Mixed Race Studies

The school experiences of mixed-race white and black Caribbean children in England

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online 2018-10-01
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2018.1519586

Kirstin Lewis
Department of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, London
School of Education, University of Durham, Durham, United Kingdom

Feyisa Demie, Honorary Fellow
School of Education
University of Durham, Durham, United Kingdom

This research aims to explore the school experiences of mixed white/ black Caribbean children in English schools. The overarching findings of this research confirm that although the mixed-race population as a whole is achieving above the national average, the mixed white/ black Caribbean group is consistently the lowest performing mixed-race group in the country. Views of pupils, their parents and teachers in two London secondary schools suggest various reasons why mixed white/ black Caribbean pupils might continue to be the lowest performing mixed group in the country. These included experiences of marginalization and invisibility in school life, the low expectations that teachers held about them, the lack of knowledge about how to support them at school and how all these issues were exacerbated by the friendship groups they mixed in. This research paper discusses these critical factors in detail and their implications for policy and further research.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp

The Huffington Post
2015-10-21

Dave Jamieson

Jeff and Di-Key with their children, Jervontay, Jeffrey and Kelton (left to right). Family photos courtesy of Di-Key Lockhart.

What the future of low-wage work really looks like.

On Jan. 18, 2013, as the sun went down, Jeff Lockhart Jr. got ready for work. He slipped a T-shirt over his burly frame and hung his white work badge over his broad chest. His wife, Di-Key, was in the bathroom fixing her hair in micro-braids and preparing for another evening alone with her three sons. Jeff had been putting in long hours lately, and so the couple planned a breakfast date at Shoney’s for when his shift ended around dawn. “You better have your hair done by then,” he teased her.

As he headed out the door, Jeff, who was 29, said goodbye to the boys. He told Jeffrey, the most rambunctious, not to give his mom a hard time; Kelton, the oldest, handed his father his iPod for the ride. Then Jeff climbed into his Chevy Suburban, cranked the bass on the stereo system he’d customized himself, and headed for the Amazon fulfillment center in nearby Chester, Virginia, just south of Richmond.

When the warehouse opened its doors in 2012, there were about 37,000 unemployed people living within a 30-minute drive; in nearby Richmond, more than a quarter of residents were living in poverty. The warehouse only provided positions for a fraction of the local jobless: It currently has around 3,000 full-time workers. But it also enlists hundreds, possibly thousands, of temporary workers to fill orders during the holiday shopping frenzy, known in Amazon parlance as “peak.” Since full-timers and temps perform the same duties, the only way to tell them apart is their badges. Full-time workers wear blue. Temps wear white…

…He and Di-Key reconnected in their early 20s. The two made a striking couple—a tall, imposing white guy and his petite African-American girlfriend. “I had a really tough childhood,” says Di-Key. “I didn’t think anyone could love me, but he showed me differently.” She had left school at 17 and had two sons from previous relationships—the oldest, Kelton, is legally blind. “I had a hard time finding a job, and ended up going on assistance,” she says. But after she and Jeff got together, they slowly started to build a more secure life. Jeff pushed Di-Key to get her GED. They had a child together and got married, and Jeff adopted Di-Key’s sons. “He always treated those boys just like they were his own,” says Jeff’s sister, Laura Lockhart. Di-Key worked a series of jobs in retail and office cleaning, and Jeff stayed on at the building supply store. Eventually, they even managed to buy a house—a three-bedroom starter in Hopewell for $86,000. Then, not long after the housing crash, the building supply store closed down, and both Jeff and his father lost their jobs…

Read the entire article here.

Placing Racial Classification in Context

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World
First Published 2019-06-25
15 pages
DOI: 10.1177/2378023119851016

Robert E. M. Pickett, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology and Demography
University of California, Berkeley

Aliya Saperstein, Associate Professor of Sociology
Stanford University, Stanford, California

Andrew M. Penner, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

This article extends previous research on place-based patterns of racial categorization by linking it to sociological theory that posits subnational variation in cultural schemas and applying regression techniques that allow for spatial variation in model estimates. We use data from a U.S. restricted-use geocoded longitudinal survey to predict racial classification as a function of both individual and county characteristics. We first estimate national average associations, then turn to spatial-regime models and geographically weighted regression to explore how these relationships vary across the country. We find that individual characteristics matter most for classification as “Black,” while contextual characteristics are important predictors of classification as “White” or “Other,” but some predictors also vary across space, as expected. These results affirm the importance of place in defining racial boundaries and suggest that U.S. racial schemas operate at different spatial scales, with some being national in scope while others are more locally situated.

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The mixed race Irish kids who feel like outsiders

RTÉ
2019-07-08

Patti O’Malley, Associate Researcher in the Sociology Department
University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

“It seems that these young people are neither Irish in Ireland nor African in Africa“

Opinion: That Irish citizens feel like outsiders in the land of their birth on the basis of skin colour remind us that the issue of race is alive and well

“Ireland is a white country – there’s black people in it – but it’s not like there should be black people – it is a white country.” This is the voice of Colum (not his real name), a 12 year old mixed race Irish boy who was born and raised in Ireland to a white Irish mother and a black African father.

As we can note from Colum’s perspective, he seems quite resigned to the notion that Irish identity and whiteness go hand-in-hand and black people are not allowed to stake a claim to Irish identity because of this. In stark terms, black people may be “in” but never “of” the country. In order to be regarded as truly Irish, one must be racially defined as white. Indeed, like several other mixed race (i.e. black African/white Irish) young people aged 4 to 18 that I interviewed as part of a research study, Colum has stated his intention to go “back” to Africa to live when he is older.

Although occupying the official status of Irish citizen (and holding Irish passports), these mixed race young people are not actually recognised as Irish. As they go about their everyday lives, whether at the bus stop or in the supermarket queue, these young people report feeling subject to scrutiny with comments like “how do you like it here?” or, perhaps most strikingly “but, where are you really from?”…

Read the entire article here.

Lil’ Kim’s Lighter, Whiter Skin Is a Sad Indictment of Racism

The Daily Beast
2016-04-26

Yaba Blay

Handout; Instagram

Why has Lil’ Kim seemingly lightened her skin? Because of the absurd, but very present, social advantage for black people that comes with having lighter skin.

There was a time when Lil’ Kim represented a brand of unapologetic self-love for black women. The kind that announced that we are sexual beings without shame or fear. She reflected what it might look like to be at once a woman, black, and sexually free. Visually, her body was a site for pleasure, most importantly her own.

Sonically, her lyrics offered us permission to explore our own bodies and our own pleasure. Lil’ Kim was our champion.

I’m not sure what she’s now championing. In a series of pictures she posted on Instagram, she is virtually unrecognizable.

While we have debated whether other celebrities like Beyoncé and Rihanna have actually lightened their skin or if the magazines that featured their images had photoshopped their complexions, with Kim, there surely can be little question.

It looks as though she has lightened her once black-girl-brown complexion to one that’s not so brown at all. Her hair is longer, straighter, blonder. Her once round nose now thin. Even her eyes sit differently on her face. She’s changed, in ways that words can’t even begin to capture. And it hurts…

Read the entire article here.

Borderliners

BBC Radio 4
2019-07-06

In a new poem for Radio 4, Hannah Lowe explores the mysteries surrounding the lives of her Chinese Jamaican family.

The term ‘borderliner’ was once a derogatory term for having mixed heritage. “Between ‘bi-racial’ and ‘bounty,'” Hannah writes, “I find the label ‘borderliner’ which the dictionary tells me, means uncertain or debatable.” Using this term and its troubling history as the basis for a new poetic form, the poem reflects on borders and borderlines, both physical and psychological.

Hannah Lowe

Drawing on half-memories and imagined images from her family history, Hannah Lowe re-creates moments from the lives of her Jamaican Chinese father who came to the UK by ship in 1947 and became a professional gambler, her Chinese grandfather who moved to Jamaica as a legacy of indentured labour in the Caribbean, and most elusive of all the mystery surrounding the life of her Jamaican grandmother of whom she has only one photograph.

Producer: Jo Wheeler
Reader: Burt Caesar

A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 4

Listen to the story (00:27:39) here.

The Inheritance of Haunting, Poems

University of Notre Dame Press
March 2019
108 pages
6.00 x 9.00in
Paperback ISBN: 9780268105389
Hardcover ISBN: 9780268105372
eBook (PDF) ISBN: 9780268105396
eBook (EPUB) ISBN: 9780268105402

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

Winner of the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival.

The driving forces behind Rhodes’s work include a decolonizing ethos; a queer sensibility that extends beyond sexual and gender identities to include a politics of deviance; errantry; ramshackled bodies; and forms of loving and living that persist in their wild difference. Invoking individual and collective ghosts inherited across diverse geographies, this collection queers the space between past, present, and future. In these poems, haunting is a kind of memory weaving that can bestow a freedom from the attenuations of the so-called American dream, which, according to Rhodes, is a nightmare of assimilation, conquest, and genocide. How love unfolds is also a Big Bang emergence into life—a way to, again and again, cut the future open, open up the opening, undertake it, begin.

These poems are written for immigrants, queer and transgender people of color, women, Latin Americans, diasporic communities, and the many impacted by war.

As a key figure of national and transnational desire, the mulata was famed for her corporal functions—sex and dance. Beginning in the 1970s, Brazilian governmental tourism agencies utilized the image of the sexually available mulata for the promotion of Brazil as a tourist destination. From the 1970s to the 1990s, white Rio de Janeiro businessman Oswaldo Sargentelli, a self-described mulatólogo (mulata expert), presented samba spectacles of scantily clad dancing women to the Brazilian elite and tourists alike. With the branding of brasilidade as a sexual paradise of mulatas, the archetype of the sensual sexually available mulata who dances with abandon became a thematic fixture memorialized in popular Brazilian cultural politics and in the international imagination.

Jasmine Mitchell, “Sensual Not Beautiful: The Mulata as Erotic Spectacle,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Spring 2017. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/sensual-not-beautiful.

Chinyere K. Osuji

New Books Network
2019-07-11

Reighan Gillam, Host and Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Southern California

Chinyere K. Osuji, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2019)

The increasing presence of interracial relationships is often read as an antidote to racism or as an indicator of the decreasing significance of race. In her book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race (NYU Press, 2019), Chinyere K. Osuji examines how interracial couples push against, navigate, and often maintain racial boundaries. In-depth interviews with black-white couples in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Los Angeles demonstrate how couples negotiate racial difference with their spouses, within their families, and during public encounters. This comparative study of interracial couples in Brazil and in the United States shows just how race can be constructed differently, while racial hierarchies persist. This book would be of interest to those in fields such as racial and ethnic studies, family and kinship studies, gender studies, and Latin American studies.

Listen to the interview (00:52:56) here. Download the interview here.

Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World

Boydell & Brewer
July 2010
260 pages
12 black and white illustrations
9×6 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781580464734
Hardback ISBN: 9781580463263
eBook for Handhelds ISBN: 9781580468190
eBook ISBN: 9781580467056

Solimar Otero, Professor of Folklore
Indiana University, Bloomington

A study of the interchange between Cuba and Africa of Yoruban people and culture during the nineteenth century, with special emphasis on the Aguda community.

Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World explores how Yoruba and Afro-Cuban communities moved across the Atlantic between the Americas and Africa in successive waves in the nineteenth century. In Havana, Yoruba slaves from Lagos banded together to buy their freedom and sail home to Nigeria. Once in Lagos, this Cuban repatriate community became known as the Aguda. This community built their own neighborhood that celebrated their Afrolatino heritage. For these Yoruba and Afro-Cuban diasporic populations, nostalgic constructions of family and community play the role of narrating and locating a longed-for home. By providing a link between the workings of nostalgia and the construction of home, this volume re-theorizes cultural imaginaries as a source for diasporic community reinvention. Through ethnographic fieldwork and research in folkloristics, Otero reveals that the Aguda identify strongly with their Afro-Cuban roots in contemporary times. Their fluid identity moves from Yoruba to Cuban, and back again, in a manner that illustrates the truly cyclical nature of transnational Atlantic community affiliation.

Table of Contents

• Grassroots Africans: Havana’s “Lagosians”
• Returning to Lagos: Making the Oja Home
• “Second Diasporas”: Reception in the Bight of Benin
• Situating Lagosian, Caribbean, and Latin American Diasporas
• Creating Afrocubanos: Public Cultures in a Circum-Atlantic Perspective
• Conclusion: Flow, Community, and Diaspora
• Appendix: Case Studies of Returnees to Lagos from Havana, Cuba