Mixed Race Studies

The Changing Face of Liverpool 8

Diverse Magazine
2009

Dave Clay

Four hundred years of shackles and chains, four hundred years of racist names and institutionalised racist games, Slavepool’s history has got to change
“Slavepool” by Eugene Lange AKA Muhammad Khalil

My mate, the late and inspirational, John Hill once described Liverpool-born Black people as Puzzle People. He had touched on the puzzling question of identity in the City of Liverpool.   Negro in the 1940s, Second Generation Immigrants in the 1950s,  Mixed-Race in the 1960s, Coloured/Half-caste in the1970s, Afro Caribbean in the 1980s,  Ethnic Minority in the 1990s  and to be found somewhere on an Ethnic Monitoring Form in the Millennium. You can be, politely, described as any of the above at any given time or era in Liverpool. Confused? This article endeavours to explore the so-called Identity Crisis in Liverpool from a Liverpool-born Black perspective.

When I considered which direction this article should take I found that it was so emotional that I had to express some feelings and experiences, rather than provide an academic overview of identity in Liverpool. The latter is more than adequately addressed by Dr. Ray Costello in his excellent overview of this subject on page.

I was born and raised in the Granby area of Liverpool 8 with an African father and a White mother. We were born in the slums of Liverpool 8. As a teenager in the early 1960s I considered myself as one of the ‘Shines’. Obviously intended as a derogatory remark. It was one term used to describe Liverpool Blacks and was fitting with the racist Scouse humour of the time. Here’s an example: Question—Where is the cleanest street in Liverpool?—Answer: Upper Parliament Street where there is a Shine on every corner!…

…FROME SHINES TO HALF-CASTE

Little had changed by the time I became one of the older boys. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh. It was now almost 1970 and we were now being called Half-Caste and we continued in the tradition of fighting racism head on. The term half-caste in many ways distinguished us from our fathers only in the sense that we spoke the Scouse ‘language’; we were here to stay and mostly stood up for ourselves. It also isolated us from from Black people outside of Liverpool. Terms like ‘Yellow Man’ ‘half breed’ and ‘red’ were familiar terms within a growing Black population. As a 12 year old I recall being told about the ‘mad African’ who struttered around Upper Stanhope Street waving a paper and shouting extremities about ‘half-caste’ people. We used to consider him as an object of fun. One day I actually listened to what he was saying and it summed up the dilemmas faced by Black kids of our generation; “You half-caste. You are from nowhere. You were born in the middle of the Ocean”. Our fathers took a different view. They considered us as English, ignoring the skin pigmentation. Why did they not teach us African?  We deployed ‘back slang’ instead. The African community was more elderly and holding on to the last strand of the institutions they had created; The Ibo, The Federation, The Crew Club, The Sierra Leone, The Nigerian and The Yoruba. They saw themselves as returning to Africa one day, not with us, and saw no reason why their sons and daughters could not assimilate into the indigenous population since we were born in Liverpool, England, not Freetown Sierra Leone. Unlike their sons and daughters they had no fight in Britain. It was here Africans had arrived from slavery, colonialism, poverty and wars and in many ways they tried to shield us from racism, in order to ensure a good quality of life. They were polite, courteous, believed in education and, in some ways, were too appreciative of Britain for allowing them an opportunity in a country that had occupied Africa. This is not to ignore the African blood that was shed in two World Wars.  Fortunately we knew the reality of Liverpool and English history.  Our foot was in all camps in regard to Africa, language and Liverpool culture. We could not be hoodwinked too easily. We know racism—be it subtle or overt. In any past life we could have been slaves in Africa, on the Masta’s Plantation, targets of the KKK in America, rioters in Watts, or Rodney King, categorised in apartheid South Africa or joining the Mau Mau resistance…

Read the entire article here.

Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present

Routledge: Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
2010-10-21
204 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-39808-4

Sarah Salih, Professor of English
University of Toronto

This study considers cultural representations of “brown” people in Jamaica and England alongside the determinations of race by statute from the Abolition era onwards. Through close readings of contemporary fictions and “histories,” Salih probes the extent to which colonial ideologies may have been underpinned by what might be called subject-constituting statutes, along with the potential for force and violence which necessarily undergird the law. The author explores the role legal and non-legal discourse plays in disciplining the brown body in pre- and post-Abolition colonial contexts, as well as how are other bodies and identities – e.g. black, white are discursively disciplined. Salih examines whether or not it’s possible to say that non-legal texts such as prose fictions are engaged in this kind of discursive disciplining, and more broadly, looks at what contemporary formulations of “mixed” identity owe to these legal or non-legal discursive formations. This study demonstrates the striking connections between historical and contemporary discourses of race and brownness and argues for a shift in the ways we think about, represent and discuss “mixed race” people.

Table of Contents

• 1: Introduction: The Mulatto in Law and Literature
• 2: Pre-Emancipation Stories of Race: Marly and The Woman of Colour
• 3: Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century: Dinah Craik’s Olive [1850] and Richard Hill’s Lights and Shadows
• 4: Mulattos in the Contact Zone: Mary Seacole and Ozias Midwinter Coda: Modern Mulattos: Mona Lisa and The Crying Game
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Does the British State’s Categorisation of ‘Mixed Race’ Meet Public Policy Needs?

Social Policy & Society
Volume 9, Number 1 (January 2010)
pages 55-69
DOI:10.1017/S1474746409990194

Peter J. Aspinall, Reader in Population Health at the Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, UK

The England and Wales 2001 Census was the first to include ‘Mixed’ categories which have now been adopted across government. The four ‘cultural background’ options were highly prescriptive, specifying combinations of groups. This paper assesses how satisfactorily these analytical categories captured self-ascribed cultural affiliation based on the criteria of validity, reliability and utility of the data for public services. Finally, the paper asks whether we now need a census question on ethnic origin/ancestry in addition to—or instead of—ethnic group or whether multi-ticking or a focus on family origins might give more useful public policy data and better measure the population’s ethnic diversity.

Read the entire article here.

A White Side of Black Britain: The Concept of Racial Literacy

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 27, Issue 6
November 2004
pages 878 – 907
DOI: 10.1080/0141987042000268512

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

Opposition to transracial adoption on both sides of the Atlantic, has been based, in part, on the assumption that white parents cannot understand race or racism and thus cannot properly prepare children of multiracial heritage to cope with racism. In this article I draw on a seven-year ethnographic study to offer an intensive case study of white transracial birth parents that counters this racial logic. I draw on a subset of data collected from field research and in-depth interviews with 102 members of black-white interracial families in England. I provide an analysis of three practices that I discovered among white transracial birth parents who were attempting to cultivate ‘black’ identities in their children of multiracial heritage. I offer the concept of ‘racial literacy’ to theorize their parental labour as a type of anti-racist project that remains under the radar of conventional sociological analyses of racism and anti-racist social movements.

Read or purchase the article here.

Social Work Practice and Lone White Mothers of Mixed-Parentage Children

British Journal of Social Work
Volume 40, Number 2
pages 391-406
DOI:10.1093/bjsw/bcn164

Vicki Harman, Lecturer in Social Policy and Social Work
Royal Holloway, University of London

This paper reports on empirical research involving focus groups with social workers in order to provide insight into their experiences of working with lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children in England. Social workers’ understandings of key areas of families’ lives are explored, including experiences of racism and adequacy of social support networks. The analysis highlights the need for a greater awareness of racism and social disapproval experienced by mothers, and how this impacts upon their support networks. The contested areas of identity and social and political identification for mixed-parentage children are discussed and key questions are asked about the use of terminology and how this influences social work practice. This paper also considers how social workers felt services could be improved and highlights the need for further training.

Read or purchase the article here.

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom or The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery

Louisiana State University Press
Originally Published: 1860
Published by LSU Press: 1999
120 pages
Trim: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 5 halftones
ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-2320-1 Paper

William Craft

With a Foreword and Biographical Essay by

Richard J. M. Blackett,  Andrew Jackson Professor of History
Vanderbilt University

Husband and wife William and Ellen Craft’s [her mother was a slave and her father was her mother’s owner.] break from slavery in 1848 was perhaps the most extraordinary in American history. Numerous newspaper reports in the United States and abroad told of how the two—fair-skinned Ellen disguised as a white slave master and William posing as her servant—negotiated heart-pounding brushes with discovery while fleeing Macon, Georgia, for Philadelphia and eventually Boston. No account, though, conveyed the ingenuity, daring, good fortune, and love that characterized their flight for freedom better than the couple’s own version, published in 1860, a remarkable authorial accomplishment only twelve years beyond illiteracy. Now their stirring first-person narrative and Richard Blackett’s excellent interpretive pieces are brought together in one volume to tell the complete story of the Crafts.

Ellen Craft

Summary by Monique Pierce of Documenting The South:

Published in 1860, shortly before the start of the Civil War, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is the narrative of William and Ellen Craft‘s escape from slavery. Both were born and grew up in Georgia, and they lived in Macon prior to their escape. In December 1848 they devised a plan in which Ellen Craft, who was very light- skinned, would dress as a man and pretend to be a rheumatic seeking better treatment in Philadelphia. William was to accompany her and act as her slave. Relying exclusively on means of public transportation, including trains and steamers, they made their way to Savannah, then to Charleston, Wilmington, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia, where they arrived on Christmas Day. They then relocated to Boston and sailed for England after the Fugitive Slave Law enabled slave hunters to pursue them even in free states. At the time this work was published, they were living in England with their sons. The narrative includes many anecdotes about slavery and freedom for Blacks and discusses how they were treated in both the South and the North.

Read the entire book in HTML format here.  You may also obtain it here.

‘No Such Thing as a Mulatto Slave’: Legal Pluralism, Racial Descent and the Nuances of Slave Women’s Sexual Vulnerability in the Legal Odyssey of Steyntje van de Kaap, c.1815-1822

Fiona Vernal
Department of History
University of Connecticut

Slavery & Abolition
Volume 29, Issue 1
January 2008
pages 23 – 47
DOI: 10.1080/01440390701841034

In 1815, a contentious case came before the Court of Justice in the Cape Colony. Steyntje Van de Kaap, a creole slave, claimed manumission for herself and four children based on her status as a concubine. Harkening back to the Dutch period at the Cape, her suit resurrected a little-known 1772 statute, which, upon the death of slave owners, granted freedom to their concubines and any children from such unions. So indicative was the case of sexual relations at the Cape that one contemporary observer declared that the outcome could threaten one-third of the local slave property, while a Privy Councilor in England who heard the case on appeal, predicted grave consequences if the case should set a precedent. The protracted suit became enmeshed in the nineteenth-century struggle between slaveholders, abolitionists and colonial administrators at the Cape, and in Great Britain. On the eve of amelioration in British colonies like the Cape, Steyntje’s case demonstrated how white paternity and the status of concubine became legal grounds for freedom. This article explores how one woman’s sexual relations with her masters transcended the boundaries of her personal life to challenge the local system of matrilineal descent, to complicate the issue of consent in slave-master sexual relations, and to invoke the worst fears of slaveholders as they confronted a new imperial legal regime interested in reforming slavery.

Politicking the personal: examining academic literature and British National Party beliefs and wishes about intimate interracial relationships and mixed heritage

Information & Communications Technology Law
Volume 18, Issue 2
June 2009
pages 83 – 98
DOI: 10.1080/13600830902814992

Mike Sutton
School of Social Sciences
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Barbara Perry
Faculty of Criminology Justice and Policy Studies
University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Ontario, Canada

Drawing heavily on our earlier work in this area (Perry and Sutton 2006; forthcoming), this article discusses the issue of intimate interracial relationships (IIRs) within the context of the UK Government’s current concerns with social cohesion and provides an overview of the literature on hate and prejudice against those in IIRs in the UK and USA. Following an examination of the official statistics and the numbers of mixed race people in England and Wales, we move on to provide a brief but disturbing glimpse of what it would mean if the BNP‘s long-term dream of winning a national election were actually to happen in light of their official website published proposed policies against IRRs and mixed heritage people.

Belonging to Britain

The Munk Centre for International Studies
University of Toronto
2008-11-14
Video Length: 00:46:36

Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies
Yale University

In her lecture, “Belonging to Britain”, Hazel Carby looks at the historic relationship between England and Jamaica, including the history of the slave trade in Bristol and the complex question of identity for those of mixed British and West Indian heritage. Carby is a professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.

View the video here.

Metisse Narratives

Soundings: A journal of politics and culture
Issue 5, Spring 1997

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

Jayne Ifekwunigwe discusses the testimonies of women of ‘mixed race’ parentage in the English-African diaspora.

Rather than representing a portrait of metisse (‘mixed race’) girls as unruly, at age six Sandra and Aneya have exposed the major problematic of ‘race’.  Their discussion highlights the cultural paradoxes of ‘race’ and colour which multiple generations of women, men and children in England silently negotiate in their everyday lives.  These individuals descend from lineages which cut across so-called different ‘black and white’ ‘races’, ethnicities, cultures, and classes. Their roots are both endogenous and exogenous.

In varied cultural and historical contexts, countless terms are employed to name such individuals – mixed ‘race’, mixed heritage, mixed parentage, mestizo, mestiza, mulatto, mulatta, Creole, coloured, mixed racial descent, etc. I deploy the terms metisse (f), metis (m), metissage which more appropriately describe generations of individuals who by virtue of birth and lineage do not fit neatly into preordained sociological and anthropological categories.  In England, at the moment, there are a multitude of terms in circulation which describe individuals who straddle racial borders.  More often than not, received terminology either privileges presumed ‘racial’ differences (‘mixed race’) or obscures the complex ways in which being metis (se) involves both the negotiation of constructed ‘black’/’white’ racial categories and the celebration of converging cultures, continuities of generations and over-lapping historical traditions.  The lack of consensus as to which term to use, as well as the limitations of this discursive privileging of ‘race’ at the expense of generational, ethnic, and cultural concerns, led me to metis(se) and metissage…

…Gettin’ into me late teens, I didn’t think much about meself because of all these conflicts that were startin’ to come up from the past. Also new ones that were comin’ in from other communities – black communities – that were really shockin’ me. I mean there were times when I wouldn’t show me legs. I’d go through the summer wearing tights and socks. Cause I thought they were too light and too white-lookin’. There was a lot of pressure. I remember one day I was leanin’ up somewhere and this guy said to me, ‘Boy, aren’t your legs white.’ I just looked in horror, and felt really sick and wanted to just run away. I was thinkin’, God why didn’t you make me a bit darker? Why did you make me so light? It took me years to reconcile that…

Read the entire article here.