) and Off Colour (1999) are studied closely with respect to the racial and sexual “other” she represents concerning the voice of the other in society.
• Conclusion
  • The study of the relevantly selected poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay shows that Duffy, through her use of the dramatic monologue, and Kay, by using her own experiences present the voice of the “other” in their poetry. Duffy gives voice to the outcasts in the society such as the criminal, the mentally ill, the rejected, the silenced, the marginalized, the unemployed and the immigrant, and Kay herself already an “other” as a black girl adopted and raised by a Scottish family deals with racial issues, racial and sexual otherness in contemporary Britain. Both Duffy and Kay have their poetry represent the contemporary Britain through the experience and voice of the “other”.