Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Mixed Britannia, BBC Two, review

    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

    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

    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

    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.

    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

    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.

  • The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics

    The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics

    MIT Press
    January 2009
    368 pages
    7 x 9, 35 illus.
    Paper ISBN-10: 0-262-58275-9; ISBN-13: 978-0-262-58275-9

    Evelynn M. Hammonds, Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies (and Dean of Harvard College)
    Harvard University

    Rebecca M. Herzig, Professor of Women and Gender Studies
    Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

    The Nature of Difference documents how distinctions between people have been generated in and by the life sciences. Through a wide-ranging selection of primary documents and insightful commentaries by the editors, it charts the shifting boundaries of science and race through more than two centuries of American history. The documents, primarily writings by authoritative, eminent scientists intended for their professional peers, show how various sciences of race have changed their object of study over time: from racial groups to types to populations to genomes and beyond. The book’s thematic and synthetic approach reveals the profoundly diverse array of practices—countless acts of observation, quantification, and experimentation—that enabled the consequential categorizations we inherit.
     
    The documents—most reproduced in their entirety—range from definitions of race in dictionaries published between 1886 and 2005 to an exchange of letters between Benjamin Baneker and Thomas Jefferson; from Samuel Cartwright’s 1851 “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” to a 1950 UNESCO declaration that race is a social myth; from a 1928 paper detailing the importance of the glands in shaping human nature to a 2005 report of the discovery of a genetic basis for skin color. Such documents, given context by the editors’ introductions to each thematic chapter, provide scholars, journalists, and general readers with the rich historical background necessary for understanding contemporary developments in racial science.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
    • 1. DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS OF “RACE”
    • 2. ANATOMICAL OBSERVATIONS
    • 3. IMMUNITY AND CONTAGION
    • 4. EVOLUTION AND DEGENERATION
    • 5. TECHNIQUES OF MEASUREMENT
    • 6. GLANDULAR DIFFERENCES
    • 7. HYBRIDITY AND ADMIXTURE
    • 8. TOWARD GENETICS
    • 9. THE END OF RACE?
    • Index

  • The future American must be either an Anglo Saxon or a Mulatto…

    Nationality demands solidarity. And you can never get solidarity in a nation of equal rights out of two hostile races that do not intermarry. In a Democracy you can not build a nation inside of a nation of two antagonistic races, and therefore the future American must be either an Anglo Saxon or a Mulatto. And if a Mulatto, will the future be worth discussing?

    Thomas Dixon, Jr. (1864-1946)

  • Marriage

    In my first marriage I paid my compliments to my mother’s race; in my second marriage I paid my compliments to the race of my father.

    Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

  • being mulatto is longing for oneself, just like the despised hermaphrodite outcries the conflict between the sexes.

    …being mulatto is longing for oneself [o mulato é saudade de si mesmo] just like the despised hermaphrodite outcries the conflict between the sexes… the mestiço is thus an unexpected being in the plan of the world, an unfortunate experiment of the Portuguese.

    Mendes Correia, 1940: 122