Mixed Race Studies

HaluHalo Gives Mixed Race Identities A Fresh Narrative Online & IRL

Bustle
2018-08-01

Salma Haidrani

Source: HaluHalo

A cursory glance at pop culture today and you wouldn’t be mistaken for thinking that mixed race identities have never been more visible. Take the likes of Jorja Smith, Mabel, and Raye. And less than two months ago, Meghan Markle made history as the first mixed race royal in the British monarchy. While it’s problematic enough that representations rarely deviate from the “acceptable” face of mixed race (light-skinned and complete with Eurocentric features or at the very least, “ambiguous”), the dialogue surrounding the complexities of mixed race identities remains absent from the mainstream.

It’s this that motivated London-based photographer Susan Dale to launch HaluHalo, the first photo series of its kind to explore the lesser-known intricacies of mixed race identity. “Thanks to social media, there’s a visual representation of mixed race people compared to when I was growing up but there’s still a lack of public discourse on what it means to be mixed race,” she tells me. “I was curious to find out if anyone else felt the way I did or shared my experiences.”

Dale likens HaluHalo to Humans of New York, albeit with a multi-racial lens. While initially she didn’t encounter any issues approaching complete strangers of mixed ethnicities, ages and genders to share their experiences and how they self-identify – “I started with the most basic method by sliding into their DMs on Instagram!” – she found that they would either hesitate or completely disappear when it came to answering her interview questions…

Read the entire article here.

Voice Business presents Wirework

Tristan Bates Theatre
1A Tower St, Covent Garden
London, United Kingdom WC2H 9NP
Tuesday, 2018-07-03 through Saturday, 2018-07-07, 19:30 (Thurs & Sat Matinees 14:30)

A play about the unexpected relationship between Koos Malgas, a Cape Coloured shepherd and Helen Martins, a one-time actor and teacher, in the creation of the Owl House – an extraordinary environmental piece full of animated sculptures and pulsating light montages.

Set in the isolated landscape of the South African Karoo and inspired by images from pictures and postcards, their world becomes dominated by form and colour. In her struggle to find the ‘light’, Helen looks towards Mecca as Koos faces the reality of apartheid prejudice and survival.

BRITISH PREMIERE, first performed in South Africa, 2009

Supported by Arts Council England

CAST
Helen Elaine Wallace
Koos Kurt Kansley

CREATIVE
Director Jessica Higgs
Scenographer Declan Randall

How the Use by Eugenicists of Family Trees and Other Genealogical Technologies Informed and Reflected Discourses on Race and Race Crossing during the Era of Moral Condemnation: Mixed-Race in 1920s and 1930s Britain

Genealogy
Volume 2, Issue 3 (September 2018)
Special Issue “Genealogy and Multiracial Family Histories”
2018-07-05
15 pages
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy2030021

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader
Centre for Health Services Studies, University of Kent, Canterbury

In the 1920s and 30s, significant empirical studies were undertaken on mixed-race (‘hybrid’) populations in Britain’s seaport communities. The physical anthropologists Rachel Fleming and Kenneth Little drew on the methods of anthropometry, while social scientist Muriel Fletcher’s morally condemnatory tract belongs to the genre of racial hygiene. Whether through professional relationships, the conduct of their work, or means of disseminating their findings, they all aligned themselves with the eugenics movement and all made use of pedigree charts or other genealogical tools for tracing ancestry and investigating the inheritance of traits. These variously depicted family members’ races, sometimes fractionated, biological events, and social circumstances which were not part of genealogy’s traditional family tree lexicon. These design features informed and reflected prevailing conceptualisations of race as genetic and biological difference, skin colour as a visible marker, and cultural characteristics as immutable and hereditable. It is clear, however, that Fleming and Little did not subscribe to contemporary views that population mixing produced adverse biological consequences. Indeed, Fleming actively defended such marriages, and both avoided simplistic, ill-informed judgements about human heredity. Following the devastating consequences of Nazi racial doctrines, anthropologists and biologists largely supported the 1951 UNESCO view that there was no evidence of disadvantageous effects produced by ‘race crossing’.

Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Genealogical Technologies
• Case Studies of the Eugenic Use of Genealogical Technologies in Studies of Mixed-Race
• Intersections between Eugenicists’ Use of Genealogical Technologies, Discourses on Race, and the Biological Consequences of ‘Race Crossing’
• Conclusions
• Funding
• Conflicts of Interest
• References

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Bristol’s new Lord Mayor removes 316-year-old portrait of controversial slave trader Edward Colston… from her office wall and replaces him with a picture of a lion

The Daily Mail
2018-06-19

Richard Spillett

Cleo Lake, the Lord Mayor of Bristol, has removed a portrait of Edward Colston from the wall of her office because of his role in the slave trade.

• Portrait of slave trader Edward Colston has hung in mayor’s office since the 50s
• But the new mayor has ordered it be removed because she can’t work next to it
• Colston helped make Bristol a rich city, but his company was behind the trafficking and deaths of thousands of slaves

The Lord Mayor of Bristol has removed a 300-year-old portrait of a slave trader from the wall above her desk.

Cleo Lake said she ‘simply couldn’t stand’ the sight of Edward Colston looking at her as she worked.

The portrait dates back to 1702 and was hung in 1953 when City Hall opened – but Cleo Lake has asked for it to be installed in a museum about the abolition of slavery.

It is the latest move by the city to dissociate themselves from Colston, with venues and schools having previously removed his name from their titles.

Cleo Lake, who describes herself as of Scottish, Bristolian and Afro-Caribbean heritage, was elected in May by fellow councillors…

Read the entire article here.

Why Barack is black and Megan is biracial

Media Diversified
2018-06-28

Olivia Woldemikael, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science
Harvard University

Olivia Woldemikael discusses the differences in how Megan Markle and Barack Obama present themselves racially and asks what it means for blackness as an identity

The exclusivity and purity of the racial categories, black and white, is a myth, and a destructive one. Yet, it is continuously perpetuated in national discourse and family conversations. As the personalities of celebrities and politicians continue to be venerated in America, the racial identity of public figures such as Barack Obama and Meghan Markle are important sites for changing our ideas about race.

It’s no surprise to me that Barack Obama was considered America’s first black president and Meghan Markle is considered the biracial princess of England. The two are similarly “light-skinned” in racial parlance. Yet, the manner in which each of them has constructed signifiers of their race explains the difference in public perception. While perception alone does not diminish either’s proximity to whiteness and privilege, which may help explain their success. It does, however, draw attention to the way individuals are able to exercise agency in determining their racial identity, undermining the monolithic American racial ideology. The divergent public personas that Obama and Markle have cultivated demonstrate the fragility of racial categories and hierarchies, as well as highlight the need for a paradigmatic shift in the way we discuss and represent race in the media…

Read the entire article here.

What it is like for a black student to go to Cambridge

The Financial Times
2018-05-30

Rianna Croxford

Rianna Croxford

Trailblazer discovers confidence sought by top universities can be learned

I am the first in my family to go to university and faced a lot of the obstacles students of colour encounter when aiming for Oxford and Cambridge.

Educated at state school, I graduated from Cambridge last year as one of only seven women of mixed white and black heritage in my year of 3,371 undergraduates.

As one of the first black students to read English at Trinity Hall college, I had to deal with different degrees of racism day to day, as well as cultural challenges that my background had not prepared me for.

I want to help make it easier for other students like myself to enter elite institutions that can offer a fast track to a successful career…

Read the entire article here.

1944 We Were Here: African American GIs in Dorset

Lulu
2014-10-06
103 pages
5.83 wide x 8.26 tall
0.57 lbs.
Paperback ISBN: 9781291278170

Louisa Adjoa Parker

1944 We Were Here: African American GIs in Dorset explores the stories of the black soldiers who came to Dorset to train for D-Day. Told through the eyes of local people as well as the children of the GIs themselves, this is an important addition to Dorset’s rich and diverse history. Here we discover stories of friendship, love, murder, racism and the segregation that was a fact of life in the US for African Americans at this time.

Blinking in the Light

Cinnamon Press
2016-02-01
28 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1910836057

Louisa Adjoa Parker

A collection of confessional poems which, in starkly telling a story about a fraught pregnancy and the suicide of a man very close to the speaker’s family, evokes with powerful images and unadorned language a raw sense of contemporary life.

Tangled Roots: Real Life Stories from Mixed Race Britain

Tangled Roots
2015-12-11
205 pages
ISBN: 978-0993482403

Edited by:

Katy Massey

12% of UK households are mixed race. These are our stories.

The Tangled Roots book brings together over 30 writers to answer the question: What is life like for mixed families in Britain today?

Five leading authors—Bernardine Evaristo MBE, Sarfraz Manzoor, Charlotte Williams OBE, Diana Evans and Hannah Lowe—together with 27 members of the public tell the story of their mixed lives with heart-breaking honesty, humour and compassion.

Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala – review

The Guardian
2018-05-20

Afua Hirsch

Akala: ‘a disruptive, aggressive intellect’. Photograph: Rob Baker Ashton/BBC/Green Acre Films

In a powerful, polemical narrative, the rapper charts his past and the history of black Britain

In 2010, UK rap artist Akala dropped the album DoubleThink, and with it, some unforgettable words. “First time I saw knives penetrate flesh, it was meat cleavers to the back of the head,” the north London rapper remembers of his childhood. Like so much of his work, the song Find No Enemy blends his life in the struggle of poverty, race, class and violence, with the search for answers. “Apparently,” it continues, “I’m second-generation black Caribbean. And half white Scottish. Whatever that means.”

Any of the million-plus people who have since followed Akala – real name Kingslee Daley – know that the search has taken him into the realm of serious scholarship. He is now known as much for his political analysis as for his music, and, unsurprisingly, his new book, Natives, is therefore long awaited. What was that meat cleaver incident? What was his relationship with his family and peers like growing up? How did he make the journey from geeky child, to sullen and armed teenager, to writer, artist and intellectual?.

Natives delivers the answers, and some of them are hard to hear. In one of the most touching of many personal passages in the book, Akala retraces the steps by which he was racialised – as a mixed-race child – into blackness, and by which he realised that his mother, who fiercely protected her children’s pride in their heritage, enrolling them among other things in a Pan-African Saturday school, was racialised as white…

Read the entire article here.