Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The number of children born out of the widespread practice of sexual intimacy forced the colonial administration and the Belgian Parliament to debate what they termed the problème des métis, “the mulatto problem.” The issue was the treatment of the mulatto offspring of these unions: whether they should endure the same status as the rest of the Congolese population or whether they should be considered an intermediate group above the latter but beneath the Europeans. Attempts at resolving the dilemma produced a series of contradictory policies, resulting in considerable ambiguity. This ambiguity came to characterize the lives of the growing population of métis throughout the entire colonial period (Jeurissen 1999; Stoler 2002). Usually, the status of the metis depended upon the degree of recognition and acknowledgment of parenthood by their fathers. Those who were not recognized were often abandoned by their mothers because of the ostracism that they faced when returning to their native villages. The abandoned children usually ended up living in Catholic and Protestant missionary boarding schools, which were created for this purpose.

Jean Muteba Rahier, “Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black,… The Wanderings and Meanderings of Identities” in Problematizing Blackness: Self Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States, eds. Jean Muteba Rahier and Percey C. Hintzen, (London: Routledge, 2003): 86.

What happened to the British children born to black GIs?

Posted in Articles, Biography, History, Media Archive, United Kingdom, United States on 2022-02-01 03:47Z by Steven

What happened to the British children born to black GIs?

BBC News
2022-01-29

Eldridge says he would have loved to have met his father *MARTIN GILES/BBC*

Eighty years ago, US soldiers began arriving in the UK to help in the fight against Hitler’s Nazi Germany. In a small sleepy village in Suffolk, life was about to change forever.

Best friends Eldridge Marriot and Trevor Everett grew up together in Tostock, where they still live today.

As the pair, now aged in their 70s, reminisce over summers spent playing on the village green, it is clear they have a deep connection.

They were two of 14 children in the village, and about 2,000 across the UK, born to white British mothers and black American soldiers during World War Two.

“We definitely stood out with our curly hair,” Eldridge laughs. “But we didn’t have any racial problems; we were never treated differently.”

“We had some good times and I’ve had a brilliant life, I wouldn’t change it for nothing,” Trevor adds…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Babs Gibson-Ward, BBC News, Eldridge Marriot, England, Suffolk, Tostock, Trevor Everett

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Medieval black Briton found

Posted in Anthropology, History, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2011-10-10 02:06Z by Steven

Medieval black Briton found

The Times of London
2010-05-02

Gillian Passmore

A SKELETON uncovered in the ruins of a friary is the earliest physical evidence of a black person living in Britain in medieval times.

The remains of a man, found in the friary in Ipswich, Suffolk, which was destroyed by Henry VIII, have been dated to the 13th century.

It is the first solid indication that there were black people in Britain in the 1,000-year period between the departure of the Romans, who had African slaves, and the beginnings of the age of discovery in the 15th century…

…He predates by 150 years the three black people previously known to have lived in Britain. They were identified from tax records…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Gillian Passmore, Ipswich, Suffolk, The Times of London

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Mixed Race Studies

What happened to the British children born to black GIs?

Medieval black Briton found

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