{"id":10700,"date":"2010-12-11T02:15:13","date_gmt":"2010-12-11T02:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=10700"},"modified":"2010-12-11T02:15:13","modified_gmt":"2010-12-11T02:15:13","slug":"half-caste-an-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=10700","title":{"rendered":"Half-Caste (An Excerpt)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Half-Caste (An Excerpt)<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
\nVolume 2, Number 1<\/a>, (2008)
\n6 pages<\/p>\n

Angela Ajayi<\/strong><\/p>\n

At about the age of nineteen, a year after I arrived for college in the United States, I stopped thinking of myself as \u201chalf-caste<\/a>.\u201d The word, so loaded in its literal meaning and with its colonial roots, was used with frequency and ease to refer to those of us who had European mothers and African fathers in <\/strong>Nigeria<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For a long time\u2014from early childhood to late teens\u2014I accepted the word, not giving it much thought since it wasn\u2019t necessarily used in a negative way. In fact, if you were \u201chalf-caste,\u201d you were different in a way that was usually considered interesting and more attractive. The \u201chalf-caste\u201d women, for instance, were often sought after and desired by Nigerians for love affairs; the men deemed good-looking. Or so I observed, growing up in Plateau State, Nigeria<\/a>, where more than a handful of mixed-race families lived.<\/p>\n

In the first decades following Nigeria\u2019s independence from the British in 1960<\/a>, many Nigerian men received scholarships to study in Europe and the former Soviet Union<\/a>. They left for their studies\u2014and some of them returned, after many years, with foreign wives. My father was one of these men who came home with a European wife. While studying veterinary medicine in Kiev<\/a>, now the capital of Ukraine<\/a>, he met my mother and married her in a tumultuous time of discrimination and racial prejudice against black students in the Soviet Union…<\/p>\n

Read the entire excerpt here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Half-Caste (An Excerpt) Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies Volume 2, Number 1, (2008) 6 pages Angela Ajayi At about the age of nineteen, a year after I arrived for college in the United States, I stopped thinking of myself as \u201chalf-caste.\u201d The word, so loaded in its literal meaning and with its colonial roots, was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,12,395,28,125,8,25],"tags":[4673,4672,4684],"class_list":["post-10700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-europe","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-women","tag-afroeuropa","tag-afroeuropa-journal-of-afroeuropean-studies","tag-angela-ajayi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}