{"id":51789,"date":"2017-02-22T21:07:54","date_gmt":"2017-02-22T21:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=51789"},"modified":"2017-02-22T21:12:02","modified_gmt":"2017-02-22T21:12:02","slug":"when-black-is-not-the-only-colour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=51789","title":{"rendered":"When Black is not the only colour"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Black is not the only colour<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

50.50: inclusive democracy<\/a>
\nopen democracy<\/a>
\n2017-02-20<\/p>\n

Kamila Zahno<\/strong><\/a>
\nHaringey, London, United Kingdom<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nKamila and her ‘slightly coloured’ siblings in the 1960s.<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Too Black for the adoption agencies but not Black enough for the political campaigners. \u00a0On growing up an adoptee of mixed heritage in Britain<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Times have changed. When I was a child in sixties\u2019 Britain there was no Jessica Ennis<\/a>, Jackie Kay<\/a>, Chuka Umunna<\/a> or Lewis Hamilton<\/a>. Mixed heritage role models were thin on the ground: we saw film stars like Merle Oberon<\/a>, or singers such as Bob Marley<\/a>, but I can\u2019t remember seeing any British role models. Now people of mixed parentage are everywhere, although it was not until the 2001 Census that we became \u2018official\u2019.\u00a0 In that year there were 677,177 of us.\u00a0 By 2020 it is estimated that 1.24 million people in the UK will be of mixed parentage.<\/p>\n

In the fifties when I was born, unmarried pregnant women were encouraged to give their babies up for adoption. I, along with my three siblings, was one of them.\u00a0 However, the adoption agency files revealed what a headache we posed to them.\u00a0 We were not adoption material.\u00a0 \u2018Baby is slightly coloured and adoption is impossible\u2019 was the phrase written in my sister Ellen\u2019s adoption papers.<\/p>\n

We were all different ethnicities: our fathers from Asia or Africa, our mothers white. My mother was a young Swiss au pair working in London; my father an Indian engineering student. How they met I shall never know but I liked to think about them learning to jive at the Hammersmith Palais<\/a>…<\/p>\n

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

Too Black for the adoption agencies but not Black enough for the political campaigners. \u00a0On growing up an adoptee of mixed heritage in Britain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,8,10],"tags":[26248,687,26246,26247],"class_list":["post-51789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-50-50-inclusive-democracy","tag-adoption","tag-kamila-zahno","tag-open-democracy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51789","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=51789"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51791,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51789\/revisions\/51791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}