Mixed Race Studies

Harry-and-Meghan is not ‘great news’ for interracial couples

gal-dem
2017-12-01

Natalie Morris

image via Vanity Fair

On Monday it was announced that Prince Harry is engaged to Meghan Markle – a half white, half black American. A mixed-race woman is about to become the first non-white member of the British monarchy, and I am conflicted.

Feelings about the Royal Family aside, my initial instinct was that the introduction of any kind of diversity to this country’s most historic institution can only be a good thing. There’s definitely a little girl inside me who wants to cry joyful tears at the thought of a black princess. But after about four minutes on Twitter and an avalanche of headlines screaming about Harry’s “exotic” choice of fiancée, I realised how this was actually going to go…

Read the entire article here.

Ngozi Onwurah: the forgotten pioneer of black British film

gal-dem
2017-06-20

Varaidzo

‘The Body Beautiful‘ by Ngozi Onwurah. Image via BFI

Ngozi Onwurah, despite being the director of the first independent black British feature film to be released, is not a household name. For a long time, her film Welcome II The Terrordome (1995), was the only film by a black woman to have a UK release. Like many black British women pioneers, her contributions to her craft have been pushed to the peripheries of British film history, yet revisiting her films reveals them to be prescient explorations of race that are just as relevant today.

Onwurah was born to a white mother and a black father in 1960s Nigeria. She was raised in England by her mother, alongside her two other siblings (one of whom, Simon Onwurah, produced Welcome II The Terrordome). Her first work, Coffee Coloured Children (1988), uses Onwurah’s own personal narrative to look at the experiences of being a black mixed-race child in England. It begins gleefully with folk of all races gathered together, dancing, laughing, rejoicing, to the ever optimistic soundtrack of Blue Mink’s song ‘Melting Pot’. The tone of the film darkens almost instantly, its extended background monologue beginning with the question “our childhood memories are blurred, murky, why did the big boys throw dog shit on our front door?”. This is coupled with the visual of this particular act being reproduced for the viewer…

Read the entire article here.

Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom

gal-dem
2016-11-18

Grace Barber-Plentie

Image via Telegraph

The characters and scenarios in Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom are like ghosts – they’re long gone, long dead, and yet there is still a resonance and urgency to them that keeps pushing through to our subconscious, never letting us quite forget. Regardless of the merits of her films themselves, Asante is a clever filmmaker, a filmmaker with a plan. At the BFI’s recent Black Star symposium, she told the audience that she deliberately makes period films about old issues in order to show how they reflect on our own contemporary problems with race, gender, love and money. Gone is the period dress of Belle, but there are still hoards of mixed race girls out there trying to find their place in society. And while in 2016 one would hope that an interracial couple could walk down the street holding hands without a second glance, Asante’s true story of the heir to the throne of Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and his white wife still makes us think about those of us that must fight for what we want and who we love.

The love worth fighting for, in the case of A United Kingdom, is that of white shopkeeper’s daughter Ruth, in a modest turn by Rosamund Pike and African heir Seretze Khama, played by David Oyelowo; another strong performance to add to his list. Their love, as seen in the opening scenes of the film, is not a fierce, passionate one, but one where each are equal and share love deeply in their own restrained way….

Read the entire review here.

When will Rachel Dolezal stop trying to get in formation?

gal-dem
2016-06-23

Paula Akpan and Ella Wilks-Harper

When the story of Rachel Dolezal first broke – the NAACP president who has been misrepresenting herself as black – I snorted derisively.

When she was interviewed by VICE’s Broadly and mused over how “it’s so hard to explain this to people: I don’t feel white,” I rolled my eyes.

However, upon discovering that Dolezal had joined the Twittersphere, I had a cursory stalk and came across the following tweet…

Read the entire article here.

‘You don’t see many of them round here’: being black in the white, rural West Country

gal-dem
2016-09-05

Louisa Adjoa Parker

My parents met when my dad came to the UK from Ghana in the 1960s to train as a nurse. He married my mum, and I was born in Doncaster in 1972. I don’t think he had a clue before he came how racist Britain was then, and both my parents were naïve in their own ways. Their turbulent marriage was unsuccessful, not, as my grandparents had feared, as a result of two different cultures colliding, but because of two very different personalities colliding (and my dad’s fists colliding with parts of my mum’s body).

Many people of mixed heritage talk of the difficulties of belonging to two cultures. I didn’t have that problem – my dad rarely offered anything in the way of Ghanaian culture. We didn’t eat Ghanaian food, listen to Ghanaian music, or have contact with any of our Ghanaian relatives. In fact, Ghana has always seemed to me, a far-off, mystical, hot and dusty land, peopled by unknown relatives. My dad wanted to become English; he looked up to them, liked their ways. I’ve not yet visited, although I hope to soon, and am grateful to my brother for flying out there and finding our long-lost family…

Read the entire article here.

I’m Filipino too: Filipino-ness and Multiraciality

gal-dem
2016-06-01

Amena Conopio-Ziard

When I first participated in an online Austronesian community group, a member questioned me, in Tagalog, if I was Filipino. He thought by messaging me in Tagalog he could cleverly catch me out in an autonomous space he believed I shouldn’t be in…

Read the entire article here.