Mixed Race Studies

The problem for poor, white kids is that a part of their culture has been destroyed

The Guardian
2016-04-04

Paul Mason

Our culture was the one celebrated in Ken Loach movies … a scene from the film Kes. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

Thatcherism didn’t just crush the unions, it crushed a story – as the report that says working-class white children go backwards at school proves

The report came couched in the usual language of inclusion, technocracy and “what works”. Disadvantaged children are doing so badly at school that only one in five hits an international benchmark designed by the authors.

But the headline grabber in the paper from the liberal thinktank CentreForum concerns ethnicity: the serial losers after 28 years of marketisation, testing, a centralised curriculum and decentralised control of schools are poor white kids…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Children: A Study of Identity

Unwin Hyman
July 1987
230 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0043701683
8.5 x 5.7 x 1 inches

Anne Wilson (1955-)

Wilson’s research was conducted in England from October 1979 to May 1980 and focused on children of white/black (mainly West Indian) parentage. Using ‘snowball’ methods of recruitment, she was able to achieve a sample of 39 mothers and their 51 children of ages six to nine. The measurement instrument used with the children comprised 21 photographs, 14 of individual children and 7 of pairs of adults, and the book published the children’s and mothers’ interview schedules in its appendices…

Continue to read a synopsis of the book here.

Diversity and cohesion in Britain’s most mixed community

Financial Times
2015-10-14

John McDermott

At the Barking Road Community Centre in Plaistow, dancers sway and twirl to calypso beats. If the music hints at the centre’s past as an Afro-Caribbean club, the mix of elderly boppers suggest how the composition of this pocket of east London is changing. As well as women with Nigerian and Jamaican heritage, there are those with roots in India, Pakistan, Colombia, Poland and the Philippines. They show why Plaistow is the clearest example of what researchers describe as London’s “super-diversity”.

“If London is the most diverse city in the world, and Plaistow is the most diverse part of the city, Plaistow might be the most diverse place in the world,” says Forhad Hussain, a local councillor. When Hussain came to the area in 1983 with his Bangladeshi-born parents, this part of the city was mostly white and working-class, home to dockers and their families who had stayed put as Plaistow was rebuilt after the devastation wrought by the Blitz…

Read the entire article here.

Something Old, Something New

BBC Radio 4
2015-10-06

Johny Pitts, Host

Peter Meanwell, Producer

Recorded & mixed! Finished @BBCRadio4 (Engineer Steve Hellier with Johny Pitts) Source: Peter Meanwell

From Sheffield to South Carolina, Johny Pitts explores alternative Black British identity.

What happens when your Dad’s an African-American soul star [Richie Pitts] and your Mum’s a music-loving girl from working class Sheffield? Are your roots on the terraces at a Sheffield United match, or in the stylings of a Spike Lee film? For writer and photographer Johny Pitts, whose parents met in the heyday of Northern Soul, on the dance floor of the legendary King Mojo club, how he navigates his black roots has always been an issue. Not being directly connected to the Caribbean or West African diaspora culture, all he was told at school was that his ancestors were slaves, so for BBC Radio 4, he heads off to the USA, to trace his father’s musical migration, and tell an alternative story of Black British identity.

From Pitsmore in Sheffield, to Bedford Stuyvesant in New York, and all the way down to South Carolina, where his grandmother picked cotton, Johny Pitts heads off on a journey of self-discovery. On the way he meets author Caryl Phillips, Kadija, a half sister he never knew, and historian Bernard Powers. He visits the Concorde Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, and the Bush River Missionary Baptist Church, in Newberry, South Carolina. He tracks down a whole host of long-lost cousins, and talks to Pulitzer winning writer Isabel Wilkerson. On the way he shines a light on the shadows of his ancestry, and finds stories and culture that deliver him to a new understanding of his own mixed race identity and history.

Listen to the story here.

Understanding Race on Black London history walk

Sociology in the City: blogging from Sociology at the University of Westminster
University of Westminster
London, United Kingdom
2015-02-20

Students of the first year module Understanding Race went on a walking tour this morning, led by the writer and historian Steve Martin.

Challenging the popular idea that race in Britain is a phenomenon of post-WW2 immigration, Steve gave us an insight into the longstanding presence of non-white people in London’s history, with a focus on people of African and African-Carribean heritage…

Read the entire article here.

“Red Velvet” spins a fascinating true story

The Berkshire Eagle
Pittsfield, Massachusetts
2015-08-13

Jeffrey Borak, Entertainment Editor and Theater Critic

LENOX — Actor Ira Aldridge isn’t in the American Theater Hall of Fame; his name is barely a whisper in the annals of American theater. That shouldn’t be, say director Daniela Varon and actor John Douglas Thompson, who is playing Aldridge in “Red Velvet,” a new play by Lolita Chakrabarti that had its world premiere in October 2012 at the Tricycle Theatre in London and its American premiere in March 2014 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Born a few years after the start of the French Revolution, Aldridge died a few years after the end of our Civil War — a megastar in Europe, but virtually unknown here.

“I was 17 when I first heard about Aldridge,” Varon said during a joint interview with Thompson in the lobby of Shakespeare & Company’s Tina Packer Playhouse, where the production officially opens at 7:30 tonight after a week of previews. It is scheduled to run in rotating repertory through Sept. 13.

“He gave up everything to go to England to become an actor,” Varon said.

Aldridge fashioned a career performing throughout through Europe and the UK. While he was known primarily as a tragedian, he also had a reputation as a good comedic actor.

He outraged London critics but awed audiences when, one night in 1833, he replaced the ailing Edmund Kean as Othello, at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden.

…Born in New York in 1807, Aldridge emigrated to Liverpool, England in 1824, where he met and married Margaret Gill, a Yorkshire woman.

“He was 26 when he married her, She was 18,” Thompson said. “He already had had a lifetime of experience. He was not a young 26.” Despite a solid marriage, he was a notorious womanizer and fathered several children, in and out of wedlock.

Between 1825 and 1833, he played theaters throughout the United Kingdom. He made his first tour of Europe in 1852, playing not only Othello but also Lear, Richard III, Shylock, Macbeth. He died in Lodz in 1867, where he was given a state funeral…

Read the entire article here.

Joseph Emidy: From slave fiddler to classical violinist

BBC News
2015-06-21

Miles Davis, BBC News Online

Joseph Emidy led the Truro Philharmonic Orchestra

The remarkable life of a former slave who became a pioneer of classical music has been commemorated.

The “genius” violinist Joseph Emidy, from West Africa, was enslaved for two long periods of his eventful life.

But having finally gained his freedom in 1799, Emidy became “Britain’s first composer of the African diaspora”.

His achievements were marked at Truro Cathedral on Sunday with the erection of a ‘boss‘ – a painted wooden carving featuring a violin and a map of Africa.

On his death in 1835, The West Briton newspaper reported in Emidy’s obituary: “As an orchestral composer, his sinfonias may be mentioned as evincing not only deep musical research, but also those flights of genius.”…

…Emidy was finally discharged four years later in the port of Falmouth on 28 February 1799.

He married a local woman, Jenefer Hutchins, in 1802, started taking on music students and became involved with the the first of Truro’s biennial concerts in 1804.

Beverley Wilson (far right) the great, great, great, great grand-daughter of Joseph Emidy met kora player Sona Jobarteh (centre)

Silk Buckingham described him as “an exquisite violinist, a good composer, who led at all the concerts of the county, and who taught equally well the piano, violin, violoncello, clarionet and flute”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race in Manchester – Intersections of Class and Mixed Race Identity

Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar.
Tuesday, 2015-03-03

Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor Women & Gender Studies
California State University, Fullerton

I spent the last three months of 2014 living in Manchester, England helping my mother-in-law through chemotherapy and navigating the National Health Services bureaucratic red tape to secure caregiver support and the like. While I wasn’t able to keep up with this blog, I did manage to work on my first novel and make note of how I was perceived differently than I normally am in the U.S. Now these perceptions draw on my specific interactions so my observations are certainly not generalizable to all but I found the comparisons revealing.

In the African and South Asian (think Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian) community of Longsight, being mixed race (as determined by skin color, hair texture and physical markers of mixed race identity) was not as common as in other parts of Manchester which were predominantly white. In Longsight, I felt like the odd person out and though I have traveled to England many times before (mostly London and Manchester), I was not cognizant of being one of the few mixed folks in the bunch until I stayed more than a week in the area. Home to mostly first generation immigrants to the U.K., Longsight appeared to demonstrate a kind of “racial insularity” that I had not experienced in other parts of the city. Mixed race couples were, in fact, quite rare to find…

Read the entire article here.

Dreams of my mother…

One Love, One London
2015-01-04

Tony Thomas

It’s October 1959; Paddington station is busy… Scanning the departures board for her train a nervous looking woman hurries towards the platform. In one hand she carries a suitcase and holding her other hand tightly is a pretty 2 year old; a mixed race child. The girls’s name was Rosemary Walter and the journey she was about to embark on would change her life forever. She could not have known it off course but she was being rejected; hidden. You see Rosie’s mother, a white woman married to a white man had had a black lover and Rosie was living proof of a relationship that was not just illicit but in those days deemed utterly shameful…

These are not my words but the word’s of George Alagiah narrating the three part series Mixed Britannia. The little girl in the story is my mother; this was the tale of the early years of my mothers life…

My mother was born in 1957 to a white mother and a Jamaican father; in 1959 at the age of two she was handed over to the National Children’s Home and transported from London to Wales; she would spend the next 16 years of her life in children’s homes across the country.

The world that my mother inhabited in her youth was not like today; there were not as many black people in the country; there was no noteable mixed race population and Wales was more or less a white’s only territory. Wherever my mother would go she would not fit in. Her hair was too frizzy, she had big lips and a big nose; there was no way that she could “pass“. She was clearly an object of curiosity to the people that she met who had never interacted with a “darkie” before. On holiday’s such as Christmas unlike the other children my mother did not have a family that would come and take her back to the family home; she would spend the holiday’s with kind Welsh and English families doing a good deed.

My mother spent most of her time in care in Wales; she was sent to London, Brixton at the age of 14 to be with her “own kind” as Brixton had become known as a place where the West Indian community congregated together and it was also where her mother lived who had become an honorary Jamaican. It was the thinking of the children’s home that as she was getting to the age of having boyfriends she should be around her own kind for mating purposes.

For my mother Brixton was as much a culture shock as Wales. My mother had a Welsh accent; she was mixed-race and had never met her Jamaican father. Although she had always sympathised with African-American struggles and her obvious “otherness” made her desire to understand that part of her she knew nothing about; she was not a part of the Jamaican community…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond the ‘Race’ Concept: The Reproduction of Racism in England

Sydney Studies in Society and Culture
Volume 4 (1988)
pages 7-31

Robert Miles, Associate Dean of Study Abroad and International Exchanges College of Arts and Sciences
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Large numbers of people continue for long periods of time to cling to myth, to justify it in formulas that are repeated in their cultures, and to reject falsifying information when prevailing myths justify their interests, roles, and past actions, or assuage their fears. (Edelman, 1977:3)

The deepest instinct of the Englishman–how the word ‘instinct’ keeps forcing itself in again and again!–is for continuity: he never acts more freely nor innovates more boldly than when he is conscious of conserving or even of reacting (Enoch Powell, cited in Wood, 1965:145)

This is the doctrine of the new tribalism, and as such would make sure, if it prevailed, that there would be Washingtons and riots in Britain. (Times, 18.11.67)

Introduction

This paper has two objectives. First, it will summarise and develop my critique of the sociology of ‘race relations’ and the way in which it utilises the idea of ‘race’ as an analytical concept. It will be concluded from this that it is necessary to show why and how the idea of ‘race’ is employed in social relations rather than take for granted its commonsense status. The concepts of racialisation and racism will be shown to be central to this task. Second, as a way of illustrating the significance of this argument, I shall consider a key phase in the racialisation of domestic English politics. I show, first, how the 1964/ 70 Labour government initially employed the idea of ‘race’ to problematise the migrant presence in favour of the exposure of racism and, second, how Enoch Powell subverted a later attempt to do the latter by an ideological intervention which employed the category of ‘nation’ as an allusion to the idea of ‘race’.

The Ideological Character of ‘Race Relations’ Sociology

A confrontation with the idea of ‘race’ is a confrontation with the history and legacy of a central strand of Western thought. During the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the idea of ‘race’ occupied a key place in the attempt by intellectuals and politicians to understand the rapidly changing and expanding world in which they lived, and the successful attempt to attribute scientific status to the idea of ‘race’ is now well understood (Banton, 1977). That some eight million people had to die in the course of a political project influenced by that bogus science is also well understood, despite ongoing attempts by fascist groups to define this historical episode as a myth. The work of many biologists and geneticists both before and after the Holocaust has demonstrated, clearly and repeatedly, that the idea of there being discrete biological groups ranged in a hierarchy of superiority/ inferiority has no scientific foundation. Ambiguities remain in the way in which some of them contimie to employ the idea of ‘race’ within scientific discourse but where its use is maintained and defended, it is in terms which are clearly divorced from the nineteenth century emphasis upon the classification of phenotypical variation (Montagu, 1972). ‘Race’, in the sense of discrete sub-species, is no longer seriously considered to be biological fact. Thus ‘any use of racial categories must take its justifications from some other source than biology’ (Rose et. al., 1984:127).

Most social scientists accept and adopt this as their starting point when analysing the continuing reproduction of racism. But, in the course of rejecting scientific racism, many of them have incorporated the key ‘concept’ of scientific racism into their analytical framework. They have redefined ‘race’ as a social category and utilise it as both explanans and explanandum, in an attempt to constitute ‘race relations’ as a discrete object of analysis, about which theories can be formulated, tested and reformulated (e.g. Rex, 1970; cf. Miles, 1982, 1984b).

Historically, and in the contemporary world, people attribute meaning to particular patterns of phenotypical variation and act in accordance with that process of signification. The occurrence of this complex process of cognition and action is not contested. What is contested is the analytical method and concepts employed to understand and explain it. The conventional sociological method is to claim that, as a result of this process, ‘races’ are constituted and thereby come to relate to one another, and that the means and consequences of this fall into regular patterns which can be theorised. Thereafter, and crucially, ‘race’ is transformed into a real phenomenon which has identifiable effects in the social world. ‘Race’ becomes a variable with measurable consequences. Sociologists employ this variable to report that, for example, ‘race’ has important effects on educational achievement, that ‘race’ interrelates with class to produce multiple patterns of disadvantage, that ‘race’ intervenes in the political process affecting the way in which people vote, that ‘race’ determines an individual’s chances of being unemployed, arrested by the police or becoming a magistrate, and so on. That is, sociologists employ the idea of ‘race’ as an explanans, as an analytical concept identifying a phenomenon with determinant effects.

This is a classic example of reification. There is no identifiable phenomenon of ‘race’ which can have such effects on social relations and processes. There is only a process of signification in the course of which the idea of ‘race’ is employed to interpret the presence and behaviour of others, a conceptual process which can guide subsequent action and reaction. This complex of signification and action, where it occurs systematically over periods of time, has structural consequences. This complex can be referred to as a process of racialisation, a concept which refers to the social construction but also refers to patterns of action and reaction consequent upon the signification. Within this process, the ideology of racism plays a central role by offering criteria upon which signification can occur, attributing negative correlates to all those possessing the real or alleged criteria, and legitimating consequent discriminatory behaviour or consequences…

Read the entire article here.