Mixed Race Studies

Centuries of skin

Ragged Raven Press
2010
80 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9552552-9-8

Joanna Ezekiel

Some of the poems in Joanna Ezekiel’s first full poetry collection Centuries of skin engage imaginatively with her discoveries, in childhood and adolescence, of her dual Indian Jewish and Eastern European Jewish heritage. In the title poem, Centuries of skin, Ezekiel responds to overhearing in synagogue that, “She’s not a proper Jew”, with “Perhaps I’ll shout./Hurl my outlawed voice over wide hats…” and in “Rainbow”, she pictures her family in England and India connected by a rainbow, “our family tree of praying voices/murmuring the seven colours”. Economic imagery, raw honesty, and wry humour characterise Ezekiel’s poems.

Joanna blogs at delayed reactions.

Rainbow

Friday nights, stumbling Sabbath blessings
with my brothers and parents, I’d imagine a rainbow
that stretched from our home to Bombay,
our family tree of praying voices
murmuring the seven colours
radiant as peacock blessings
or precious stones, its arc transcending
timezones, continents, fractured partitions.
climbing through dense English cloud
to set in a haze of Eastern red.
I didn’t know then that over it
my father’s parents loomed, large
as Buddhas and angry as the sun.

A braid of words

I cling to the edge
of the roar of a lion,
it’s white-gold edge
like a coast at sunrise.
My feet hang clear
of the quicksand below
as it bubbles and sucks.
I will scramble up
to face the roar,
it’s mountains and valleys,
my breath a sirocco,
my pulse a landslide.
I will hear my calm voice
through the tremor,
a braid of words
like a pulley-cable
to haul myself across
until I fall off
into full noon sunlight,
blinking, my palms
stripped and raw.

Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin

Peepal Tree Press: The Best in Caribbean Writing
2007-03-05
64 pages
ISBN: 9781845230500

Seni Seneviratne

Seni Seneviratne’s debut collection offers a poetic landscape that echoes themes of migration, family, love and loss and reflects her personal journey as a woman of Sri Lankan and English heritage.

The poems cross oceans and centuries. In ‘Cinnamon Roots’ Seni Seneviratne travels from colonial Britain to Ceylon in the 15th century and back to Yorkshire in the 20th Century; in A Wider View time collapses and carries her from a 21st century Leeds back to the flax mills of the 19th century; poems like ‘Grandad’s Insulin’, based on childhood memories, place her in 1950’s Yorkshire but echo links with her Sri Lankan heritage.

Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family

Beacon Press
1999-08-01 (originally published in 1956)
304 pages
Size: 5-3/8″ X 8″ Inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-080707209-7

Pauli Murray (Anna Pauline Murray) (1910-1985)

First published in 1956, Proud Shoes is the remarkable true story of slavery, survival, and miscegenation in the South from the pre-Civil War era through the Reconstruction. Written by Pauli Murray the legendary civil rights activist and one of the founders of NOW, Proud Shoes chronicles the lives of Murray’s maternal grandparents. From the birth of her grandmother, Cornelia Smith, daughter of a slave whose beauty incited the master’s sons to near murder to the story of her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald, whose free black father married a white woman in 1840, Proud Shoes offers a revealing glimpse of our nation’s history.

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Migration from the West Indies to Britain, 1750-1820

The University of Michigan
2010
481 pages

Daniel Alan Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in The University of Michigan 2010

This dissertation shows that the migration of mixed-race individuals from the Caribbean to Britain between 1750 and 1820 helped to harden British attitudes toward those of African descent. The children of wealthy, white fathers and both free and enslaved women of color, many left for Britain in order to escape the deficiencies and bigotry of West Indian society. This study traces the group’s origin in the Caribbean, mainly Jamaica, to its voyage and arrival in Britain. It argues that the perceived threats of these migrants’ financial bounty and potential to marry and reproduce in Britain helped to collapse previous racial distinctions in the metropole which had traditionally differentiated along class and status lines and paved the way for a more monolithic racial viewpoint in the nineteenth century.

This study makes three major contributions to the history of the British Atlantic. First, it provides a thorough examination of the West Indies’ elite population of color, showing its connection to privileged white society in both the Caribbean and Britain. Those who moved to the metropole lend further proof to the agency and influence of such individuals in the Atlantic world. Second, it expands the notion of the British family at the turn of the nineteenth century. Through analyses of wills, inheritance disputes, and correspondence, this project reveals the regularity of British legal and personal interaction with relatives of color across the Atlantic, as well as with those who resettled in the metropole. Third, it allows for a material understanding of Atlantic racial ideologies. By connecting popular discussions in the abolition debate and the sentimental novel to biographical accounts of mixed-race migrants, British notions of racial difference are more strongly linked to social reality. Uncovering an entirely new cohort of British people of color and its members’ lived experiences, this dissertation provides crucial insight into the tightening of British and Atlantic racial attitudes.

INTRODUCTION

In 1840, the Reverend Donald Sage completed his memoirs. Reflecting on the meandering twists and turns of life, he wrote extensively on his education and the different schools he attended as a youth. One of these institutions, where he stayed only briefly between 1801 and 1803, was located in the small seaside town of Dornoch, in the Scottish Highlands. Sage described the village as a “little county town” which had been “considerably on the decrease” by the time his family had arrived. As one would do in such a journal, Sage thought back on his boyhood friends, and noted that while at Dornoch he and his brother became close companions with the Hay family. Like Sage, the three Hay brothers were not originally from the village; they had instead been born in the West Indies. In fact, Sage revealed that they were “the offspring of a negro woman, as their hair, and the tawny colour of their skin, very plainly intimated, [and] [t]heir father was a Scotsman.” Sage became particularly good friends with Fergus, the eldest of the three, of whom he gave a very qualified endorsement: “Notwithstanding the disadvantages of his negro parentage, Fergus was very handsome. He had all the manners of a gentleman, and had first-rate abilities.”

It may seem out of place for three West Indian children, the offspring of an interracial couple, to be living in a small village at Scotland’s northern tip in 1801. Historians tend to think of an Afro-Caribbean presence in Britain as a phenomenon of the last sixty-plus years, and one localized around major urban centers. At the same time, only recently has the topic of inter-racial unions been addressed in the “new” multicultural Britain. The story of the Hay children in Dornoch, however, was not at all unique at the turn of the nineteenth century. Rather, the Hays were members of a regular migration of mixed-race West Indians who arrived in the home country during the period. Facing intense discrimination, few jobs opportunities, and virtually no educational options in the colonies, West Indians of color fled to Britain with their white fathers’ assistance. Once arrived, they encountered myriad responses. While some white relatives accepted them into their homes, others sued to cut them off from the family fortune. Equally, even though a number of fictional and political tracts welcomed their arrival, others condemned their presence and lobbied to ban them from landing on British soil. Regardless of these variable experiences, mixed-race migrants traveled to Britain consistently during the period. The Hay children may have turned heads on the roads of Dornoch, but they would not have been a wholly unfamiliar sight.

This study examines the movement of mixed-race individuals from the Caribbean to Britain at the end of the long eighteenth century. It argues that the frequent and sustained migration of these children of color produced a strong British reaction, at both the personal and popular levels, against their presence, and helped contribute to the simplification and essentialization of British racial ideology in the nineteenth century. A number of personal histories are followed through the various stages of this transplantation, and are compared to published accounts of the phenomenon in general. White patronage and parental ties were vital in the colonies if a mixed-race individual was to leave for Britain. Connected through these kinship and business associations, elite West Indians of color maintained their own Atlantic networks. Once in Britain, they had to monitor their finances vigilantly against rival claimants to Caribbean fortunes. Family attempts at disinheritance were a frequent problem, and demonstrated an increasing British disgust at colonial miscegenation, along with mixed-race resettlement. With the advent of the abolition movement in the 1770s and 1780s, the issue took on greater political importance. Rich heirs of color now in Britain seemed to herald the cataclysmic prophesies of slavery supporters. Certain that abolition would destroy the racial and class barriers between black and white, many Britons recoiled at those of hybrid descent now resident in the metropole. If class distinctions had restrained racial prejudice in the early years of the eighteenth century, they no longer produced the same moderating effects at the century’s close…

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The World They Left Behind: Family Networks and Mixed-Race Children In the West Indies
• Chapter 2: Patterns of Migration: Push and Pull Factors Sending West Indians of Color to Britain
• Chapter 3: Inheritance Disputes and Mixed-Race Individuals in Britain
• Chapter 4: Success and Struggle in Britain
• Chapter 5: West Indians of Color in Britain, and the Abolition Question
• Chapter 6: Depictions of Mixed-Race Migrants in British Literature
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• Brunias, 1779
• 1.2 “The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl,” by Agostino Brunias, 1779
• 1.3 “Joanna,” by William Blake, 1796
• 1.4 Percentages of Children Born of Mixed Race, and the Percentage of Mixed-Race Children Born in Wedlock, St. Catherine, Jamaica, 1770-1808
• 1.5 Percentage of Mixed-Race Children Born in Wedlock, Kingston, Jamaica, 1809-1820
• 1.6 Percentage of Free, Mixed-Race Children with Interracial Parents, Kingston, Jamaica, 1750-1820
• 1.7 Thomas Hibbert’s House, Kingston, Jamaica, 2008 (erected 1755)
• 2.1 Deficiency Fines Collected (in pounds current), St. Thomas in the Vale Parish, Jamaica, 1789-1801
• 2.2 Percentage of West Indians in Student Body (University of Edinburgh Medical School and King’s College, Aberdeen), 1750-1820
• 2.3 “Johnny New-Come in the Island of Jamaica,” by Abraham James, 1800
• 4.1 “A Scene on the quarter deck of the Lune,” by Robert Johnson from his Journal, April 8, 1808
• 4.2 Cartoon by Robert Johnson from his Journal, April 8, 1808
• 4.3 Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath, London
• 4.4 “Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray,” unknown artist (formerly attributed to John Zoffany), c. 1780
• 4.5 “The Morse and Cator Family,” by John Zoffany, c. 1783
• 4.6 “Nathaniel Middleton,” by Tilly Kettle, c. 1773
• 4.7 “William Davidson,” by R. Cooper, c. 1820
• 4.8 “Robert Wedderburn,” 1824..306
• 5.1 “Sir Thomas Picton,” c. 1810
• 5.2 Calderon’s Torture, from The Trial of Governor Picton
• 5.3 Calderon’s Torture, and “Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave,” by William Blake, 1793
• 6.1 “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” by Josiah Wedgwood, 1787

List of Tables

• 1.1 Racial Classification of the Mothers of Mixed-Race Children with White Fathers, by Percentage, 1770-1820
• 1.2 Percentages of Interracial Parents vs. Two Parents of Color Amongst Mixed-Race Children in Jamaica, 1730-1820
• 2.1 Percentage of white men’s wills, proven in Jamaica, with bequests for mixed-race children in Britain (either presently resident, or soon to be sent there), 1773-1815
• 2.2 Percentage of white men’s wills with acknowledged mixed-race children, proven In Jamaica, that include bequests for mixed-race children in Britain (either presently resident, or soon to be sent there), 1773-1815.131
• 2.3 Professions of testators sending mixed-race children to Britain, by percentage, 1773-1815
• 2.4 Destinations of mixed-race Jamaicans, by percentage, 1773-1815

White mother given mixed race sperm in IVF loses compensation claim

British Medical Journal
Volume 341, Number 5806
2010-10-15
DOI: 10.1136/bmj.c5806

Clare Dyer

Two children in Northern Ireland whose white mother was mistakenly impregnated with sperm from South Africa labelled “Caucasian (Cape Coloured)” during in vitro fertilisation have failed in a compensation claim at the High Court in Belfast.

The children’s mother, who brought the case on their behalf, claimed that their quality of life was adversely affected because they looked markedly different from their parents and had quite different skin colour from each other. She said that they were subject to “abusive and derogatory comment and hurtful name calling from other children, causing emotional upset.”…

Read or purchase the article here.

[Note from Steven F. Riley]

Admittedly from a cursory glance, this article is perhaps the kind that belongs on the front page of  a supermarket tabloid.  However, the plaintiff’s claim of “abusive and derogatory comment and hurtful name calling from other children, causing emotional upset.” because of “differently looking” children does seem to merit some kind of thoughtful and intelligent commentary.

Needless to say, millions of families with “differently looking” children by the way of “correctly labeled” sperm and egg rendezvous—or by adoption—face the prospect “abuse and derogatory” comments every day.  Thus a successful claim might have laid down a very, very interesting precedent.

A Theory of Race

Routledge
2008-12-04
182 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-99073-8

Joshua Glasgow, Lecturer of Philosophy
Somona State University, California

Social commentators have long asked whether racial categories should be conserved or eliminated from our practices, discourse, institutions, and perhaps even private thoughts. In A Theory of Race, Joshua Glasgow argues that this set of choices unnecessarily presents us with too few options.

Using both traditional philosophical tools and recent psychological research to investigate folk understandings of race, Glasgow argues that, as ordinarily conceived, race is an illusion. However, our pressing need to speak to and make sense of social life requires that we employ something like racial discourse. These competing pressures, Glasgow maintains, ultimately require us to stop conceptualizing race as something biological, and instead understand it as an entirely social phenomenon.

Appropriating the One-Drop Rule: Family Guy on Reparations

Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture
Volume 7: Open Issue (2010)

Jason Jones
University of Washington

The one-drop rule, or the notion that one drop of African blood renders a person black, once played a vital role in the expansion of the nineteenth-century American slave population and segregation under Jim Crow. Media, communication, and rhetorical studies, however, have yet to consider the extent to which the one-drop rule continues to function in contemporary American discourse on race. There are, nonetheless, scholars in other fields who have turned a critical eye to the one-drop rule and the ways Americans have taken up or challenged the one-drop rule in their language. Ronald Sundstrom studied the obstacles multiracial individuals have encountered in their efforts to assert their multiracial identities in the face of various parties who deny such identities on grounds informed by the one-drop rule and other perspectives that refuse the existence of mixed race (110-116). Joshua Glasgow and his colleagues performed an experiment in which participants were asked to racially classify a woman who looked white and self-identified as such, but discovered that she had a black ancestor; the overwhelming majority of participants categorized her as white (64). However, as Glasgow went on to point out, many Americans identify President Barack Obama as black despite common knowledge of his white mother. Given such observations, it is clear that there are vestiges of the one-drop rule in American racial discourse. But as Michel de Certeau explained, people appropriate discourses to achieve ends that do not always coincide with the ideological implications originally associated with some facet of language use (48). Being no exception, the one-drop rule no longer works to expand the ranks of dehumanized chattel nor does it serve as grounds for the legal removal of peoples from segregated areas, yet many still rely on it, though less rigidly, to identify some biracial Americans as black. The one-drop rule’s discursive utility, however, is not confined to regressive forms of racial identification and has been used for other strategic purposes as is the case in an episode of Seth MacFarlane’s Emmy-nominated Family Guy (“Peter Griffin…”) that parodies the slavery reparations debate, a veritable minefield for anyone willing to partake in the dispute…

Read the entire article here.

Utilizing the Strengths of Our Cultures: Therapy with Biracial Women and Girls

Women & Therapy
Volume 27 Issue 1 & 2 (January 2004)
pages 33-43
ISSN: 1541-0315 (electronic); 0270-3149 (paper)
DOI: 10.1300/J015v27n01_03

Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti, Associate Professor
California Polytechnic State University

Lisa M. Edwards, Assistant Professor, Director of Child/Adolescent Community Program
Marquette University

Historically, psychology has operated from a pathology-based perspective. In the last several years, however, efforts have been made to balance this view with an acknowledgement of individual strengths and assets. For biracial women and girls, this approach may be particularly useful. Through the utilization of several techniques, including solution-focused interventions and narrative approaches to treatment, therapists can empower their female biracial clients through development of their strengths.

Read the entire article here.

Mapping genes that predict treatment outcome in admixed populations

The Pharmacogenomics Journal
Published Online: 2010-10-05
DOI: 10.1038/tpj.2010.71

Tesfaye Mersha Baye, Assistant Professor
University of Cincinnati College of Medicine

Russell Alan Wilke, Associate Professor of Medicine
Vanderbilt University Medical Center

There is great interest in characterizing the genetic architecture underlying drug response. For many drugs, gene-based dosing models explain a considerable amount of the overall variation in treatment outcome. As such, prescription drug labels are increasingly being modified to contain pharmacogenetic information. Genetic data must, however, be interpreted within the context of relevant clinical covariates. Even the most predictive models improve with the addition of data related to biogeographical ancestry. The current review explores analytical strategies that leverage population structure to more fully characterize genetic determinants of outcome in large clinical practice-based cohorts. The success of this approach will depend upon several key factors: (1) the availability of outcome data from groups of admixed individuals (that is, populations recombined over multiple generations), (2) a measurable difference in treatment outcome (that is, efficacy and toxicity end points), and (3) a measurable difference in allele frequency between the ancestral populations.

Africans in Yorkshire? The deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny within an English genealogy

European Journal of Human Genetics
Volume 15 (2007)
pages 288–293
DOI: 10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201771

Turi E. King
University of Leicester

Emma J. Parkin
University of Leicester

Geoff Swinfield
Geoff Swinfield Genealogical Services, Mottingham, London

Fulvio Cruciani
Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’

Rosaria Scozzari
Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’

Alexandra Rosa
Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’

Si-Keun Lim
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, United Kingdom

Yali Xue
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, United Kingdom

Chris Tyler-Smith
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, United Kingdom

Mark A. Jobling
University of Leicester

The presence of Africans in Britain has been recorded since Roman times, but has left no apparent genetic trace among modern inhabitants. Y chromosomes belonging to the deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny, haplogroup (hg) A, are regarded as African-specific, and no examples have been reported from Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe. We describe the presence of an hgA1 chromosome in an indigenous British male; comparison with African examples suggests a Western African origin. Seven out of 18 men carrying the same rare east-Yorkshire surname as the original male also carry hgA1 chromosomes, and documentary research resolves them into two genealogies with most-recent-common-ancestors living in Yorkshire in the late 18th century. Analysis using 77 Y-short tandem repeats (STRs) is consistent with coalescence a few generations earlier. Our findings represent the first genetic evidence of Africans among ‘indigenous’ British, and emphasize the complexity of human migration history as well as the pitfalls of assigning geographical origin from Y-chromosomal haplotypes.

Introduction

The population of the UK today is culturally diverse, with 8% of its 54 million inhabitants belonging to ethnic minorities, and over one million classifying themselves as ‘Black or Black British’ in the 2001 census. These people owe their origins to immigration from the Caribbean and Africa beginning in the mid-20th century; before this time, the population has been seen as typically Western European, and its history has been interpreted in terms of more local immigration, including that of the Saxons, Vikings and Normans. However, in reality, Britain has a long history of contact with Africa (reviewed by Fryer). Africans were first recorded in the north 1800 years ago, as Roman soldiers defending Hadrian’s wall –‘a division of Moors’. Some historians suggest that Vikings brought captured North Africans to Britain in the 9th century. After a hiatus of several hundred years, the influence of the Atlantic slave trade began to be felt, with the first group of West Africans being brought to Britain in 1555. African domestic servants, musicians, entertainers and slaves then became common in the Tudor period, prompting an unsuccessful attempt by Elizabeth I to expel them in 1601. By the last third of the 18th century, there were an estimated 10,000 black people in Britain, mostly concentrated in cities such as London.

Has this presence left a genetic trace among people regarded as ‘indigenous’ British? In principle, Y-chromosomal haplotyping offers a means to detect long-established African lineages. Haplotypes of the non-recombining region of the Y, defined by slowly mutating binary markers such as SNPs, can be arranged into a unique phylogeny.  These binary haplotypes, known as haplogroups (hg), show a high degree of geographical differentiation, reflecting the powerful influence of genetic drift on this chromosome. Some clades of the phylogeny are so specific to particular continents or regions that they have been used to assign population-of-origin to individual DNA samples, and in quantifying the origins of the components of admixed populations using simple allele-counting methods.

Studies of British genetic diversity, generally sampling on the criterion of two generations of residence, have found no evidence of African Y-chromosomal lineages, suggesting that they either never became assimilated into the general population or have been lost by drift. However, here, we describe a globally rare and archetypically African sublineage in Britain and show that it has been resident there for at least 250 years, representing the first genetic trace of an appreciable African presence that has existed for several centuries…

Read the entire article here.