Mixed Race Studies

While the British government was somewhat pressured by white seamen’s organisations to protect jobs for whites, the primary cause of the anxieties underlying the Coloured Alien Seamen Order moved far beyond employment issues in the shipping industry. As has been well-documented by several scholars, the effort to limit immigration of African seamen to Britain was fundamentally linked to growing unease with the social and sexual liaisons between white women and black seamen. According to Carina Ray (2009), the anxiety over interracial sexual relations was at the root of a massive repatriation campaign for black seamen in the interwar era. Jacqueline Nassy Brown’s work depicts the political backlash against black seamen within England at this time, having been identified as the root of the ‘colour problem’ and the degeneration of white women’s morality. To demonstrate the tone of the British public’s views on the subject of racial mixing, Brown cites the writings of Muriel Fletcher, a social scientist who conducted research on black seamen in Liverpool in 1928–30. As Fletcher wrote in the report of her findings:

In their own country they are not allowed to mix freely with white people or have relations with white women. Once having formed unions with white women in this country, they are perhaps loathe to leave England … In this country [the black seaman] is cut adrift from [tribal restrictions] before he has developed the restraint and control of Western Civilization. In Liverpool there is evidence to show that the negro tends to be promiscuous in his relations with white women. [Their] sexual demands impose a continual strain on white women.

Fletcher’s deepest fears, and indeed those of the British public at large, were linked to the ‘half-caste’ children born out of these unions and raised in an environment characterised by immorality. Far from being a marginal view, Fletcher’s findings have been identified as both constructive and representative of ‘systematic social and political disempowerment of Black people’ in Liverpool until the present (Christian 2008:238). According to Brown (2005:28), ‘It would be hard to state emphatically enough how thoroughly racial politics in Liverpool/Britain reflect the legacy of the Fletcher Report’. Indeed, studies from the 1980s and beyond confirmed the ongoing marginalisation and stigmatisation of the black and mixed-race community in Liverpool (Christian 2008:238).

Lynn Schler, “Becoming Nigerian: African Seamen, Decolonisation, and the Nationalisation of Consciousness,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Volume 11, Issue 1, (April 2011): 46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-9469.2011.01100.x.