Mixed Race Studies

How Green Was My Surname; Via Ireland, a Chapter in the Story of Black America

The New York Times
2003-03-17

S. Lee Jamison

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Shaquille O’Neal!

So many African-Americans have Irish-sounding last names—Eddie Murphy, Isaac Hayes, Mariah Carey, Dizzy Gillespie, Toni Morrison, H. Carl McCall—that you would think that the long story of blacks and Irish coming together would be well documented. You would be wrong.

Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of ”Interracial Intimacies; Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption,” said that when it comes to written historical exploration of black-Irish sexual encounters, ”there are little mentions, but not much.”

And most African-Americans do not know a lot about their family names.

“Quite frankly, I always thought my name was Scotch, not Irish.” said Mr. McCall, the former New York State comptroller.

But the Irish names almost certainly do not come from Southern slaveholders with names like Scarlett O’Hara. Most Irish were too poor to own land. And some blacks, even before the Civil War, were not slaves.

…Elizabeth Shown Mills, who recently retired as the editor of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, said that unlike native-born whites, “Irish were more willing to accept and acknowledge interracial allegiances.”

Before the Civil War, she said, “the free mulatto population had the same number of black moms as white moms.”

Ms. Mills said that mixed-race children would have been given Irish surnames when their Irish fathers married their black mothers, or when their unmarried Irish mothers named children after themselves.

The Irish ended up in the Caribbean, too. Britain sent hundreds of Irish people to penal colonies in the West Indies in the mid-1600’s, and more went over as indentured servants.

Mr. [Charles L.] Blockson noted that “Lord Oliver Cromwell’s boatloads of men and women” sent to Barbados and Jamaica intermingled with the African slaves already there.

Montserrat ended up with the largest Irish community in the West Indies…

Read the entire article here.

Half-white, half-Asian, but no less Irish

The Irish Examiner
Dublin, Ireland
2015-08-15

Dean Van Nguyen

Half white, half Asian Dubliner Dean Van Nguyen speaks to other mixed-race Irish people in their twenties and thirties about growing up in a primarily white culture, being subjected to racist taunts, and coming to terms with their own sense of self.

Who am I? It’s a simple question, but one we as human beings frequently ask ourselves – it defines our sense of self identity, from childhood right throughout our lives, and can play a major role in shaping the people we become.

When it comes to self-concept, there are some obvious factors that we know from an early age just by examining our circumstances.

For generations of people born in Ireland, many of the key questions seemed pre-answered: You were Irish. You were white. You were Christian.

As African-American comedian Reginald D. Hunter joked at a Vicar Street gig in 2011, Ireland is “where they make white people”.

While the country is becoming ever more pluralist as we get deeper into the 21st century, for those of mixed-race now in their twenties and thirties, the answers to these questions of self-identity have been less simple…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Irish: ‘We were the dust to be swept away’

The Irish Times
2015-07-18

Kitty Holland, Staff Reporter

‘I lived in a state of pure terror’: Rosemary Adaser, co-founder of the group Mixed Race Irish. Photograph: Joanne O’Brien

Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation urged to confront the racism endured by children taken into care and abused because they had a non-white parent

In October 1958, when Rosemary Adaser was admitted, as an 18-month-old, to a mother-and-baby home in Dublin, her admission notes described her as “illegitimate and coloured”. Fifteen years later, when she was pregnant and sent to a mother-and-baby home in Co Meath, they described her as “rather mature for her age; accepts her colour well”.

“My file is peppered with references to my colour,” she says. “The racism was relentless and brutalising. My formative years were devastated by it.”

Adaser is one of about 70 mixed-race people who have come together in the past few years as Mixed Race Irish, a campaign and support group. They believe they were taken into care because they were mixed race, that there was a different unspoken “policy” for them and that they suffered an “extra layer of abuse” because of their racial identity. They say racism was endemic, systemic and systematic, in the care system and in Irish society, and that their experiences were particular to them…

…Like other mixed-race Irish children in the mother-and-baby homes, she was never offered for adoption. She believes this was policy, based on a presumption that nobody would want to adopt a mixed-race baby. Instead she was fostered, or boarded out. “When I was four I was sent to a couple in their 60s. No, they weren’t vetted. They were invited to select a child. People were paid by the State to take in children. This couple had no pension, and I was an income source.

“The woman was vicious. I have a clear memory of fearing the gardening gloves, because she would go and cut branches from the rose bushes and cut the flowers off. She called me filthy and nasty and would strip me naked. I was four, remember, and she would whip me with the thorns. Years later I still had scars on my back, buttocks, stomach, legs, arms and soles of my feet, but not my face,” Adaser says. “The whippings were so bad I was hospitalised. After 18 months I was returned to St Patrick’s.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘Kiss me, I’m Irish’ took on a new meaning when DNA proved that I was

The Guardian
2015-03-17

Michael W. Twitty

New tests confirmed what my family had long known: our ancestors were children of their Irish-American slaveholders

Like many African Americans, I was excited by the possibility of using DNA tests to learn about my cultural roots before they were severed by centuries of slavery, obfuscation and the destruction of records. Today, I’m proud to say that multiple tests have confirmed my roots among ethnic groups living Ghana, Sierra Leone and other countries in West and Central Africa.

But the tests also confirmed the legacy of slavery in quite another way: my family, like most black American families, has not one but several white ancestors – men who took advantage of their access to young enslaved women and, in the process, increased the number of human beings they called property.

“Kiss Me, I’m Irish” took on a whole new meaning for me, when I discovered that I was…

Read the entire article here.

Zélie Asava: mixed-race identities and representation in Irish, U.S. and French cinemas

African Women in Cinema Blog
2015-02-28

Beti Ellerson, Director
Centre for the Study and Research of African Women in Cinema

Interview with Zélie Asava by Beti Ellerson, February 2015.

Zélie Asava of Irish-Kenyan parentage with English citizenship, is a lecturer in film and media theory and national cinemas at Dundalk IT and University College Dublin. She explores mixed-raced identities and its representation in Irish, U.S. and French cinemas.

Zélie could you talk a bit about yourself?

I was born in Dublin to Irish and Kenyan parents. Having lived in London previously, they decided to raise me there. As an adult I moved back to Ireland, to go home and develop my career in academia. While, Dublin is a fascinating city with a great cultural scene, I found the experience much more troubling than anticipated due to the growth in racism during the economic boom of the late ‘90s/early 2000s (see my piece for The Evening Herald newspaper).

As an undergraduate, I became involved in student anti-racism movements at University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin, and worked with community groups. During my MA at the University of Sussex and PhD at University College Dublin I studied the representations of black and mixed-race characters in French and American cinema, while pursuing work as an actress and journalist. In my professional life I have also worked in politics and equal opportunities consultancy, and lived in Canada and France, before becoming a lecturer.

How has your identity influenced your interest in racial representations?

This personal and academic experience prompted me to explore what it meant to be black and Irish from a theoretical and social perspective. I studied the history of black and mixed-race people in Ireland and their representation onscreen, and began to develop research papers on the subject which finally became the book, The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television (Peter Lang, 2013).

Due to the cinematic context of my research, the mixed characters I analyse are mostly of African/European heritage, mostly female and mostly heterosexual (following dominant representations). By uncovering, deconstructing and critiquing these representations my work contributes to opening up spaces for new filmmakers, new screen visualizations of raced characters and new understandings of race and racism…

Read the entire interview here.

CMRS Mixed-Race Irish Film Keynote Links

Mixed Roots Stories
2015-01-11

Zélie Asava, Lecturer and Joint-Programme Director of Video and Film
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Louth, Ireland

Following my keynote on mixed representations in contemporary Irish cinema and television at the 2014 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, here are some links to the films discussed…

View all of the keynote links here.

Section of Creative Media lecturer to speak at Global Mixed Race conference in Chicago

Dundalk Institute of Technology
Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland
2014-11-10

Kathryn Moley
Communications Office

Dundalk Institute of Technology is incredibly proud to announce that Joint Programme Director of Video and Film in the Institute, Zélie Asava, is travelling to Chicago, to participate in a ‘Global Mixed Race’ conference.

The conference will be held at DePaul University’s Lincoln Park Campus and will focus on critical mixed race studies with discussions by scholars, filmmakers and performers at this international conference across November 13th-15th. The DkIT lecturer will join nearly two hundred presenters from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan and Australia who will participate in 45 panels during this third biennial conference, which was founded in 2010…

Read the entire article here. Watch the keynote address here.

Dr. Rebecca King O’Riain gives opening keynote address

Maynooth University
Maynooth University Department of Sociology
Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland
2014-11-27

Dr. Rebecca King-O’Riain gave the opening keynote address on “mixed race, transconnectivity and the global imagination” at the critical mixed race studies conference on 13 November, 2014 at DePaul, University on Chicago, USA.

Her talk examined two key questions – ‘Is there such a thing as Global Mixed Race? If so, what is it, where did it come from and is it a good thing?’. Below is the abstract for her talk.

If race gains meaning through the process of racialization, this meaning only makes sense within very specific local contexts entwined with complex local histories, which in turn shape local political, economic and social arrangements. Mixed-race studies started primarily in the United States and has been deeply shaped by the politics of race in that context, with strong racial boundaries and the legacy of the ‘one drop rule’. How then do we make sense of mixed race as a global phenomenon across the globe without losing the specificity of local context from which it derives its meaning?

Drawing on our recent edited volume Global Mixed Race, I use empirical research from Kazakhstan, Okinawa, Zambia, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, New Zealand, and Mexico, as well as the UK, Germany, and Canada, to ask what happens when we take mixed race on the road? Because as Mahtani (2014) keenly observes, it is not just about asking ‘what are you?’ but also about asking ‘where (in the world) are you?’…

Read the entire article here watch the keynote here. [MixedRaceStuides.org is mentioned from 00:35:41 to 00:36:07 in the video].

How can you identify as Irish on the census if you are not white?

Manchester Policy Blogs: Ethnicity
Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity
University of Manchester, United Kingdom
2014-11-27

Lindsey Garratt, Research Associate

The census allows people to identify as Irish only if they are also white. What about the growing number of ethnic minority Irish?, asks Lindsey Garratt.

When I moved to the UK from the Republic of Ireland in August 2012, I filled in an application to privately rent a house. The form contained a question on ethnicity.

As I ticked the ‘white Irish’ box, it was the first time I had identified myself as anything other than part of the majority group of a country. Now outside the dominant category and the anonymity this sometimes provides, a fleeting nervousness passed through me – what if identifying myself as Irish went against securing the house?

This thought came and went in an instant, but what hasn’t left me was my second reaction – what category would I have checked if I wasn’t ‘white’, what if I was ‘black’ and Irish, what box could I tick then?…

…Uncoupling ‘white’ from Irish in the census would allow at least three important groups to be recognised. Firstly, those of two migrant origin parents born in Ireland, or those who themselves moved to Ireland and subsequently to the UK. Secondly, those of mixed parentage born in Ireland, who have moved to the UK. Lastly, those of mixed parentage, born in the UK…

Read the entire article here.

‘The abuse we suffered due to our skin colour is being airbrushed from Irish history’

TheJournal.ie
Dublin, Ireland
2014-10-22

Nicky Ryan, Staff Reporter

Members of Mixed Race Irish before the committee today. Source: Oireachtas.ie

Mixed Race Irish is asking for the Government to recognise the abuse they suffered in State-run institutions.

IN A EMOTIONAL appearance before an Oireachtas committee, mixed race survivors of institutional abuse in Ireland have called on the Government to recognise the suffering they endured.

The group, Mixed Race Irish, believe the alleged racist abuse they experienced in these institutions is being “airbrushed from Irish history”. They say that few, if any, records exist of mixed race Irish in any State institutions.

“Our research suggests this racism was endemic throughout all the institutions attended by our community,” co-founder Rosemary Adaser told the Justice Committee.

“The nuns showed us films of missionaries going to tame the ‘savages’, and we were told, ‘look at that, they are savages, that’s what you are’,” she said.

Co-founder Carole Brennan said that parish priests “would single out mixed race children and abuse them.”

“We believe we were treated differently, resulting in inequality, in these systems due to one simple fact – the colour of our skin,” she said…

Read the entire article here.