Mixed Race Studies

19 Black UK Actresses Who Are Killing The Game Across The Pond

Essence
2016-11-17

Sydney Scott

There’s tons of talent coming out of the UK, with many actresses crossing the pond and appearing in some of our favorite television shows and movies. There are too many talented actresses to name, but we had to share some of our favorites with you. From well-known names and recognizable faces to those just bursting onto the scene, here are 19 of our favorite UK actresses…

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.

Multiracialism and Civil Rights

Fordham Law News
Fordham University, The Jesuit University of New York
2016-11-21

Shane Danaher

Tanya K. Hernández

Fordham Law Professor Tanya Hernandez shared excerpts from her upcoming book on multiracialism and civil rights in talk sponsored by the Center on Race, Law & Justice’s Colloquium on Race and Ethnicity on November 17, not quite seven months shy of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage and the legal stigma against mixed-race children.

Hernandez outlined the argument presented in her work-in-progress study of multiracial identity in discrimination lawsuits, tentatively titled Multiracials and Civil Rights. In the book, Hernandez challenges conventional wisdom about multiracial discrimination.

“The growing view that discrimination against multiracial (racially-mixed) people poses a distinctive challenge to racial equality law is incorrect,” she said. “This misperception is based on the false presumption that multiracials experience racial discrimination in a unique manner that makes it necessary to reconsider civil rights law.”…

Read the entire article here.

Loop of Jade: Sarah Howe visits Manchester Literature Festival

Humanity Hallows
2016-11-04

Leigh Jones

2015 T.S. Eliot prize winner and author of A Certain Chinese Encyclopaedia, Sarah Howe made an appearance at the Manchester Literature Festival recently to discuss her novel Loop of Jade. Within her work, Howe takes her audience on a personal journey through her English-Chinese background, exploring, as the book’s blurb describes, both ‘migration and inheritance’. The novel contains many forms of writing, including poetry, narrative, free verse and short prose, all providing an insight into cultural upbringing and the journey to discover one’s place within society.

At the event, Howe read from her work. Opening with ‘Sirens’, inspired by Theodore Roethke’s ‘Elegy for Jane’, Howe showed how she became fascinated with the key word ‘pickerel’ from which she created a poem illustrating the true meaning of literature and how the perceptions of words continuously develop overtime. Howe emphasised the differences human beings share through literature and how it has encouraged us to think. She described her piece as, “very real and determinative”, as it does not seek to provide an answer but, more so, to enhance ideas…

Read the entire article here.

Watch The Trailer For Barry, Netflix’s Barack Obama Biopic

TIME
2016-11-22

Nash Jenkins

There are just under two months until Donald Trump is inaugurated, but a sentimental nostalgia for Barack Obama’s presidency has been building for quite some time. The new trailer for Barry, a biographical film about Obama’s days as a student at Columbia University in the early 1980s, might help stoke it.

Newcomer Devon Terrell will play the 44th President as a 20-year-old undergraduate, grappling with his identity as a mixed-race kid from Honolulu in a largely white scene. “You a whole different type of brother,” a peer tells him at one point. “You do realize that, don’t you?”…

Read the entire article here.

Black U.K. beauty magazine accidentally put a white model on its cover. Apologies followed.

The Washington Post
2016-11-22

Travis M. Andrews, Staff Writer

Emily Bador is a white woman. She is not, therefore, a black woman. Normally, that wouldn’t be news worth reporting, mostly because it isn’t news.

But her race came into play recently due to the new cover of Blackhair magazine, a British glossy that bills itself as “an international bi-monthly magazine for the style conscious black woman. Packed with 100’s of hair inspirations, fashion, lifestyle and celebrity interviews, we are one of the leading publications for women of colour in Europe.”

The magazine, which generally if not always features black or mixed-race models, used her photograph for the cover of its December/January issue. The editors have admitted they didn’t know she was white…

…According to Blackhair’s editor, Keysha Davis, who wrote a note on the magazine’s Facebook page, the publication runs photographs they receive from PR companies and salons. They specifically request that these photographs be of black or mixed-race women…

Read the entire article here.

David Olusoga: ‘There’s a dark side to British history, and we saw a flash of it this summer’

The Guardian
2016-11-04

Arifa Akbar

‘People used to shout “Go back to Africa” at us’ … David Olusoga. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

The writer and broadcaster on reassessing black history and the fallout from the Brexit vote

For as long as David Olusoga has been writing and broadcasting on black British history (almost two decades), he has received infuriated letters from the public. Nowadays, there are tweets too, which employ the same fulminating tone.

“The number of people who say, ‘I’m sick of hearing about slavery’, or ‘black people are always talking about slavery’. My response to them is ‘Name a British plantation. Name a slave trader. Name a British slave ship.’ Normally they can’t, because we don’t know that much about slavery. It’s not a central part of our national story.”

Olusoga’s new book, Black and British: A Forgotten History, is not about slavery as such, but it is a radical reappraisal of the parameters of history, exposing lacunae in the nation’s version of its past. Domestic history cannot be separated from the vast former empire building, he argues, which was inextricably bound to the economics of global slavery. Joining up history at home and abroad makes it harder to gloss over Britain’s part in the slave trade…

Read the entire article here.

Attitudes toward interracial marriages and the role of interracial contacts in Sweden

Ethnicities
Volume 16, Number 4, August 2016
pages 568-588
DOI: 10.1177/1468796816638400

Sayaka Osanami Törngren
Malmo University, Sweden; Sophia University, Japan

This paper examines attitudes toward interracial marriages and the relationship between the amount of prior interracial contact and attitudes in Sweden. The analysis is based on an anonymous postal survey conducted in Malmö, Sweden answered by 461 white-European respondents. Several studies in the US address the question of contact and attitudes and find that those who have more interracial contact, especially interracial friendships, have more positive attitudes toward intermarriage. The results show that the majority of the white European respondents can imagine marrying interracially; however, there are clear preferences toward different racial groups. Moreover, as in the US context, respondents who reported interracial friendships, and not general or superficial contacts, are more apt to answer the question about interracial marriage positively.

Read or purchase the article here.

Terry and Judy – A Mixed Race Journey

The listening project: It’s surprising what you hear when you listen
BBC Radio 4
2016-11-23, 10:55Z

Fi Glover, Presenter

Marya Burgess, Producer

Fi Glover introduces a conversation between a mixed race couple who met at a time when their relationship was a lot more unusual than it is today. Another in the series that proves it’s surprising what you hear when you listen.

The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they’ve never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation – they’re not BBC interviews, and that’s an important difference – lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject.

Listen to the conversation here.

Passive Voice, Active Prejudice: Mary Seacole in Children’s Literature and Media

theracetoread: Children’s Literature and Issues of Race
2016-10-20

Karen Sands-O’Connor, Professor
English Department
Buffalo State, The State University of New York, Buffalo, New York

[David] Harewood’s ITV programme celebrates the new statue of Mary Seacole in London–but not everyone is pleased

This week, Britain’s ITV showed a programme on Mary Seacole entitled “In the Shadow of Mary Seacole.” In some ways, the programme could have been titled, “Mary Seacole in the Shadow of British Racism.” Many people who initially celebrated the fact that ITV was telling the story of the woman labeled “The Greatest Black Briton” in 2004 were dismayed to find that the programme was put on the schedule at 10:40 pm. Others complained that the programme focused on the opinions of white historians. Indeed, it seemed that most, though not all, of Seacole’s defenders in the programme were non-historians: actors, comedians, nurses. Unfortunately, none of this is new when it comes to Mary Seacole—and children’s books about the Jamaican Crimean War nurse are no exception…

Read the entire article here.