Mixed Race Studies

‘Mixed Britannia’ – research by LSBU’s Dr Caballero informs BBC series

London South Bank University
2011-10-05

Research conducted by Dr Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow in London South Bank University’s Families and Social Capital Research Group, has formed the foundations of a BBC2 series starting on Thursday 6 October.

Dr Caballero was an academic consultant for the three-part series ‘Mixed Britannia‘, which is presented by George Alagiah. This is part of a season of BBC programmes which explores what it means to be part of Britain’s mixed-race community.

Dr Caballero is interviewed for the final programme in the series which will air on Thursday 20 October…

…Dr Chamion Caballero says: “Despite there being a long presence of mixed race people and couples in Britain, there is still a tendency to herald their presence as part of a new multicultural phenomenon which has been dubbed the rise of ‘Beige or Brown Britain’. Yet such groups have a long history in Britain…

Read the entire article (and view a family portrait circa, 1916) here.  Find out more about the research here.

Mixed Britannia, BBC Two, review

The Telegraph
2011-10-06

Josephine Moulds

Josephine Moulds reviews the first episode of BBC Two’s documentary Mixed Britannia, presented by George Alagiah.

The first part of an ambitious documentary series, Mixed Britannia, ran last night, continuing BBC Two’s season about mixed-race life in the UK.

Over the course of three programmes, it aims to show the experiences of mixed-race people living in Britain from 1910 to the present day. The problem was it tiptoed so lightly around the subject of race, the first episode at least fell rather flat.

Last night covered 1910-1939, so presenter George Alagiah could shudder at how racist our country once was rather than tackle the thornier issue of the current climate. (That is saved for the last instalment.)…

Read the entire article here.

Beware this new mixed-race love-in

The Guardian
2011-10-04

Joseph Harker, Assistant Comment Editor

I’m glad that attitudes to mixed-race people have changed. But does it all mask a subtler kind of racism?

Why does everyone want to be like me? According to scientific research (yes, really) I’m not only more beautiful than, but also biologically superior to, other humans. Advertisers use people like me all the time – to show how cool they are, how modern, how cutting-edge. People like me win world championships, X Factor, and even the keys to the White House. Yes, in today’s world it’s great to be mixed race. If Nina Simone were alive, surely she’d be singing: “To be young, gifted and mixed”.

This week the BBC is marking the 10th anniversary of the ethnic category being included on the UK census with a three-part documentary, Mixed Britannia, part of its mixed race season (in which I’ve had a small role). Between 1991 and 2001 there was a 150% increase in those identifying themselves as “mixed”. Young people in particular are keen to adopt this label, and with more than 50% of Caribbean-origin children having one white parent, and other racial mixes on the rise too, the figures for this year’s census look set for another huge leap…

…I can see why young people may want to adopt this identity – but there’s also a certain naivety to it, in that it ignores the history of anti-racist struggle and of mixed-race people themselves…

…The biggest delusion of all, which props up this whole debate, is the notion that black and white people forming loving relationships proves racism is being defeated: that the quality of life for Britain’s minorities can be measured by the number of interracial relationships. But this is fantasy. Compare it with gender equality. Would anyone seriously claim that, because men and women feel attraction for each other, sexism cannot exist? From the days of master-slave girl couplings, it’s always been clear that what people do in the bedroom is completely separate from what they do in the outside world…

Read the entire article here.

Desdemona’s Fire

Lotus Press/Wayne State University Press
1999
61 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Paper ISBN: 9780916418830

Ruth Ellen Kocher, Associate Professor of English
University of Colorado, Boulder

This is the author’s first book and winner of the 1999 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. While miscegenation has always been more a part of American history than many want to admit, Desdemona’s Fire journeys through this often forbidden landscape in poems that are sometimes painfully poignant, yet fresh in their imagery and detail.

Joe Christmas and the Chamber of Secrets – The Black/ White Dilemma in William Faulkner’s Light in August

Africa Resource
2010-04-04
21 paragraphs

Isabel Adonis, Writer and Artist

I read William Faulkner’s Light in August in my early teens and I scarcely understood it.  But I understood something and many years later a woman at a party mentioned that she had read the same novel at college.  For a while she talked about miscegenation and on my return home I decided that this was something that I wanted to look into.  I wandered down to the little second hand bookstore in Bethesda where I used to live and it was the first book that I found there, as if it had been waiting for me to claim it. I am mixed race, my mother was Welsh and my father was from the Caribbean.  Many people treat me as if I am black, an exotic, and a foreigner. But I have lived a life like the character in the book, lonely isolated and forever going round in circles searching for my authentic self. And just as in Faulkner’s deep south I live in a society which is determined to make me bad, determined to make me take the role of scapegoat, to make me ‘the other’ of themselves.

In the novel we learn that Joe Christmas’ skin tone is “parchment” and that he doesn’t know his parents though he suspects one of them was black.  He was left on the steps of an orphanage on Christmas day, hence his name.  In the book he is aged thirty-three so we know that he has a Christ-like persona: he has come to redeem our sins. As a little boy in the orphanage he is fond of making his way to the dietician’s  room where he likes to suck on her toothpaste.  On one particular afternoon he has taken the toothpaste from the sink when he hears her returning to her room with the interne from the local hospital.  For safety, he hides behind a cloth curtain and witnesses her making love.  Because of his anxiety he eats too much toothpaste and is sick.  As a result, he is caught by the dietician…

Read the entire essay here.

Black Welsh Identity: the unspeakable speaks.

British Broadcasting Corporation
North West Wales
2006-05-30

Isabel Adonis, Writer and Artist

Isabel Adonis was born in London and brought up in Llandudno, the Sudan and Nigeria. She spent 21 years in Bethesda before returning to Llandudno. She helped found Timbuktu, a new international arts and literary journal.

This piece won the best article award for 2002 in New Impact magazine.

“I am a woman. When I look in the mirror I see a woman. When other people look at me they see a woman. I know what a woman is and I am one. Once when I was a child, in Africa, I had my hair cut very short and the other children started calling me ‘El Walad’ – The Boy. It was very distressing, but I didn’t start feeling like a boy, and the children wouldn’t have been teasing me if they had really thought I was one.

If anyone asks me what it feels like to be a woman, I’m stuck for an answer. There doesn’t seem to be any other thing for it to be like or unlike; it feels normal, natural, un-problematic. It doesn’t feel like anything at all: – what does it feel like to be human?…

…I am Welsh. My mother was born and brought up in North Wales, speaking Welsh. I have lived most of my life in Wales. When I look in the mirror I see brown skin and African features. When other people look at me they see an exotic, a foreigner.

If anyone asks me what it feels like to be a black Welsh woman, I’m stuck for an answer. It doesn’t feel like anything at all; it feels like being human. I am my natural colour, and I live in my natural home, no problem.

But as soon as I step out of the front door, there is a problem. Most of the people who meet me are thrown into confusion and conflict. They like to think of themselves as being tolerant, accepting, unprejudiced etc. so they try to treat me as normal although their senses scream out that I am different. They try to be sensitive, avoid the word ‘black’, avoid the subject that is always on their minds. Many prefer to avoid me if possible, they find it a strain…

Read the entire essay here.

Stories and survival’: An Interview with Jackie Kay

Wasafiri
Volume 25, Issue 4, 2010
pages 19-22
DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2010.510366

Maggie Gee

Jackie Kay has had a glittering career as a writer of poetry, fiction and drama for both adults and children. She was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted by a white couple at birth and was brought up in Glasgow. Her first collection of poetry, The Adoption Papers (1991), explored the experience of adoption and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Subsequent poetry books include Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998), Life Mask (2005) and Darling (2007). Her bold and original short stories are collected as Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002) and Wish I Was Here (2006). Her work has been widely anthologised and she has written drama for stage, radio and television. Her first novel, Trumpet, published in 1998, was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize. Jackie Kay lives in Manchester and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. In 2006, she was awarded an MBE for services to literature. Jackie Kay’s memoir, Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey, which she discusses in the following interview, was published in May of this year.

Read the entire article here.