Mixed Race Studies

Hungary’s first black MP aims to ‘destroy prejudice’

BBC News
2018-06-11

Tom Mulligan

Orsolya Kovacs Olivio Kocsis-Cake: Fidesz always finds an enemy who must be hated

Hungary has a reputation for anti-immigration politics, but a young black liberal MP wants to revamp the country’s image.

Olivio Kocsis-Cake, of the opposition Parbeszed (Dialogue) party, is being sworn in as an MP on Monday, taking a seat vacated by a colleague who is stepping down.

Mr Kocsis-Cake (pronounced “kochish-tsocker”) has become a talking point in Hungary because of the strong anti-migrant rhetoric – particularly against non-whites – ratcheted up by members of the governing Fidesz party, its loyal national media and far-right groups like Jobbik.

“In the 1990s I was physically in danger a number of times when confronted by skinheads on the street. But now this is very unusual. Mostly I just get suspicious looks,” Mr Kocsis-Cake told independent news website Index.hu.

Parbeszed won just five seats in the 2018 election, in which the right-wing Fidesz of Prime Minister Viktor Orban secured a super-majority of 133 seats and the ultra-nationalist Jobbik came second with 26 seats…

…Two different generations

Olivio Kocsis-Cake was born in 1980. His mother is Hungarian and his father, from Guinea-Bissau, came to Hungary via Senegal in 1976, aged 18.

Like many students invited to communist Eastern Europe from developing countries, Marcelo Cake-Baly studied and graduated at the Karl Marx Economics University. He settled and found work as a Budapest tram-driver and was even a one-time film actor…

Read the entire article here.

My family had never seen a Kenyan: The Chinese making a new life in Africa

BBC News
2018-05-10

Rajeev Gupta
BBC World Service, Nairobi, Kenya

Xu Jing and Henry Rotich fell in love a decade ago

“We fell in love but it was very difficult at first,” Xu Jing explains from the courtyard of the Fairmont Hotel in Nairobi.

“My family didn’t know much about Africa at all. They hadn’t even seen a Kenyan before so they were very worried.”

Henry Rotich – the Kenyan in question – was just as concerned.

The pair had fallen for each other after Henry was sent to China to learn Mandarin as part of his government job.

It took him many weeks to get his language skills good enough to meet Jing’s father over a nerve-filled lunch, at which he asked for his blessing.

“Her father didn’t say much so I was really worried about what he was thinking, whether or not he even liked the food we were serving him,” Henry recalls.

Apparently his mastery of Mandarin was enough: a decade later, the couple are living in the Kenyan capital, proud parents to two children.

Jing now teaches Mandarin at the Confucius Institute based at the University of Nairobi, one of an estimated 10,000 Chinese nationals who have moved to the East African state.

Their family provides one snapshot of the growing links between Chinese and Kenyans – propelled somewhat by China’s massive investment in the country…

Read the entire article here.

Walter Tull should get Military Cross, says Tottenham MP David Lammy

BBC News
2018-03-23

Richard Conway, BBC Radio 5 live sports news correspondent

Walter Tull died on the battlefields of northern France in 1918

Walter Tull – one of England’s first black professional footballers – should be awarded a Military Cross 100 years after his death, says Tottenham MP David Lammy.

Tull, who played for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town, died aged 29 when he was shot on the battlefields of France during World War One.

He was Britain’s first black Army officer to command white troops.

“His service on behalf of this country was immense,” Lammy said…

Read the entire article here.

A different portrait of black fatherhood

In Pictures
BBC News
2018-03-06

Zun Lee

Zun Lee was raised in Germany by Korean parents – but as an adult he discovered his real father was a black American with whom his mother had had a brief affair.

After this discovery, he began to explore fatherhood among black Americans.

Lee says the US media mainly portrays black fathers in one of two ways:

• the absent father, often portrayed as a “deadbeat”
• the traditional family patriarch, as seen in TV programmes such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

And his project, on display at the Bronx Documentary Centre, in New York, aims for a more balanced and nuanced portrayal.

Read the entire article here.

How young Americans are set to change the US forever

BBC News
2017-07-18

William H. Frey, Senior Fellow
Metropolitan Policy Program
Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.

William H. Frey is the author of Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America.

Getty Images

Older white Americans still hold most of the economic and political power in the US. But the great ethnic diversity of younger generations means that change is coming.

America’s workforce, politics and place on the world stage will soon be changed forever.

So great and so rapid are the shifts in the country’s population, that, in the coming decade, the US is set to be transformed far more than other nations.

Almost half of millennials and children are from ethnic minority groups and it is this great diversity that is at the heart of demographic changes.

As the country comes to rely on them for its future prosperity, everyone will have to consider how society must change to make a success of this new reality…

Read the entire article here.

Meet South Korea’s first black model Han Hyun-min

BBC News
2017-07-11

In South Korea, children of mixed race can be called “mongrels“. But Han Hyun-min didn’t let racism stop him.

Watch the video here.

The struggles of war babies fathered by black GIs

BBC News Magazine
2017-05-21

Getty Images

About 100,000 black GIs were stationed in the UK during the war. Inevitably there were love affairs, but US laws usually prevented black servicemen from marrying. So what happened to the children they fathered? Fiona Clampin met two such children in Dorset, now in their seventies, who have not given up hope of tracing their fathers.

A bottle of champagne has sat on a shelf in Carole Travers’s wardrobe for the past 20 years. Wedged between boxes and covered with clothes, it’ll be opened only when Carole finds her father. “There’s an outside chance he might still be alive,” she reflects. “I’ve got so many bits of information, but to know the real truth would mean the world to me – to know that I did belong to somebody.”

The possibility of Carole tracking down her father becomes more and more remote by the day. Born towards the end of World War Two, Carole, now 72, was the result of a relationship between her white mother and a married African-American or mixed-race soldier stationed in Poole, in Dorset.

Whereas some “brown babies” (as the children of black GIs were known in the press) were put up for adoption, Carole’s mother, Eleanor Reid, decided to keep her child. The only problem was, she was already married, with a daughter, to a Scot with pale skin and red hair.

“I had black hair and dark skin,” says Carole. “Something obviously wasn’t right.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race couple: ‘The priest refused to marry us’

BBC News Magazine
2017-03-01

Claire Bates

Phil Coomes Trudy and Barclay Patoir met during World War Two at a time when mixed-race relationships were still taboo. More than 70 years later they reveal the obstacles they had to overcome to stay together.

When Trudy Menard and Barclay Patoir told friends and family they were going to get married, no-one thought it was a good idea – because Trudy was white and Barclay was black.

“When I told them at work they thought I was daft marrying a black man. They all said, ‘It won’t last you know,’ because it was a mixed-race marriage,” says Trudy.

“I think some people thought I was marrying beneath myself.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘We were the unspoken story of Ireland’

BBC News
2016-10-13

The #IamIrish exhibition in north London explores what it means to be mixed race and Irish.

Watch the video (00:02:21) here.

The love story that shocked the world

BBC News
2016-09-14

When an African prince and a white middle-class clerk from Lloyd’s underwriters got married in 1948, it provoked shock in Britain and Africa.

Seretse Khama met Ruth Williams while he was a student at Oxford University. After his studies, he was supposed to go home to the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and marry someone from his own tribe, but his romance with Williams changed everything.

His family disapproved and Khama was forced to renounce his claim to the throne. The British government came under pressure to show its disapproval and Khama was exiled from his homeland.

He later became the first president of Botswana when it became an independent country.

Witness spoke to Ruth Williams’s sister about the love that conquered prejudice.

Watch the interview here.