Mixed Race Studies

However, though my mum’s Irish, my father is Nigerian. I am not white! This fact, one that I had never even considered before I returned to the land of a thousand welcomes, now became the defining feature of my existence. I remember that first week or so back in Dublin, when I was sent out to play with the local kids. One of the first rhymes I heard was: “Eeny meeeny miny moe. Catch a nigger by da toe.” Who, or what in the hell was “nigger”, I wondered? I soon learned.

Emma Dabiri, “I’m Irish but I’m not white. Why is that still a problem as we celebrate the Easter Rising?,” The Guardian, March 29, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/29/irish-white-easter-rising-ireland-racism.

I’m Irish but I’m not white. Why is that still a problem as we celebrate the Easter Rising?

The Guardian
2016-03-29

Emma Dabiri

With an Irish mother and Nigerian father, I grew up singing Irish rebel songs. But the racism I experienced was not part of the dreams of 1916’s revolutionaries

I grew up singing Irish rebel songs. One of the first ones I learned, which seared an impression on my young mind, was James Connolly. In the haunting ballad the folk musician Christy Moore laments the 1916 execution of Connolly, the Easter Rising revolutionary, and hero of the working man:

Where oh where is our James Connolly?
Where oh where is that gallant man?
He’s gone to organise the union
That working men they might yet be free.

The song outlines the capture of Connolly, a central figure in the 1916 Easter Rising. On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, Irish republicans desperate to end the British occupation of Ireland mounted an insurrection in Dublin. British forces, with their vastly superior military advantage, quickly crushed the rebels. Nevertheless, these events – the centenary of which was commemorated this weekend – were the catalyst for a long fight for Irish independence that was eventually achieved in 1922…

Read the entire article here.

Is it time to ditch the term ‘black, Asian and minority ethnic’ (BAME)?

The Guardian
2015-05-22

Lola Okolosie, Joseph Harker, Leah Green, and Emma Dabiri

This week, former chairman of the commission for racial equality Trevor Phillips gave a speech in which he suggested that phrases such as black and minority ethnic (BME) and black, Asian and minority ethnic (Bame) have become outdated, existing purely “to tidy away the messy jumble of real human beings who share only one characteristic – that they don’t have white skin”. He said the acronyms could be divisive, and actually served to mask the disadvantages suffered by specific ethnic and cultural groups. Instead, Phillips suggested, we could potentially adopt terms commonly used in the US, such as “visible minorities” or “people of colour”. Here, four writers discuss the issue…

…Leah Green: ‘I don’t feel multiple heritage – I feel mixed race’…

Read the entire article here.

Black hair is finally fashionable. But on whose terms? – video

The Guardian
2016-03-09

Emma Dabiri

Growing up with afro hair can be traumatic, especially when white ideals of beauty are everywhere. But, says Emma Dabiri, black women are increasingly letting their natural hair out, and the ‘fro is becoming fashionable. But, she argues, they are still too often measuring their beauty by the yardstick of whiteness.

Why Zoe Saldana was the wrong black woman to play Nina Simone

The Telegraph
2016-03-04

Emma Dabiri

With her long silky hair and brown tan skin, Zoe Saldana may well be black. But is she “black enough” to play Nina Simone?

Some people seem to think not. Ms Simone’s surviving family have asked Saldana, who darkened her skin with make-up to star in the upcoming biopic Nina, to “take [her] name out of your mouth for the rest of your life.” Many Americans agree.

.@zoesaldana Cool story but please take Nina's name out your mouth. For the rest of your life.

— Nina Simone (@NinaSimoneMusic) March 3, 2016

To some it may seem strange that a woman with parents from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic – where 85 per cent of people have African ancestry – should be regarded as not being “black”. But to understand this, we need to consider the way race has been constructed by our society.

As a mixed women with a white mother and black father, I should logically be regarded as “half-white” as often as I am “half-black”. Yet this doesn’t happen, because race is not logical. Instead, whiteness is a social construct which depends on a myth of racial purity and exclusivity, with no room for anyone with visibly African ancestry, no matter how light our skin. In the USA, this was typified by the “one drop rule” – a legal principle which decreed that anyone with a single African ancestor was “black” for the purposes of segregation. For many people, black is simply black.

This can be a powerful concept: I identify as black, not mixed-race, precisely because it is an inclusive category which allows unity between a very wide range of people. But that plurality can also obscure things. I am always sensitive to the advantages I might have in comparison with darker skinned black women, because the truth is that there is a huge difference in how society treats us…

Read the entire article here.

Dating stories project

Black Girl Dancing at Lughnasa
2016-01-28

Emma Dabiri

In continuing on the work of Who Stole All the Black Women from Britain?, I am collecting stories about race and dating for an exciting new project. I want to hear your experiences of dating within and outside your racial group. Do black men really find white women more attractive? Have you experienced colourism in the dating game? Do you only date a certain ‘type’? I am exploring all of these issues for a forthcoming piece of research so do please get in touch at ed5@soas.ac.uk.

Being Mixed Race

Women of the World Festival 2015
Blue Bar at Royal Festival Hall
Southbank Center
Belvedere Road, London
Saturday, 2015-03-07, 13:30-15:00Z

Building on the findings of the Being Mixed Race panel discussions during WOW 2013 and WOW 2014, this workshop expands on issues identified during the previous conversations and focuses specifically on issues of terminology, colourism, hair and parenting. Led by visual sociologist Emma Dabiri.

Emma Dabiri is researching a PhD in visual sociology at Goldsmiths, and works as a teaching fellow in the Africa Department at SOAS, University of London. As a commentator she is frequently invited to contribute to discussions relating to Africa and the African Diaspora on topics including futures, gender, feminism, identities, literature, film and the politics of beauty. She has published in a number of academic journals, as well as in the national press and is one of the BBC’s Expert Voices.

For more information, click here.

Thanks, Belle, it’s nice to see a face like mine on screen

The Guardian (The Observer)
2014-06-07

Ashley Clark

In giving top billing to Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the film Belle makes a real contribution to raising awareness of the mixed-race experience

My heart leaps whenever I see the poster for Amma Asante’s new film, Belle, high up on billboards around town. The poised, sincere face of its lead actress, Gugu Mbatha-Raw (a Brit of black South African and white English extraction), towers above an otherwise white cast including Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, and ex-Harry Potter villain Tom Felton.

Why? As a mixed-race Brit myself – white and black Caribbean, as I’ve been checking in the relevant boxes for some years now – it’s always been significant to me to see someone who looks like they could be a close relative in the foreground rather than the background. The film’s protagonist, Dido Elizabeth Belle, as you might now know, is based on an actual 18th-century mixed-race woman of white British and black African heritage who was raised as an aristocrat…

…The sociologist Emma Dabiri convincingly argues that “black-mixed people can be racialised as black, whereas non-black-mixed people are able to inhabit a more ambiguous exotic space”. This, says Dabiri, puts paid to the myth that all mixed-race groups can be packaged together – as the media often attempt to do – as one separate, monolithic community: a tidy narrative of progress…

Read the entire article here.

Being Mixed Race

Women of the World Festival 2014
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road, London
Blue Room, Spirit Level at Royal Festival Hall
Saturday, 2014-03-08, 13:30-15:00Z

What is being ‘mixed race’? Is there such a thing as a mixed-race identity? In the 2011 census, over a million people in the UK ticked the ‘mixed race’ box—double the number who did so in 2001 when the box was first introduced. This multi-generational panel continues one of WOW 2013’s most moving and insightful conversations. Is the term mixed race useful to anyone but statisticians? Can today’s increasingly fluid racial identities ever really be squeezed into a one-size- fits-all box? Speakers include Irish Nigerian visual sociologist Emma Dabiri, artist Phoebe Collings-James and teacher, writer and feminist Lola Okolosie. The session includes a workshop led by Emma Dabiri and we hear from consultant Sally Kneeshaw.

For more information, click here.

Why I see myself as a daughter of the Diaspora rather than mixed-race

Black Girl Dancing at Lughnasa
2013-02-12

Emma Dabiri, Teaching Fellow
Africa Department, School of African and Oriental Studies, London
Visual Sociology Ph.D. Researcher, Goldsmiths University of London

Why this ‘mixed’ girl rejects the ‘mixed-race’ label.

There is nothing like hearing the arguments of members of the multiracial movement and certain ‘mixed-race’ activists to make me want to distance myself from them as much as possible and exclusively identify as black! However, after all these years, I refuse to be pushed into making essentialist identity choices.

‘Mixed-race’ has been both pathologized and celebrated across time and space, often simultaneously.  Whether we are being positioned as the halfcaste underclass—Waynetta Slob’s ‘brown babies,’ endemic of a broken Britain populated by brown-skinned, hooded feral youth, or we are cast in the role as mixed-race messiahs; genetically superior, physically fitter, inheritors of a bright new, beautiful brown post-racial future—like all non-white people, we continue to be racialised.

Both constructions assign mixed race people a specific and limited identity based on their ‘race’, and continue the work of 18th century scientific racism ascribing particular physical and mental attributes to people based on so called racial difference. Further, the myth of a new, beautiful mixed race generation as the epitome of liberal, cool, race-less Britain, masks enduring structural racism and inequalities, which will be allowed to continue unchecked if we are seduced by it.

The media and social studies join forces to perpetuate a damaging and a-historical construction of being ‘mixed-race’, where mixedness is presented as something new. But black and white people have been having children since their first encounters with each other. This is a process that has been in place since the conquests of the Americas at least. The populations of the New World are largely mixed-race populations. Although they are popularly categorised as black or white, their origins are heterogeneous. In such a context, it seems nonsensical to categorise the child of one black Caribbean parent and one white European parent as suddenly and magically ‘mixed-race’, yet we continue to do so…

Read the entire article here.