Mixed Race Studies

Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir

Serpent’s Tail
2011-07-14
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781846687907

Pauline Black

Powerful autobiography from the front woman of influential ska band, The Selecter

Lead singer for platinum-selling 2-tone band The Selecter, Pauline Black has been in the music business for over thirty years. The only woman in a movement dominated by men, she was very much the Queen of British Ska. She saw The Specials, Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and all the other top bands of that generation at their very best… and worst. Black was born in 1953 of Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents. Adopted by a white, working class family in Romford in the fifties, Pauline was always made to feel different, both by the local community and members of her extended family, who saw her at best as a curiosity, at worst as an embarrassing inconvenience. Weaving her rise to fame and recollections of the 2-tone phenomenon with her moving search for her birth parents, Black By Design is a funny and enlightening memoir of music and roots.

Born in Romford, Pauline Black is a singer and actress who gained fame as the lead singer of seminal 2-tone band The Selecter. After the band split in 1982, Black developed an acting career in television and theatre, appearing in dramas such as The Vice, The Bill, Hearts and Minds and 2000 Acres of Sky. She won the 1991 Time Out award for Best Actress, for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the play All or Nothing At All.

For black Britons, this is not the 80s revisited. It’s worse

The Guardian
2011-08-11

Joseph Harker, Assistant Comment Editor

Our MPs are ‘on message’, our media in decline and the Commission for Racial Equality abolished. Who speaks for us?

This is not 1981. Nor 1985. As has been pointed out over the past few days, things have changed a lot since the “inner-city unrest”—as it was quaintly named back then—erupted in Brixton, Tottenham, Toxteth, Handsworth and other parts of Britain.

But with each passing day, the old maxim, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”, has increasing relevance. In the 80s, as now, rioting was sparked by a confrontation between black people and the police and spread to the rest of the country, including to “white” areas. In 1981, the Conservative prime minister dismissed suggestions that the Brixton riot was due to unemployment and racism. Time proved that she was badly wrong. But fast forward three decades, and David Cameron tells the House of Commons that this week’s rioting was “criminality, pure and simple”.

In the years up to 1981, tension had been building between black people and the police over the “sus” laws, which gave officers powers to arrest anyone they suspected may be intending to steal. For them, a black youngster glancing at a handbag was enough. After Brixton, this law was repealed. Today, however, black people are seven times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched. And under the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act—which allows police to search anyone in a designated area without specific grounds for suspicion—the racial discrepancy rises to 26 times. This is symptomatic of the many ways in which, for black Britons, life seemingly improved but has steadily descended again…

…Over the last three decades we’ve allowed ourselves to be fooled that, with greater integration, plus a few black faces in sport and entertainment, things have improved. People gush about the growing mixed-race population, supposedly Britain’s “beautiful” future. Well, Mark Duggan had a white parent but it didn’t make much difference to his prospects…

Read the entire article here.

Preview Of Essential Guide To Working With Mixed-Race Young People

Manchester Metropolitan University
Tuesday, 2011-10-04, 10:00-12:30 BST (Local Time)
Thursday, 2011-10-06, 10:00-12:30 BST (Local Time)

‘Political Correctness’ has gone wrong. Let us help you talk about the subject in a practical and productive way. Come along to our next training session!!

Who we are:

Mix-d: is the social enterprise that for the last six years has developed the UK agenda for professionals who work with mixed race young people. Our activities span schools, colleges, universities, social services departments, youth work, the criminal justice system, community groups and the training sector.

We have engaged with 1,000s of young people, their parents, policy makers and politicians. We are currently working with colleagues in the U.S. and France and recently submitted in person a draft manifesto for working with mixed race young people to the European Commission in Brussels.

The Mix-d: approach has influenced policy and practice by collaborating with practitioners, politicians and, most importantly, young people to challenges stereotypes, change the language and debunk the myths and historical assumptions about what it means to be “mixed-race.”

This special half-day session will:

• Give you deep & privileged first access to the resource.
• Bring you totally up to speed with leading edge theory and practice.
• Invite your feedback and input on final version of resource.

Benefits to Professionals:

• Offers guidance on uses of Mix-d: resources and philosophy
• Offers guidance on supporting young people who are exploring / struggling with racial identity
• Provides guidance for tackling the unseen issues which affect mixed-race young people and how to represent their needs in your organisation.
• Provides practical responses to challenging comments form a young person regarding race / identity and tips on how to engage in a positive and constructive way

For more information, click here.

Mixed Race Season

BBC Press Office
BBC Two Summer & Autumn 2011
Diverse, stimulating and rewarding television on BBC Two
2011-06-22

Mixed-race Britain is put under the spotlight this autumn in a collection of revealing new programmes. With a mix of drama and documentaries, the season provides a window into the varied lives of mixed-race people living in the UK and helps us understand what the increase in mixed-race people means for the way we live in Britain today.

Mixed Britannia

George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain’s mixed-race community in a new three-part series uncovering a tale of illicit love, tragedy and triumph.

With previously unseen material and unheard testimony, charting events from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, George examines the social factors that have influenced the shape of today’s mixed-race Britain. He discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers; how the British eugenics movement physically examined mixed-race children in the name of science; how pioneering white couples adopted mixed-race babies; and how Britain’s mixed-race population exploded with the arrival of people from all over the globe—making it one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the UK…

…Mixed Race

This documentary explores the historical and contemporary social, sexual and political attitudes to race mixing. From the strict application of “anti-miscegenation” laws in the USA and South Africa to the emergence of Mestizo cultures in the colonies of South America, the programme examines the complex history of interracial relationships around the world…

For more information, click here.

Nation, miscegenation, and the myth of the mulatta/o monster 1859-1886

Universite de Montreal (Canada)
2009
261 pages
Publication Number: AAT NR60321
ISBN: 9780494603215

Jessica Alexandra Maeve Murphy

These presentee a la Faculte des etudes superieures En vue de l’obtention du grade de Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.) en etudes anglaises

“Nation, Miscegenation, and The Myth of the Mulatta/o Monster, 1859-1886” examines how Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Robert Louis Stevenson use the trope of the mulatta/o monster only to subvert it by showing readers that the real monster is white, hegemonic culture. More specifically, it deals with how Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Octoroon, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde depict the interracial body as a gothic house, one which is a microcosm for an increasingly hybrid and un-homely nation. The four texts under consideration in my thesis all explore what it means to be black and female (or dark and feminized) in the United States and Britain where to be white, male, and affluent is to have virtually limitless power over the bodies of women, particularly black ones.

Drawing upon Nancy Stepan’s notion of “proper places,” this dissertation looks at how interracial individuals challenged existing hierarchies in the mid-to-late nineteenth century by defying racial, gender, and class norms nationally and transatlantically. While many scientists of the period believed that mixed-race people were infertile and headed for extinction, the proliferation of such individuals attests to the fact that the number of racially hybrid people was increasing, not decreasing. For many Victorians and their American counterparts, the rise in this population as well as the shifting roles of black and white women, black men, and the working class compelled them to label these groups. It also heightened their concern with degeneration and their need to polarize black/white, female/male, and rich/poor. Yet, as this project shows, while such binaries are necessarily porous, England and the United States both made use of them to establish and define their national identities vis-à-vis one another. Whereas American writers like Jacobs and Wilson relied on such constructs to shame their country and to shape its future, British ones like Braddon used them to allege national superiority or, like Robert Louis Stevenson, later on in the nineteenth century, to reveal the changing face of the nation.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Making and Unmaking Monsters in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig
• Chapter 2: Sexual Propriety and Racial Transgression in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Chapter 3: The Transatlantic Gaze in M. E. Braddon’s The Octoroon
• Chapter 4: Mr. Hyde as Hybrid in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekvll and Mr. Hyde
• Notes
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

Half-white is an insult

The Guardian
2008-11-13

Michael Paulin

The debate over how black Obama is obscures the racial reconciliation his election represents

Barack Hussein Obama’s stunning victory against what was a thoroughly cynical Clinton campaign and a confused and morally bankrupt conservative Republican opposition is as historically significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall. His victory has revealed that a radical new form of political discourse and dialogue is possible, and that the tired dichotomies the political class have sustained for so long can be challenged by the people.

We now have our first black president. The most powerful man in the world is a black man. A man partly raised by his white grandparents. We have the first black president of the United States and, simultaneously, our first mixed-race president.

In Britain, Obama’s victory has exposed a predominantly white minority’s inherent suspicion and mistrust of black people. Christopher Hitchens, appearing on Newsnight last week, declared: “We do not have our first black president. He is not black. He is as black as he is white. He is not full black.” Rod Liddle, writing in the current edition of the Spectator under the headline “Is Barack Obama really black?”, suggested that “coloured“—a term of reference used in apartheid South Africa—would be more appropriate…

…These commentators are ignorant of the realities of the black experience and of the possibility of being of mixed heritage. Hitchens’s reliance on the concept of being “full black”, which harks back to the age of eugenics, exposes just how reactionary he has become. At this great moment in the global struggle for genuine democracy and racial unity, such commentators wriggle in discomfort, clinging to Obama’s “whiteness” in order to appease their own anxieties about the fact that we now have a black president. Even Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote an atrocious piece in the Evening Standard suggesting it was an insult to Obama’s mother to call him black…

…It is unfortunate that this needs to be said but, for the avoidance of doubt: Barack Hussein Obama is black. Yet he is also mixed-race. Perhaps more important, he is a black, mixed-race intellectual…

Read the entire article here.

A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany

Palgrave Macmillan
September 2010
282 pages
6 x 9 1/4 inches, Includes: 50 pgs illus
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-230-10473-0, ISBN10: 0-230-10473-8
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-230-10472-3, ISBN10: 0-230-10472-X

Maria Höhn, Professor of History
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Martin Klimke, Research Fellow
German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

Based on an award-winning international research project and photo exhibition, this poignant and beautifully illustrated book examines the experiences of African American GIs in Germany and the unique insights they provide into the civil rights struggle at home and abroad. Thanks in large part to its military occupation of Germany after World War II, America’s unresolved civil rights agenda was exposed to worldwide scrutiny as never before. At the same time, its ambitious efforts to democratize German society after the defeat of Nazism meant that West Germany was exposed to American ideas of freedom and democracy to a much larger degree than many other countries. As African American GIs became increasingly politicized, they took on a particular significance for the Civil Rights Movement in light of Germany’s central role in the Cold War. While the effects of the Civil Rights Movement reverberated across the globe, Germany represents a special case that illuminates a remarkable period in American and world history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Closing Ranks: World War I and the Rise of Hitler
• Fighting on Two Fronts: World War II and Civil Rights
• “We Will Never Go Back to the Old Way Again”: African American GIs and the Occupation of Germany
• Setting the Stage for Brown: Desegregating the Army in Germany
• Bringing Civil Rights to East and West: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Cold War Berlin
• Revolutionary Alliances: The Rise of Black Power
• Heroes of the Other America: East German Solidarity with the African American Freedom Struggle
• A Call for Justice: The Racial Crisis in the Military and the GI Movement
• Epilogue

Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home

Wiley-Blackwell
August 2005
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4051-0054-0
Papeback ISBN: 978-1-4051-0055-7
E-book ISBN: 978-1-4051-4130-7

Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London

Domicile and Diaspora investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947.

• The first book to study the Anglo-Indian community past and present, in India, Britain and Australia.
• The first book by a geographer to focus on a community of mixed descent.
• Investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947.
• Draws on interviews and focus groups with over 150 Anglo-Indians, as well as archival research.
• Makes a distinctive contribution to debates about home, identity, hybridity, migration and diaspora.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures.
• Series Editors’ Preface.
• Acknowledgements.
• 1. Domicile and Diaspora: An Introduction.
• 2. At Home in British India: Imperial Domesticity and National Identity.
• 3. Home, Community and Nation: Domesticating Identity and Embodying Modernity.
• 4. Colonization and Settlement: Anglo-Indian Homelands.
• 5. Independence and Decolonization: Anglo-Indian Resettlement in Britain.
• 6. Mixed Descent, Migration and Multiculturalism: Anglo-Indians in Australia since 1947.
• 7. At Home in Independent India: Post-Imperial Domesticity and National Identity.
• 8. Domicile and Diaspora: Conclusions.
• Bibliography.
• Appendix 1 Archival Sources.
• Appendix 2 Interviews and Focus Groups.
• Index

Read chapter one here.

Fatherhood Institute Research Summary: African Caribbean fathers

Fatherhood Institute
2010-03-10

The picture for UK fathers of Black Caribbean heritage is complex since as many of their children are now conceived with partners from outside Black Caribbean communities than are conceived within them. This pattern is not yet strong among UK fathers of Black African heritage, 81% of whose children are conceived within their own heritage group (Platt, 2009).
 
Black and Black British fathers are twice as likely as white British fathers (and three times as likely as British Asian fathers) to live apart from their children; and high rates of non-resident fatherhood are also found where children are of Mixed Heritage (Hunt, 2009a; Platt, 2009).  However, there are substantial social class differences here, and while cultural factors contribute (Reynolds, 2009) the main reasons for non-resident fatherhood in Black and Mixed Heritage families are the same as those found in white families: low socio-economic status, unemployment, low education, and so on (e.g. Amato & Sobolewski, 2004); Maclean & Eekelaar, 1997). Experience of racism, and institutionalised racism, are key to all of these (making them far more common in Black families) and are also relevant to other factors which further contribute to high levels of non-resident-fatherhood in Black families: early fatherhood, poor mental health, imprisonment, having been raised without own father present, and so on…

Read the entire article here.

White Skin, White Masks: The Creole Woman and the Narrative of Racial Passing in Martinique and Louisiana

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2006
83 pages

Michael James Rulon

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Curriculum of Comparative Literature

Through an examination of two Creole passing subjects from literary passing narratives of the twentieth century, this thesis simultaneously treats two problems that have been largely overlooked by contemporary scholarship: the role of the Creole racial identity in the genre of the passing narrative, as well as the possibility of racial passing within the context of a Creole society. In Walter White’s 1926 novel, Flight, and Mayotte Capécia’s 1950 novel, La négresse blanche, the protagonists’ difficulties in negotiating a stable racial identity reveal the inherent weakness of the racial binary that is essential to the very notion of racial passing, and they also show that Creoleness has failed to establish itself as a stable racial identity in the societies represented in both novels.

Table of Contents

• 1. Pawòl Douvan/Some Opening Words
• 2. Nwè, Blan èk Kréyòl/Black, White, and Creole
• 3. Mimi èk Isaure/Mimi and Isaur
• 4. Pasé pou Blan, Pasé pou Nwè/Passing for White, Passing for Black
• 5. Ovwè tè kréyòl/Goodbye, Creole Land
• 6. Conclusion: Èk alòs… /And so
• WORKS CITED

Read the entire dissertation here.