Mixed Race Studies

Lest we forget: the children they left behind: the life experience of adults born to black GIs and British women during the Second World War

The University of Melbourne
1999
177 pages

Janet Baker

An estimated 22,000 children were born in England during the Second World War as a result of relationships between British women and American GIs. Of these children, around 1,200-1,700 were born to African American servicemen. These figures are estimates only; the actual number of births will never be known.

The research study is based on personal interviews with eleven members of this cohort. The interviews explore their life experience and examines their sense of identity as ex-nuptial children, of mixed-race parentage, who had no contact with and usually little information about their GI fathers. Of the eleven mothers, over half were married with at least one other child at the time of the birth. Nine participants/respondents were raised by their mother or her extended family. Two were institutionalised. At the time of the interviews all of the respondents were either searching for, or had found, their black GI fathers.

This is a qualitative study which aims to bear witness to the lived experience of this cohort and to analyse the meaning individuals gave to their experience. Data collection involved personal interviews with the eleven participants. The data was then subject to a thematic analysis and the major themes and issues identified. Content analysis was undertaken using a constructivist approach.

The interviews are presented as elicited narrative relayed through an interpretive summary. Consistency was maintained by using common questions organised within a loose interview framework. The findings were organised around the major conceptual issues and themes that emerged from the case summaries. Common themes, including resilience, racial identity, self esteem and stress were identified.

The researcher has professional qualifications as a social worker and clinical family therapist. She has ten years experience in the field of adoption, including the transracial placement of Aboriginal and overseas children in Australian families. She is also a member of the researched cohort. Issues arising when the researcher is also a member of the researched cohort are discussed in the methodology.

The experience of this cohort suggests that despite the disadvantages of their birth, they fared better than expected. The majority demonstrated high levels of resilience, successfully developing a sense of identity that incorporated both the black and white aspects of their racial heritage. However, for some this success was only achieved at considerable personal cost, with several participants reporting relatively high levels of stress and/or stress related symptoms, such as anxiety, mental illness and heart disease.

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Social Work in the School of Social Work, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne

Table of Contents

• Declaration of Authorship
• Acknowledgments
• Some Wartime Quotations
• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1 Historical Context
    • 1.1.1 Segregation
    • 1.1.2 Tensions Between Black and White Americans
    • 1.1.3 Sex between Black and White
    • 1.1.4 ‘Brown babies’
  • 1.2 Links to Contemporary Welfare Issues
    • 1.2.1 Transracial Child Placement
    • 1.2.2 Rights of Access to Birth Information
  • 1.3 Aims of the Research
• 2. Research Design and Methodology
  • 2.1 Introduction
  • 2.2 Logic of the Approach
  • 2.3 The participants
  • 2.4 Data Collection
  • 2.5 Analysis and Interpretation of the Data
    • 2.5.1 Analysis
    • 2.5.2 The place of the literature review
  • 2.6 Role of the Researcher
  • 2.7 Validity
  • 2.8 Ethical Issues
    • 2.8.1 Assistance with Searches
• 3. Review of the Literature
  • 3.1 Introduction
    • 3.1.1 Sexual relationships between black men and white women
    • 3.1.2 Race and illegitimacy as stigma
    • 3.1.3 Identity Formation
    • 3.1.4 Stress, resilience and coping
  • 3.2 Conclusion
• 4. Findings
  • 4.1 Introduction
  • 4.2 Case studies
    • 4.2.1 Participant 1
    • 4.2.2 Participant 2
    • 4.2.3 Participant 3
    • 4.2.4 Participant 4
    • 4.2.5 Participant 5
    • 4.2.6 Participant 6
  • 4.3 Participant Summaries
• 5. Summary and Discussion of Findings
  • 5.1 Themes and Issues:
    • 5.1.1 Sex between black and white
    • 5.1.2 Race and Illegitimacy as Stigma
    • 5.1.3 Identity Formation and Children of Mixed-race
    • 5.1.4 Grief and Loss
    • 5.1.5 Stress, Resilience and Coping
    • 5.1.6 Impact of search for birth father on identity formation
  • 5.2 Implications for Social Work Practice
  • 5.3 Conclusion
• 6. Bibliography
  • Appendix 1: Glossary of Terms
  • Appendix 2: Participant’s Stories (continued)
    • 6.1.1 Participant 7
    • 6.1.2 Participant 8
    • 6.1.3 Participant 9
    • 6.1.4 Participant 10
    • 6.1.5 Participant 11
  • 6.2 Summary
• Appendix 3: Interview Schedule
• Appendix 4: Letter to Tracing Services
• Appendix 5: Letter of Support from TRACE.
• Appendix 6: Letter of Support From ‘War Babes’ (UK)
• Appendix 7: Letter to Participants (1)
• Appendix 8: Letter to Participants (2)
• Appendix 9: Letter to Participants (3)
• Appendix 10: Consent to Take Part in Research Project
• Appendix 11: Letter to Post Adoption Resource Centre
• Appendix 12: Response from Post Adoption Resource Centre

Introduction

The following study provides an account of the lived experience of the adult children of wartime relationships between British women and African American servicemen during the Second World War. It is a qualitative study that seeks to explore the meaning of that experience and in particular how the research participants see themselves—as black, white or mixed-race.

The exploration of these issues took place in the context of a personal interview with each of eleven respondents, which explored the meaning they gave to their life experience as children of black GI fathers raised with no contact, until they reached middle-age, with their birth fathers or their African American heritage. A particular focus of the interviews was the extent to which this experience impacted on their sense of self-identity as children of mixed British and African American parentage. As all of the participants were searching for, or had found their birth fathers the significance of their search, in terms of its impact on their sense of personal identity, was also explored.

The experience of this cohort can only be clearly understood in the historical context of the Second World War and in particular the impact of the decision by America to send black troops to England. An overview of the major social and historical issues impacting on the life experience of this cohort follows…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Recasting the Tribe of Ishmael: The Role of Indianapolis’s Nineteenth-Century Poor in Twentieth-Century Eugenics

Indiana Magazine of History
Volume 104, Issue 1 (March 2008)
pages 36-64
ISSN: 0019-66737

Elsa F. Kramer

The Tribe of Ishmael is a biblically derived moniker for hundreds of impoverished late-19th-century immigrants in Indianapolis whose applications for unrestricted public relief during an era of organized charity reform brought them special attention from clergy, politicians, and social scientists. Rev. Oscar C. McCulloch, of Plymouth Congregational Church in Indianapolis, named the Tribe and made its members the focus of his campaign to reform charity and eradicate pauperism. McCulloch and other observers conflated the Tribe as a loosely organized, mixed-race band of vagrants whose lifestyles and intermarriages perpetuated crime, wanderlust, and dependence on charity. Records show, however, that many of the families migrated to the Midwest from eastern and southern states in search of freedom and opportunity, living in the city and holding jobs at least part of the year. A family pedigree study of the Tribe that McCulloch began in the 1880s eventually became valuable to civic leaders seeking public support for selective reproduction laws. Arthur H. Estabrook, a caseworker for the Eugenics Record Office 1910–1929 and a biologist with particular interest in mixed-race genetics, edited the Tribe of Ishmael materials after World War I for use in support of anti-miscegenation, compulsory sterilization, and other negative-eugenics-based legislation intended to prevent reproduction by individuals deemed degenerate, unfit, or feebleminded. This paper compares the rhetoric of Estabrook’s edited and expanded version of the notes with McCulloch’s original materials in order to demonstrate the ways both narratives were crafted to further social policy agendas.

And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael, because the Lord hath heard thy affliction. And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.
Genesis 16:11–12

Rainy weather and muddy streets kept many of his flock home on Sunday morning, January 20, 1878, when Rev. Oscar C. McCulloch of Indianapolis’s Plymouth Congregational Church delivered a sermon on the problem of the city’s poor. Charity was not an unusual topic within his congregation, which practiced the Social Gospel of applied Christianity—“the alleviation, by physical and spiritual means,” as McCulloch’s daughter, Ruth, would later explain it, “of poverty, ignorance, misery, vice and crime.” This particular lecture, however, reflected a change in his approach to welfare, away from almsgiving and toward the exclusion of applicants deemed unworthy of relief.

It was coincidence that had brought about this key shift in the well-known minister’s attitude: According to McCulloch, his pastoral visits to the poor had acquainted him with the members of one family whose dire poverty so disturbed him that he sought to secure them emergency aid at the Center Township Trustee’s office. There he learned, instead, of the family’s—and their friends’ and relatives’—long history of relief applications. At about the same time, he read a book about “the Jukes,” a New York clan that reminded him of the family he visited in Indianapolis. The book’s author, Richard L. Dugdale, a researcher interested in the causes of poverty and crime, had become curious about the frequency of family ties among inmates he encountered while inspecting county jails for the New York Prison Association. Although Dugdale’s study of criminality among the Jukes (the fictitious surname by which he identified the clan) conceded that environmental factors were as influential as hereditary causes in “giving cumulative force to a career of debauch,” McCulloch concluded that charitable aid targeted only at alleviating deficits such as hunger and homelessness encouraged the proliferation of degenerate families such as the Indianapolis clan, whom he labeled the Ishmaelites. He began to argue for compulsory social controls designed to prevent the “idle, wandering life” and “the propagation of similarly disposed children,” and helped craft legislation to create the State Board of Charities and the Center Township Board of Children’s Guardians. The collaboration he created between public and private charities infused the former—which gave relief without regard to an applicant’s character—with the latter’s strategy of giving based on moral merit. He reorganized the Indianapolis Benevolent Society as the Charity Organization Society (COS) and combined its efforts with those of Center Township relief caseworkers in order to identify citizens perceived to be making poverty their profession. Notes from interviews conducted and other public records gathered by these visitors of the poor were ultimately collected in McCulloch’s family study, which was intended to provide evidence of “a constellation of degenerate behaviors—including alcoholism, pauperism, social dependency, shiftlessness, nomadism, and ‘lack of moral control’ ” caused by inherited genetic defects and exacerbated by current charitable practice. The solution, McCulloch believed, was to “close up official out-door relief… check private and indiscriminate benevolence, or charity, falsely so-called… [and] get hold of the children.”

McCulloch’s renowned career as a progressivist minister and charity reformer was cut short by his premature death, at age forty-eight, in 1891. Although he had succeeded, by at least some estimates, in reducing the number of Indianapolis citizens receiving public and private relief, he did not live to see the unanticipated impact of his Ishmael study on eugenics, the emerging science of race improvement through selective breeding. His work, intended to reduce dependence on public welfare, continued for many years to be cited, with other family studies, as evidence of a need for legislative measures to compel mandatory sterilization of “mental defectives” and criminals. For McCulloch and others of his day, pauperism had in itself implied an inherited moral problem. The scientists who revised his Ishmael family documents in subsequent decades would emphasize his casual observations of individual feeblemindedness to support a more comprehensive agenda for social reform, one that included the institutionalization of adult vagrants, the prevention of any possibility of their future reproduction, and the segregation of their existing children—all to protect the integrity of well-born society’s germ-plasm. McCulloch had sought to analyze and solve a social problem through historical narrative; his family studies were later presented as scientific data in support of a larger plan for genetically based social control. The transformation of the largely unscientific Ishmael study and its disparaging rhetoric into a tool in support of a Mendelian agenda for racial hygiene can be seen through a comparison of two sets of Ishmael notes. An examination of the first set, based on records gathered by McCulloch and his colleagues in the late nineteenth century, alongside the second, revised set prepared by biologist Arthur H. Estabrook at the Eugenics Research Office (ERO) of the Carnegie Institution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, after World War I, reflects the changing social context in which the notes were first written and later edited and reveals the value of the concept of inbred deficiencies to civic leaders seeking public support for racial purity laws…

…Arthur Estabrook’s interest in McCulloch’s “three generations” of intermarried poor families originated during his term as an investigator for the Indiana State Committee on Mental Defectives (1916–18) and continued during his subsequent work on hereditable human traits at the Carnegie Institution’s Eugenics Record Office (ERO), an organization founded in 1910 as a clearinghouse for data on human traits and heredity. Estabrook was especially interested in the traits of mixed-race groups and in the sterilization of “mental defectives.” He presented reexaminations of the Jukes and the Ishmaels at the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held in 1921 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. His work for the ERO also included The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics (1912, with Charles B. Davenport) and Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe (1926, with Ivan E. McDougle), studies that involved bi-racial and tri-racial individuals respectively. He represented the ERO in Virginia from 1924 to 1926 during an analysis of the issues in the Carrie Buck sterilization lawsuit, and served as the president of the Eugenics Research Association 1925–1926.

Estabrook’s activities following his move to the ERO reflected the widening scientific acceptance of eugenics research and a consequent turn toward more aggressive advocacy, on the part of some scientists and social reformers, for strong measures such as sterilization. Such reformers typically presented compulsory sterilization and other eugenic programs as humanitarian in approach and economic in efficiency. Their studies correlated the increase in immigration to the United States (as well as the persistence of allegedly inferior, native-born descendants of families such as the Ishmaels) with statistics on crime and poverty. In their 1912 report on a rural Massachusetts family they called the Hill Folk, ERO biologists Florence H. Danielson and Charles B. Davenport asked: “Should the industrious, intelligent citizen continue in each generation to triple or quadruple his taxes for maintaining these defectives… or can steps be taken to… prevent the propagation of inevitable dependents?” Other scientists openly expressed concern about cacogenics, the deterioration of a specific genetic stock. British biologist and educator William E. Kellicott spoke on the scientific, ethical, and economic impacts of racial purity and implored his audience “to think of the future of our communities and nations and of our race, rather than contentedly to… parade with self-satisfied air through our glass houses of Anglo-Saxon supremacy.” Dr. H. E. Jordon was even more to the point: “Unless some eliminating mechanism be installed the Anglo-Saxon race surely is doomed to the fate of the Greeks and Romans.”…

…RACIAL INTEGRITY

Indiana’s 1842 prohibition against miscegenation was still in force in the late 1800s to prevent the “amalgamation of whites and blacks.” A person with one black great-grandparent was considered to be “colored” or “negro.” Marriage between a white person and a person of more than one-eighth “negro blood” remained illegal in Indiana and many other states but some of the married couples recorded in the Ishmael study had apparently skirted those laws. Center Township notetakers often included descriptions of individuals’ complexions in the charity records. The inclusion of these observations of hereditary makeup alongside information such as criminal background or marital history implied that race was somehow genetically linked to pauperism, a significant inference in a city where the “colored” population was growing rapidly. Some individuals are described as mulatto or octoroon while others have “a trace of Negro blood”; some are “very dark” or “swarthy.” One married couple, he with “a trace” and she a mulatto, had a “funny little yellow boy.” One woman who was “very white and possessed very regular features” had a sister whose “very fair white skin” struck the note taker as a strange thing to find in such a poor woman. Another woman, who lived with a mulatto man, “would have been a white woman had she used soap.” A married couple lived on “a dirt street, with houses approaching the shack type, negroes and whites living together.” One man was “a mulatto… born a slave in Virginia, but in some manner secured his freedom… His third and last wife was a very black woman. She had a little property and this was [his] motive for marrying her.” Another man “was a mulatto but seems to have owned a little property.” And another “was of much better mentality than his wife though not of average ability even for a mulatto.”

Although ad hominem comments on race were deleted in the ERO Notes, there is no question that Estabrook resumed study of the Ishmaels in 1915 because of their perceived value to eugenic arguments on racial integrity. The materials he crafted in support of his theories on feeblemindedness for his 1921 presentation to the Second International Congress of Eugenics were archived at the Eugenics Record Office not under “Criminality” or “Mendicancy” (begging or vagrancy) but with files on “Race,” listed between “Negro” and “American Indian–Negro.” Where the Indiana Notes had attempted to document a causal relationship between pauperism and inbred degeneracy at the end of the nineteenth century, the ERO Notes emphasized the social and economic costs to twentieth-century society of unregulated procreation by the “extremely prolific” lower classes. “The underlying condition of the whole Tribe is seen to be feeble-mindedness,” Estabrook asserted, which in poor conditions causes “the anti-social reaction of pauperism, crime, and prostitution.”…

Read the entire article here.

Darkening Tiger Woods: How post-scandal Tiger Woods lost his whiteness and became Blasian

Asian American Cultural Center Lounge
1210 W. Nevada Street
Urbana, Illinois
2011-04-25, 14:00 CDT (Local Time)

Myra Washington, Assistant Professor of Communication & Journalism
University of New Mexico

The rhetoric around Tiger Woods, after his extramarital affairs became public, demonstrates the complexities in which Blackness and Asianness were deployed to shame, emasculate, understand, praise, pity, and mock him. Via text, Woods himself shifts his identity from Cablinasian (on Oprah) to Blasian, which media organizations used in part used to frame his behavior. His self-identification brought Blasians under scrutiny, which resulted in moves to protect the Blasian brand. Myra Washington is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Communications Research. Her dissertation explores Black/Asian (Blasian) multiracial identity and its representations through analyzing mediated constructions of Blasian celebrities specifically Kimora Lee Simmons, Hines Ward, and post-cheating scandal Tiger Woods. Using the increase in recognition of multiracial celebrities who identify as Black and Asian and the popularity of these celebrities specifically, Washington’s project interrogates if and how their visibility and success allows for other similarly mixed up [?? actual wording in announcement] mixed-race people to claim visibility for themselves. Washington received the 2010 Jeffrey S. Tanaka Asian American Studies Grant for graduate students.

For more information, click here.

Anthropological Studies of Children

Eugenics Review
Volume 18, Number 4 (January 1927)
pages 294-301

Rachel M. Fleming

Some ten years ago, with the guidance and help of Professor Fleure, of the Department of Geography and Anthropology, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, I began to study race type in women, and from the study of divergent-race characteristics for the sexes there naturally emerged a desire to follow up growth in children, and see how far and in what way racial type affected development, if it affected it at all. For this purpose it seemed essential to follow the course of growth year by year in individuals; there are numerous studies of different batches of children at different ages compared as to various physical characters. This method, however, does not bring out either what actually happens in individual cases, or allow for racial variations. On the other hand the method of following up growth in individual children is a slow and laborious one, and though, for the past eight years, some thousand children have been under continuous observation, the work is still far from complete. Last year, at the suggestion of the Eugenics Society, Professor Fleure and I took some measurements on children of mixed parentage (coloured and white) in various seaport towns. In its initial stages the work had for its main aim to record developmental changes and their correlation, if any, with different race types.As the work has progressed other possibilities have developed-the marked differences in rate of development according to sex led to some conclusions as to the desirability of recognising the sex factor in school curricula, and the Advisory Committee to the board of Education asked for the data. Further, the extensive studies of racial types carried out by Professor Fleure and his students have afforded a basis on which to consider some possibilities of special aptitudes associated with particular race types. In the course of my visits to secondary schools I am often asked by children and their parents for help in deciding on a possible career for a youth or girl who seems “pretty good all round,” “likes nearly everything,” &c., and is obviously as yet not fully developed in knowledge of what will finally be the special bent. No claim is made that special aptitudes must go with particular physical types, or vice versa, but the claim is made that in many cases it is possible to say that to many people of a certain type, a certain side of life appeals, and therefore to suggest this as probably the right one. To take a concrete example. In taking measurements at a boys’ commercial secondary school in an industrial centre, where most lads were of Scotch parentage, a lad was brought to me with the half-jesting suggestion that perhaps the callipers could find out why he had done such consistently bad work for the 18 months that he had been in the school, though he had headed the scholarship list on entry. It happened that the lad was of a striking physique noted frequently among photographs of old Welsh bards and preachers. In conversation it turned out that the lad was of Welsh extraction, that a relative had just won a bardic prize, and that the lad’ s interests were all literary. Following a talk to the head master the lad was removed to a school where his literary ability had scope, and later I heard that he had done brilliantly and was now in a University. Head teachers in some schools are now helping me to record special aptitudes, and eventually the cards should help, it is hoped, in the problems of advisory committees on the occupation of adolescents. An important scientific aspect of the work is the effort to record ancestry, and so to work out to some extent the heredity of the child and its relation to each of its parents. The advantages from this point of view of studies of children of negro and white, of Chinese and white, &c., are obvious, since some results of crossing are written in obvious characters, whereas in the blending of the races so long living side by side in our own island, the problem is much more intricate…

…PART II. CHILDREN OF MIXED PARENTAGE.

The observations on children of English and foreign parentage have only been carried out for the last year, and so results are based on much smaller numbers, and no growth data are available. The conclusions given are therefore merely in the nature of an interim report and should not be taken as final.

Several children whose fathers were Chinese, and mothers English were measured; in one case the father was Chinese and the mother Anglo-Chinese. Parents were measured in some cases. As regards physical characters, 47.3% had inherited the fold of the eyelid characterised as Mongolian. One unfortunate lad had this fold and an orbit of Chinese shape on one side only. His eyes also varied, one being the characteristic “opaque” brown of the Chinese, and one being a light grey-brown English eye.

Skin colour. Although the mothers were usually of the fair “Nordic” type, only one child had a really fair fresh skin, and 68.4% had inherited Chinese skin type and colour.

Eye colour. 68.4% had the characteristic “opaque” brown Chinese eye, and only one child had blue eyes…

…Social Workers agreed in reporting that the Chinese were good husbands, and especially good fathers, and insisted on care of the children. This was borne out by what we saw in visiting the homes, where the Chinese father often seemed most anxious to get the children to be at their best intellectually when we went in. Several Chinese were bitter about the impossibility of getting good housing conditions The children often seemed affectionate and to have complete confidence in their Chinese father, whereas in the negro-white home the children clung to the mother. The unions of Chinese and White were more usually stable than those of Negro and White…

…CHILDREN OF NEGRO AND WHITE ANCESTRY.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERS.

Skin colour. With three exceptions skin colour had been inherited from the coloured side to a greater or less degree. There were several cases of negro father and half-caste mother, and in these cases the skin was distinctly negroid. In all cases, Fl and F2 reckoned together, 92% showed some degree of negro colouring. Marked variations of intensity in pigmentation occurred, and it was noticeable that in many children the forehead seemed specially dusky, in others the arms and legs and neck varied much in intensity of shade. In cases of Portuguese and Spanish negro crossed with English half-caste, the skin was a beautiful gold-orange tint with a deep red in the cheeks. In the case of negro ancestry of American origin there were indications of North American Indian in skin and eyes, etc. It is hoped to follow up this question of inheritance of skin colour in larger numbers, and to get data on the effect of sex linkage.

Eye colour. 30% had English eyes, 70% had the peculiar velvety deep bluish brown negro eye. Only one child had really blue eyes. There were several cases of a grayish rim to the eye which had the appearance of the ring due to age, and in two cases cataract had developed. It would be interesting to work out whether this had any relation to the different light conditions, i.e., the eye had developed its intensity in tropic conditions and that intensity may possibly not be suited to our cloudier conditions.

Hair. A little over 50% had hair negroid in type and in colour, 25% had hair English in type and colour. The remaining 25% exhibited some curious mixtures-hair tight and frizzy in type, but flaxen in colour surmounting a quite black face, in another case hair partly woolly in type and partly straight, and ranging from light brown to black, and so on.

Lips. About 12% had lips like the average English child, 50% had wide everted lips, and the remainder had one lip wide and everted and one English in type.

Nose. 70% had the broad flat negro nose.

Limbs. 70% showed negroid features in the slimness of bone or in the bulbous appearance of the joints.

General appearance. 43% immediately gave the impression of being distinctly negroid. 5% might have passed as English children, and the remainder were half caste in appearance. There were some striking anomalies, e.g., negro skin and flaxen hair, negroid colouring and white scalp-in this peculiar case, almost the only thing that betrayed any English blood was the very white scalp-the hair was woolly and black. In another case the eyes and lips were English in type, the skin colour a rich brownish red, the hair dark and the scalp, very light. Other peculiarities were the long hairs often growing on the check bones and outwards from a central vertical space in the forehead. The fact that 25% admitted half-caste blood on the mother’s side shows that this intermixture is going on steadily in our seaport towns.

Head Shape. In most cases the head form was markedly long and narrow, as is to be expected since the mothers were mainly fair long heads and the negro is long headed.

General conclusions. The negro side of the ancestry tends to be very apparent in both Fl and F2 generations. Skin, eye and hair colour are not all inherited together, but vary most curiously and unexpectedly, giving the children at times a most disharmonic appearance.

Most of the Anglo-Negro children observed came from poor homes, and frequently children of the same mother had different fathers e.g. a family where the mother was recorded as sub-normal, included pure European, Anglo-negro, Anglo-halfcaste children, and a child of uncertain fatherhood. One such European child in a mixed family was a girl of aristocratic features anid bearing, who had an expression of suppressed and sullen inward rage and shamnefacediness that was painful to see. There were pleasant exceptions to this rule of bad conditions, notably a family where the father was a well educated, musical and intelligent negro, and the woman an intelligent and devoted European mother, who insisted that the father was her superior in mind and ideals. One girl in this family took a prominent part in school activities and athletics and was popular with both staff and scholars. Her frank, happy and intelligent expression was a refreshing contrast to the sulky, half shamed expression too often seen on the face of the adolescent half caste girl in our crowdecd cities. Yet even in this case teachers were finding it difficult to plan out a future occupation for the girl…

Read the entire article here.

A study of the intelligence of Anglo-Chinese children

Eugenics Review
Volume 30, Number 2 (July 1938)
pages 109-119

P. C. Hu
Department of Psychology
University College, London

I. OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY

The present investigation was carried out with the object of determining the general intellectual level of Anglo-Chinese children, and of dscovering what differences, if any, exist between their general standard of intelligence as compared with that of English children, selected from
the same social environment. With this object in view the East End of London and Liverpool were chosen as the most suitable districts in which to carry out the main portion of the research. Anglo-Chinese communities have existed in these districts for nearly a century, and small groups of half-caste children are here easily accessible to the investigator. To obtain precise information about the population, and particularly about the numbers of half-caste children residing in these areas, is by no means easy. In London they are scattered over many different schools, and accordingly the simplest plan seemed to be to choose the chief examinees from the Chung Hwa Club* for Anglo-Chinese children, and to test them in the club itself. The children attending this club must be of Chinese parentage; otherwise, no special qualification is necessary and no fee is paid, the members therefore forming a group typical of the total Anglo-Chinese population. In Liverpool the half-caste children are nearly all grouped together in the three schools; these therefore were tested in the school itself.

In both London and Liverpool the children of mixed parentage form only a small minority; and it would be useless to compare them with a paired control group containing an equally small number of English children. We need, if possible, to compare the average intelligence of both communities estimated as a whole. The method here adopted was to test the entire number of English children at the five London schools which the majority of the Anglo-Chinese children were attending. In Liverpool, to obtain sufficient numbers the English children were tested at five schools: three of the schools were attended by Anglo-Chinese, the other two by English children only, but the social status and economic conditions were much the same as those of the half-castes…

Read the entire article here.

Lone Mothers of Children from Mixed Racial and Ethnic Backgrounds: A Case Study

Single Parent Action Network (SPAN)
January 2010
41 pages

Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow
London South Bank University

This report draws on case study findings with 10 lone mothers of mixed racial and ethnic children to look at their everyday experiences of raising their children, particularly the ways in which they seek to give their children a sense of identity and belonging and what support or challenges they face in doing so.

Read the entire report here.

Communicating With Children of Interracial/Interethnic Parentage

IUC Journal of Social Work Theory & Practice
Issue 4 (2001/2002)

Toyin Okitikpi

Children of interracial/interethnic parentage are increasing in number throughout Europe yet there has been a wall of silence about how to work with such children. In this discussion the aim is not only to encourage a dialogue about children of interracial/interethnic relationships but also to urge a development of a better understanding of the inner and outer world of such children. The aim is also to highlight and analyse the different issues that welfare professionals need to take into consideration when working with the children. I shall suggest that there is a need to give greater credence to the way people communicate with the children because what is communicated and how it is communicated could affect how the children relate to others, how they develop intellectually, emotionally and psychologically and how they develop their sense of identity. Children of interracial/interethnic parentage are increasing in number throughout Europe yet there has been a wall of silence about how to work with such children. In this discussion the aim is not only to encourage a dialogue about children of interracial/interethnic relationships but also to urge a development of a better understanding of the inner and outer world of such children. The aim is also to highlight and analyse the different issues that welfare professionals need to take into consideration when working with the children. I shall suggest that there is a need to give greater credence to the way people communicate with the children because what is communicated and how it is communicated could affect how the children relate to others, how they develop intellectually, emotionally and psychologically and how they develop their sense of identity.

Read the entire article here.

A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy

Duke University Press
December 2010
328 Pages
57 b&w photos, 3 figures
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4876-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4900-6

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

A White Side of Black Britain explores the racial consciousness of white women in the United Kingdom who have established families and had children with black men of African Caribbean heritage. Filling a gap in the sociological literature on racism and antiracism, France Winddance Twine introduces new theoretical concepts in her description and analysis of white “transracial” mothers raising their children of African Caribbean ancestry in a racially diverse British city. Varying in age, income, education, and marital status, the transracial mothers at the center of Twine’s ethnography share moving stories about how they cope with racism and teach their children to identify and respond to racism. They also discuss how and why their thinking about race, racism, and whiteness changed over time. Interviewing and observing more than forty multiracial families over a decade, Twine discovered that the white women’s racial consciousness and their ability to recognize and negotiate racism was derived as much from their relationships with their black partner and his extended family as it was from their female friends. In addition to the white birth mothers, Twine interviewed their children, spouses, domestic partners, friends, and extended families members. Her book is best characterized as an ethnography of racial consciousness and a dialogue between black and white family members about the meaning of race, racism, and whiteness. It includes intimate photographs of the family members and their community.

Table of Conents

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Class Analysis of Interracial Intimacy
2. Disciplining Racial Dissidents
3. The Concept of Racial Literacy
4. Antiracism in Practice
5. Written on the Body: Ethnic Capital and Black Cultural Production
6. Archives of Interracial Intimacies: Race, Respectability, and Family Photographs
7. White Like Who? Status, Stigma, and the Social Meanings of Whiteness
8. Gender Gaps in the Experience of Interracial Intimacy
Conclusion: Constricted Eyes and Racial Visions
Notes
References
Index

Issues for Racially Diverse Families

A Research Project for the Capital Region Race Relations Association, Victoria [Canada]
2003
41 pages

Elias Cheboud (1959-2010), Adjunct Professor of Social Work
University of Victoria, Canada

Christine Downing, Project Coordinator
Multiracial Family Project

This report explores the experience of members of racially mixed families in Victoria, BC. Six themes were identified:(1. Identifying Self, 2. Being In Racially Mixed Family In Victoria, 3. The Challenges, 4. Access For Support, 5. Acceptance, 6. Gaps In Service And Resources). Then reference was made to the heuristic method, chosen to verify the process and to understand the meaning of these lived-experiences.

Most participants in this snapshot study have described encountering numerous barriers as part of a racially mixed family or as individuals living in Victoria. This could be due to everyday racism and discrimination that has closed their access to social services and resources. Interestingly, isolation, identity confusion and an impaired sense of belonging were common experiences reported by adults and children. As a result, for participants to seek resources and services, it has been difficult due to their uniqueness and inability to fit to the existing service and resource categories. The significance of this finding means participants are struggling to adapt their identity to fixed notions of identity (ie. “Chinese”, “Black”) in order to access services and/or seek resources.

What was fascinating in this study was that some individuals who chose to marry into different racial/ethnic backgrounds were rejected by their family of origin and as a result they became isolated from their community. Whereas some individual’s experiences regardless of racial/ethnic mix were positive, the family and community relationships remained solid. Based on this study, we conclude that racially mixed families in Victoria are lonely and the isolation experienced by their children is more serious due to the outright rejection of the community they live in.

The findings presented here are comparable to identity patterns explanations (individual, cultural, and social, as well as political issues) found in the literature. Furthermore, the extracted meanings have confirmed sources of identity as being congruent to the adopted theory of this research (explain briefly locational theory). This study is very important to all professionals as well as to human services agencies. Both human service agencies and professionals could refer to these participants’ patterns of experiences of reforming identities which serve as a guideline to help and provide services appropriately. We believe that we have exposed the need to facilitate this awareness and sensitivity to gain further knowledge about racially mixed people in Victoria. This research confirms commonly held assumptions about identity and associated stresses for racially mixed people. This research will serve to identify the various locations held by racially mixed people in the community as well as their unique needs which may ultimately help to bridge the gaps in knowledge about racially mixed families in Victoria.

The following recommendations are suggested to address these concerns:

1. Development of an educational, information and resource center in Victoria.
2. Development of support groups to address concerns brought up in the study
3. Province wide research (both qualitative and quantitative)
4. Extended training for professionals and service providers at all levels in community and government agencies.

Read the entire report here.

Kelly Jackson: Faculty spotlight

Arizona State University
College of Public Programs
2011-01-14

Dr. Kelly Jackson is an Assistant Professor in Social Work in the College of Public Programs.

Before coming to the College four years ago, she earned her Masters in Social Work from the University at Albany, and her PhD in Social Welfare from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Kelly’s research focuses on the cultural identity development of persons of mixed racial and ethnic heritage. She is also interested in developing and evaluating strength-based interventions for at-risk multiracial and multicultural youth.

She says her work is very personal to her.  “As a social worker and a person of mixed race heritage, I am committed to expanding the current knowledge base of multiracial identity development by conducting and disseminating empirical research that utilizes ecological and strength-based conceptualizations of the multiracial experience.”…

Read the entire article here.