Mixed Race Studies

Marvin Rees’s triumph as mayor defies Bristol’s racist past

The Guardian
2016-05-08

Simon Woolley

Source: Marvin Rees

The descendant of enslaved Africans is now running a former slave city. His symbolic victory gives hope – and should not be forgotten

While much has been said, rightly so, about a Muslim now leading London, we must not lose sight of the symbolism and enormous significance of Marvin Rees being elected mayor of Bristol this weekend.

Rees, the working-class son of an English mother and Jamaican father, makes history as the first directly elected city mayor in Europe of African or Caribbean heritage.

And that’s important, because the city of Bristol and its governance cannot effectively be understood without seeing it, in part, through the prism of race…

Read the entire article here.

I’m the new NUS president – and no, I’m not an antisemitic Isis sympathiser

The Guardian
2016-04-24

Malia Bouattia

‘Some may not agree with my politics and ideologies, but I do believe the student movement has a shared goal.’ Photograph: Vicky Design/NUS website

The accusations being directed at me this week are deeply troubling and false. I want to focus on liberating education and opportunity for all

This week I became the first black woman to be elected president of the National Union of Students, and the first Muslim who will hold this position too. But instead of celebrating and publicising this incredible landmark, the media coverage has been cluttered with stories calling me a racist, an antisemite, an Islamic State sympathiser and more.

The truth is, as those who know me well understand, I’ve always been a strong campaigner against racism and fascism in all its forms. And I’d like to set a few things straight…

Read the entire article here.

Malia Bouattia’s election as NUS president proves deeply divisive

The Guardian
2016-04-22

Jessica Elgot

At the NUS conference, Bouattia won on the first round. Photograph: NUS/PA

Jewish student groups alarmed by her election, but the first black Muslim woman in the role has nerves of steel, and young activists love her for that

It is rare that the election of a student union president merits the flurry of headlines that greeted Malia Bouattia. But her election, as the first black Muslim woman to hold the office, has been one of the most divisive moments in the National Union of Students’ recent history…

Read the entire article here.

Blackass: a race rewrite of Kafka’s Metamorphosis

The Guardian
2016-04-13

Ainehi Edoro

Ainehi Edoro reflects on Blackass, a novel that subjects Kafka’s classic to African literary conventions – and, in the process, gives an iconic European story ‘an extreme but necessary makeover’

Last year, I received a review copy of A Igoni Barrett’s Blackass from his Nigerian publisher. I knew it was a rewrite of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I just didn’t know what to expect. To be quite frank, I was a bit worried. Kafka has not always lived a happy life in Africa. When Guinean novelist Camara Laye wrote a Kafka-inspired novel, he was dragged through a gauntlet of scandals. Kind commentators called his work derivative and unoriginal. Others were less kind. They accused him of borderline plagiarism. Some even went as far as suggesting that he couldn’t have written the novel without the help of a ghostwriter of some kind. But Blackass, it turns out, is different. Barrett essentially subjects Kafka’s classic to the pressures African literary conventions, and, in the process, gives an iconic European story an extreme, but much needed makeover…

Read the entire review here.

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.

“For me growing up as a mixed-race person, you’re forced to see both sides,” he explains. “I grew up in a house where my mother was Xhosa, my dad was Swiss, my stepdad was Shangaan, my friends were Zulu. I lived in such a melting pot that I never grew up with a preconceived notion of ‘people’. Because of that it helped my comedy because I could play within the nuance of that world.” —Trevor Noah

Lanre Bakare, “Trevor Noah: ‘It’s easier to be an angry white man than an angry black man’,” The Guardian, April 2, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/apr/02/trevor-noah-on-replacing-jon-stewart-and-changing-the-daily-show.

Pao by Kerry Young – review

The Guardian
2011-07-03

Ian Thomson

Young, Kerry, Pao: A Novel (London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011)

Kerry Young’s mesmerising first novel celebrates Jamaica’s ethnic melting pot, and the lost world of Kingston’s Chinatown

Jamaica, where Kerry Young was born in 1955, is an island of bewildering mixed bloods and ethnicities. Lebanese, British, Asian, Jewish and aboriginal Taíno Indian have all intermarried to form an indecipherable blend of Caribbean peoples. In some ways, this multi-shaded community of nations was a more “modern” society than postwar Britain, where Jamaicans migrated in numbers during the 1950s and 60s. British calls for racial purity often puzzled these newcomers from the anglophone West Indies, as racial mixing was not new to them. Jamaica remains a nation both parochial and international in its collision of African, Asian and European cultures.

Young, the daughter of a Chinese father and a mother of mixed Chinese-African heritage, came to Britain in 1965 at the age of 10. Pao, her zingy first novel, lovingly recreates the Jamaican-Chinese world of her childhood, with its betting parlours, laundries, fortune-telling shops, supermarkets and (business being a hard game in Jamaica) gang warfare. The Chinese first arrived in Jamaica in the 1840s, we learn, as indentured labourers. Having escaped this indignity, they set up business in the Jamaican capital of Kingston selling lychee ice cream, oysters and booby (sea bird) eggs. Racial tensions developed between them and their black neighbours; mixed marriages were generally frowned on. Ian Fleming, in his Jamaican extravaganza Dr No, wrote disapprovingly of the island’s yellow-black “Chigroes“…

Read the entire review here.

Trevor Noah: ‘It’s easier to be an angry white man than an angry black man’

The Guardian
2016-04-02

Lanre Bakare, Deputy Arts Editor

Trevor Noah photographed at the Daily Show offices.
Photograph: Christopher Lane

Six months ago the South African comic took on the trickiest task in comedy; replacing Jon Stewart as host of the Daily Show. What’s he learned so far? Always keep your cool

Trevor Noah is perched on top of a bank of chairs in the Daily Show conference room. It’s a Friday, which means there’s no live show, and Noah has time to clown around, undergoing half-a-dozen tie changes while being photographed by the Guide. This room is usually the hallowed space where the writers share their ideas and hone jokes for America’s best-known political satire, but right now Noah has his arms outspread and is tottering around as if he’s about to fall over. “That’s good,” says the Guide’s photographer. “Keep doing that airplane thing,” he adds as Noah regains his balance. “Airplane?” asks Noah with faux-incredulity. “That’s what you thought that was? Interesting. This is like a Rorschach test: you see whatever you want.”…

…“For me growing up as a mixed-race person, you’re forced to see both sides,” he explains. “I grew up in a house where my mother was Xhosa, my dad was Swiss, my stepdad was Shangaan, my friends were Zulu. I lived in such a melting pot that I never grew up with a preconceived notion of ‘people’. Because of that it helped my comedy because I could play within the nuance of that world.”…

Read the entire article here.

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.