Mixed Race Studies

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…

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Unwinding a Lie: Donald Trump and ‘Birtherism’

The New York Times
2016-09-16

Michael Barbaro

It was not true in 2011, when Donald J. Trump mischievously began to question President Obama’s birthplace aloud in television interviews. “I’m starting to think that he was not born here,” he said at the time.

It was not true in 2012, when he took to Twitter to declare that “an ‘extremely credible source’” had called his office to inform him that Mr. Obama’s birth certificate was “a fraud.”

It was not true in 2014, when Mr. Trump invited hackers to “please hack Obama’s college records (destroyed?) and check ‘place of birth.’”

It was never true, any of it. Mr. Obama’s citizenship was never in question. No credible evidence ever suggested otherwise.

Yet it took Mr. Trump five years of dodging, winking and joking to surrender, finally on Friday, to reality after a remarkable campaign of relentless deception that tried to undermine the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president…

Read the entire article here.

Trump Drops False ‘Birther’ Theory, but Floats a New One: Clinton Started It

The New York Times
2016-09-16

Maggie Haberman

Alan Rapperport

Donald J. Trump publicly retreated from his “birther” campaign on Friday, tersely acknowledging that President Obama was born in the United States and saying that he wanted to move on from the conspiracy theory that he has been clinging to for years.

Mr. Trump made no apology for and took no questions about what had amounted to a five-year-long smear of the nation’s first black president. Instead, he claimed, falsely, that questions about Mr. Obama’s citizenship were initially stirred by the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, in her unsuccessful primary contest with Mr. Obama in 2008.

Still, Mr. Trump’s brief remarks, tacked onto the end of a campaign appearance with military veterans at his new hotel in downtown Washington, amounted to a sharp reversal from a position he has publicly maintained, over howls of outrage from all but the far-right extreme of the political spectrum, since 2011.

“President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period,” Mr. Trump said. “Now, we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”

Mr. Trump’s refusal to disavow the birther issue helped drive his standing among black voters to historically low levels, with some public opinion polls showing him supported by zero percent of African-Americans…

…Mr. Trump made no apology for and took no questions about what had amounted to a five-year-long smear of the nation’s first black president. Instead, he claimed, falsely, that questions about Mr. Obama’s citizenship were initially stirred by the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, in her unsuccessful primary contest with Mr. Obama in 2008…

Read the entire article here.