Zoe Wicomb, South Africa-born but living in Glasgow for the last 11 years, is a writer of rare brilliance. On the cover of her latest book, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and double Booker winner JM Coetzee compete to eulogise her work. She’s formidably intelligent: ‘A mind like a steel trap’, says the head of the Scottish Arts Council’s literature department, ‘one of the brightest people you could meet.’ She is, according to the pupils she has taught creative writing to at Strathclyde University, where Wicomb holds a professorship, a peerless and inspiring teacher.

Yet the chances are that you won’t have ever heard of her, because this is the first British newspaper interview she has ever given. For the 30 years she’s lived in Britain, that’s the way she liked it, and to be honest, it probably still is.

Zoe’s third book Living In The Light, is one of the most convincing novels I’ve read all year. If she’s going for the title of Scotland’s greatest unknown novelist, it’s hers on a plate.

Zoe Wicomb was born in Namaqueland, a hot, arid region on the southern fringes of the Namib desert, in 1948. The good life of white South Africa was a long way from this sparsely populated scrubland, and the nearest whites lived 20 miles away, in the town which also had the nearest shop. (Not that, as coloureds, the Wicombs were allowed to enter it, only being served from a hatch round the side). Her Afrikaans-speaking parents wanted the best for their children, something more than working in the nearby gypsum mine or as a domestic servant, which were the only local jobs going. Speaking English – as no-one did for 200 miles around – wasn’t an automatic free pass to a better life, but it was a better bet than anything else.

Secondary school meant Cape Town, where she moved to live with her aunt. A school for coloureds, followed by a university for coloureds, where she learnt about such great non-coloureds as Chaucer, Johnson, Shakespeare and Hardy. And where, for the first time, Zoe caught sight of her first “play-whites”. ‘There was a family living across the road from us, and one day they just disappeared. Our neighbours said, ‘They’ve left. They’ve turned white’. This happened all the time’

‘It’s an odd phenomenon, the play-whites,’ says Zoe. ‘We don’t even know how many of them there are. There’s no discourse, nothing in the library, because officially they don’t exist. Yet the truth of the matter, because of their history, is that many Afrikaners are mixed race. Even Verwoerd [the founder of apartheid] had a wife who looked African.’

Because skin colour is so variable even within the same family, legal definitions of whiteness were absurdly tortuous. ‘A white person,’ the government decided in 1950, ‘is someone who in appearance obviously is or is generally accepted as a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person.’ Mrs Verwoerd presumably counted as white not because she looked it but because enough people could agree that she actually was.

‘The weird thing,’ says Zoe, ‘was that there was this legislation for racial purity at the same time as the whites were tacitly boosting their own numbers by allowing some people to cross over.’

Read full article here…

April 2003

Just five years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to find a college course that addressed mixed race issues. But ever since 7 million people self-identified as multiracial in the 2000 census by choosing two or more races, the interest in mixed race studies has exploded. At least sixteen universities across the country—from New Haven, CT to Santa Barbara, CA—offer classes that explore the social implications of being mixed in America. A mixed race movement is clearly taking form: politically, socially, and now, educationally.

“We start at the personal level, and then move to the social and historical issues of race,” says Professor Robert Allen, who teaches a class called People of Mixed Racial Descent at the University of California, Berkeley. The students’ first assignment is to write a 2-3 page autobiographical essay describing how they became aware of their racial and ethnic identity, what they learned, and how it has defined them.

The class, one of the first of its kind, was established in 1981 by Native American professor Terry Wilson. It began as a response to the growth of the mixed race population, especially in California’s Bay Area, as well as student interest on campus. Historically, the West has always been very multiracial because of high immigration levels and an early end to laws against interracial marriage. Forty percent of the 6.8 million U.S. residents who checked off more than one box for race live in the West, so it’s no wonder many mixed race studies courses originate in states like California.

Allen’s class has over a hundred students. About half are multiracial (of “all imaginable, possible combinations,”) others are involved in interracial relationships, and some are neither.

Allen uses a variety of literature, texts, readings, films, and speakers to teach the subject matter. An anthology edited by Teresa Williams-Leon and Berkeley Graduate student Cynthia Nakashima “The Sum of Our Parts” and Dr. Maria Root‘s “The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders As the New Frontier” serve almost as “textbooks” in the class, although, many fictitious novels telling stories of mixed people around the world are also included in the course’s critical analysis of race.

Another approach to mixed race studies is finding where one fits in the bigger picture. Prof. Steven Ropp teaches Biracial and Multiracial Identity in the U.S. at California State University, Northridge. He stresses the importance of “being a part of all the communities we belong to, by having a presence, communicating, staying active.”

The class he currently teaches began about six years ago under the tutelage of Teresa Williams-Leon, professor and co-editor of “The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans.” This year is the first year Ropp has taught the class. His vision is to create a general multiracial studies class, in hopes that it will draw more students than a class catered to a specific ethnic group.

Read original article here…

>> Erica Schlaikjer <<

US singer Amerie recently spoke to Sixshot.com about her mixed racial background. Amerie was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts to an African-American father and a Korean mother. Her father was in the United States military and this enabled Amerie to travel to and live in many different places, including Alaska, Texas, Germany, and South Korea. In fact Amerie’s first language is Korean, however, after the family left Korea, Amerie’s mother made a conscious effort to limit the use of Korean with her daughters out of fear that it would impede their development of English proficiency.  Asked if her Korean background and the music of Korea like K-pop influenced her sound, Amerie said: ‘I think my Korean heritage shaped more of my personality and more of who I am growing up, which in turn affects my music. ‘I think it did shape it but I also grew up listening to classical music, soul music, pop music, and heavy metal.’

She described her liking for heavy metal music as a phase she went through in the fifth and sixth grade and went on to say: ‘I like to listen to a lot of things. What I can say about Korean music is that it is very rhythmic. It’s very drum heavy like African music—there are similarities.’

Read original article here…

Are you black, brother? Growing up, I just was. My mum was white and my dad was brown. My mum’s relatives lived here, and the old ones had German accents. My dad’s relatives lived in Israel and mostly couldn’t speak English. When we went there, they said things in a funny language and pinched our cheeks. They smelled of garlic. And they came, originally, from exotic-sounding places like Bukhara and Isfahan (in today’s Uzbekistan and Iran respectively).

This was no big deal. My friends’ families came from Jamaica and Guyana and India and Ireland and England and Wales and Spain and South Africa. I was vaguely aware that I was Jewish; but everyone was something. None of it seemed very serious. Things started to change when I went to secondary school. My state primary had been mixed, multicultural, and multi-ability. My new school was private, posh, and predominantly Jewish. But these Jews weren’t like my family. They were all white, and a lot of them were blond with blue eyes. Not only that, but they liked football, talked like cockneys, and lived in the suburbs. They went to synagogue – ‘shul’ – and hung around only with other Jews. Some of them called black people ‘schwarzes’ and brown people ‘pakis’ and they didn’t know what to make of me, this olive-skinned Jew who didn’t practise. One of them told me that because of my irreligiosity the Messiah would not be coming.

At about 14, I started playing basketball seriously. The Harlesden Cougars basketball club was 99% black. The other 1% was me. I wasn’t black, and couldn’t understand the patois into which the other guys sometimes lapsed. I was basically the white kid, or the whitest they had. And then came university. Where Harlesden had been black, Oxford was white. I went from being the only white kid on the team to the only black kid on the team. The blackest they had, anyway. They even told me that I had natural athleticism but lacked control and shouldn’t shoot the ball.

Away from the basketball court I had a few amusing incidents. One night, a very drunk, very blonde girl staggered into my room. ‘I’ve never really met a coloured person before,’ she confided in me. When I told her that we didn’t say coloured, we said black, and in any case I was not black but Jewish, her reply was: ‘I’ve never met one of those either’. All this time, I scrawled sarcastic comments across any ethnic monitoring forms that came my way. Well, it’s not nice when they don’t have a box for you.

That became considerably harder after university, when I got a job running diversity policy for a big company. I learned about institutional racism and about monitoring and about glass ceilings and about how, at every imaginable stage in recruitment, promotion and termination, across all employment sectors, people with darker skin get treated worse than people with lighter skin with the same aptitudes and qualifications. And I understood that without hard data, you couldn’t prove this was happening, and do anything about it. And that I ought to fill the form in. So I started to tick the box ‘mixed race’.

As part of the job, I started to try and get more people from different ethnic backgrounds to apply to the company. I went out and started talking to groups of black people or Muslims or whatever. And they all thought I was one of them. The black people thought I was black – light-skinned, certainly, but black. Muslims assumed I was Muslim. Indians had me down as an Indian. Arabs thought I was an Arab. Greeks – well, check the surname: Mokades.

Read full article here…

>> Raphael Mokades <<

• Afatasi: Mixed ancestry between Samoan and White
• Afrasian: Mixed ancestry between an African and Asian
• Afro-Asian: Mixed ancestry between an African and Asian
• Afro-European: Mixed heritage between Africa and Europe
• Africasian: Mixed ancestry between an African and Asian
• Ainoco:Mixed ancestry between White and Japanese
• Amerasian: Mixed ancestry between American and an Asian
• Amalgamation: Archaic term for the intermarriage and interbreeding of different ethnicities or races
• Anglo-Asian: Mixed ancestry between an English and Asian
• Anglo-Burmese: Mixed ancestry between Burmese and European
• Anglo-Indian: Mixed ancestry between an English and Indian
• Atlantic-Creole: Mixed ancestry between European and African
• Bastard: A person of mixed blood
• Baster: People with a mixed racial and ethnic heritage
• Biracial: People of white and black origins
• Blackanese: Mixed Black and Asian
• Blackinese: Mixed ancestry between Black and Chinese
• Blacktino: Mixed of Black and Latino
• Black Dutch: People with mixed racial. cultural and ethnic heritage
• Black Indians: Mixed heritage between African and Native American
• Blasian: Mixed ancestry between Black and Asian
• Blaxican: Mixed ancestry between Black and Mexican
• Brown Skin: A political, racial, ethnic, societal, and cultural classification not limited to people of mixed heritage.
• Bruin-ou: People with a mixed racial, cultural and ethnic heritage
• Bruinmense: People with mixed racial, cultural and ethnic heritage
• Burgher People: Mixed ancestry between Europeans and Sri Lankans
• Bushie: People with a mixed racial, cultural and ethnic heritage
• Cablinasian: Causcasian/Black/American Indian/Asian Mix
• Caboclo: Mixed ancestry between White and Amerindian
• Cafuzo: Mixed ancestry between Black and Amerindian
• Capie: People with a mixed racial, cultural and ethnic heritage
• Castizo: Mixed ancestry between White and Mestizo
• Chewish: Mixed ancestry between a Jew and Chinese
• Chestnut Ridge People: see Melungeon
• Chindian: Mixed ancestry between the Chinese and Indian
• Cholo: Mixed ancestry between American Indian and Black African
• Chino: Mixed Asian and African American ancestry
• Coffee Coloured: People of mixed race with a brownish skin texture
• Colored: People of mixed blood or black
• Coloured: People with a mixed racial, cultural and ethnic heritage
• Con lai: Half-breed
• Coolie: Mixed ancestry between Black and Asian Indian
• Creole peoples: Locally-born people with foreign ancestry
• Creoles of color: Mixed-race blacks residing in the Gulf Coast and Louisiana area of the pre-existing indigenous population of Spanish Guinean originating from the island of Fernando Pó
• Daburu: The mix of races, cultures and ethnicities
• Dougla: Mixed race typically African and Asian India
• Eurafrican: African and European ancestry
• Eurasian: Mixed ancestry between a European and Asian
• Jingoism: Judging one’s own country as superior to others – an extreme type of nationalism.
• Gado Gado: Mixed
• Goffals: Mixed ancestry between Ndebele/Shona and White
• Griqua: People with a mixed racial, cultural and ethnic heritage
• Haafu or Hafu:  Half Japanese
• Halfbloed: Mixed Blood
• Half-blood: A person of mixed blood
• Half-breed: A person of mixed blood
• Half-caste: People of mixed caste
• Half-Chat: People of white and black origins
• Halfling: People with a mixed ancestry, racial, cultural and ethnic heritage
• Halfrican: Half African/ Half White
• Halvsie: Mixed Japanese Hapa: Half Hawaiian or half Asian, half Caucasian
• Hapa: A person of mixed Asian or Pacific Islander racial/ethnic heritage
• Hasian: Half Asian
• Honhyeol: Mixed blood
• Hotnot: People with a mixed racial, cultural and ethnic heritage
• Hun xue: Mixed blood
• Hybrid: Fusion or mix of race, ancestry, race, culture and ethnicity
• Indo: Mixed ancestry between a European and an Asian
• Kablungajuit: Mixed ancestry between White and Inuit
• Kailoma or Vasu: Mixed ancestry between European and Fijian
• Kleurling: People with a mixed racial, cultural and ethnic heritage
• Lai Má: American mix
• Lobo: Mixed ancestry between Black and Amerindian
• Louisiana Creole: People of mixed ancestry
• Luk kreung: Mixed racial heritage, literally means half-child
• Lumbee: Products of mixed unions
• Malaynese: Mixed ancestry between Malay and Chinese or Japanese
• Marabou: Mixed ancestry between black African/European and an Amerindian, specifically the native Taíno
• Melungeon: Mixed European, African, and Native American ancestry
• Miscegenation: Mixing of different racial groups
• Métis: A person born to parents who belong to different groups
• Mischling: Mixed person
• Mixedasians: Mixed Person
• Mixed: People of mixed origins
• Mixed ancestry: People of mixed ancestry
• Mixed-Bloods: Individuals of mixed European and Native American ancestry who are not of Hispanic descent
• Mixed race: People of white and black origins
• Mongrel: Fusion or mix of ethnicity
• Morisco: Mixed ancestry between Caucasian and Mulatto
• Mudblood: A person of mixblood
• Mulatto: Mixed ancestry between white European and black African
• Mule: Fusion or mix of horse and donkey
• Multiethnic: People of mixed ethnicity
• Multiracial: People of white and black origins
• Mutant: A mutation or mix between race, culture and ethnicity
• Mutt: Fusion or mix of ethnicity
• Nguoi Lai: Mixed-race person
• Octoroon: Mixed ancestry between a Quadroon and a European
• Pardo: Mixed ancestry between for black and white
• Passing: A person of mixed-race heritage assimilating to the white majority
• Peranakan: Indonesian Chinese
• Pointee: Mixed ancestry between an African and Caucasian
• Polygeneric: Neologism from Greek, poly-, (many) and genera (races)
• Quadroon: Generally three quarters white and one quarter black
• Quintroon: Mixed ancestry between an octoroon and a white parent
• Race of the Future: All the races are blending to become one race in the future
• Rojak or Rujak: Mixed vegetable/fruit salad
• Romani people: An ethnic group of Europe tracing their origins to medieval India
• Gypsies: An ethnic group of Europe tracing their origins to medieval India
• Redbone: Racially mixed ethnic groups in the the Sabine River region of Louisiana and Texas
• Réunion Creoles: A name given to those born on the island, of various ethnic origins on Reunion Islands
• Rhineland Bastards: Afro-German children of mixed German and African parentage
• Sri Lankan Moors: People of mixed heritage in Sri Lanka
• We-Sorts: People of “mixed-race” origins who claim descent from the Piscataway Native American population
• Zambo: Mixed ancestry between Black and Amerindian

>> Ross Rayners <<

For some uniquely and proudly South African neologism visit www.kakduidelik.co.za

The myth of a pure society

As a woman of African descent, I have got used to the surprise on some people’s faces when they find out I am also a British MP. For some people, it is a surprise that I am British at all. Particularly if they are not themselves from Britain and have never heard my name.

For millions of people all over the world, Britain is the land of tradition, the Royal Family, Beefeaters, Bobbies on the beat and, above all, white people. In much of middle America, it comes as a shock for them to hear that there any black people in Britain at all. But even if people can get their head around the idea that I might be British, the notion that I could be an MP often perplexes them.

An MP? Surely, I can see their eyes say, a British MP must be white. There are many lifetimes of war, conquest, history, literature, culture and myth behind the idea that Britain is a racially pure Society. And in the study of history, myth is just as important as reality. But the racial purity of the British has always been a myth.

From the days when the Norman French invaded Anglo-Saxon Britain, we have been a culturally diverse nation. But because the different nationalities shared a common skin colour, it was possible to ignore the racial diversity which always existed in the British Isles. And even if you take race to mean what it is often commonly meant to imply – skin colour- there have been black people in Britain for centuries. The earliest blacks in Britain were probably black Roman centurions that came over hundreds of years before Christ. But even in Elizabethan times, there were numbers of blacks in Britain. So much so that Elizabeth I issued a proclamation complaining about them. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, black people make fleeting appearances in the political and cultural narrative of the British Isles. Black people can be seen as servants in the prints of Hogarth. And in many paintings of the era. In Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’, Ms Schwartz, the West Indian heiress is obviously supposed to be of mixed race. She is gently mocked but her colour is not otherwise remarked on.

Read full article here…

>> Diane Abbott MP <<

But while cross-racial marriages are becoming increasingly widespread and accepted, Phillips has warned that the children of such couples may face a new set of racial problems. He points to the risk of a generation falling victim to ‘identity stripping’, or being unsure which community they belong to.

Phillips, whose previously unpublicised comments were made in a recent speech, said the expansion in mixed-race Britons is not an uncomplicated prospect. The mixed-race Britons are young and they show the highest employment rates of any minority group.

But they also exhibit the highest rates of lone parenthood and family breakdown, in some cases three times the average. They suffer the highest rates of drug treatment . . . Many people talk of identity stripping children who grow up marooned between communities.

The warnings have provoked criticism from some who believe they are unnecessarily pessimistic. Val Hoskins, a trustee of the mixed-race support group People in Harmony, said: ‘The reason my group was started was in response to people like Enoch Powell saying mixed-race people were a cause of conflict, not being one or the other.’

‘Mixed-race people do not see themselves as marooned. It is other people who see them as not belonging.’

Read full article here…

>> Jack Grimston <<

Britain currently has one of the highest rates of inter-racial relationships in the western world, with 50% of all black children born having one white parent. Whether we view such unions as positive multiculturalism or not, the truth is that mixed race relationships are a fact of life.

So why is it still so hard to find a suitable term to describe mixed race people? Is it right to say that someone is black or white? Let alone half-caste, bi-racial or coffee-coloured?

And what do the children from inter-racial relationships signify in 21st century Britain?

Read the full article here…

www.bbc.co.uk

Now another has joined our ranks. The actress Sophie Okonedo, who received a best supporting actress nomination for Hotel Rwanda, has every prerequisite for official tragic status. As the London Evening Standard said, she fought ‘against the odds’: an absentee Nigerian father, a struggling Jewish mother, a project housing upbringing. Despite her insistence that she is at ease with her heritage, she’s being fast-tracked as Britain’s Halle Berry. It is dangerous territory. Berry is rarely mentioned without reference to her “against the odds” life story, which includes spending her childhood not black enough for black folks and too touched with the tar brush for those picky whites. Are you seeing a pattern here?

No sooner had double gold medallist Kelly Holmes crossed the finishing line at Athens last year than the media had her lined up as a subtle, triumph-over-miscegenation story. OK, not so subtle if you consider that Holmes’s post-Athens cuttings reveal that she’s the mixed-race child of a shiftless Jamaican father raised on a project housing estate in south-east England.

Read the full article here…

>> Helen Kolawole <<

When Tiger Woods went on Oprah to declare himself mixed race, not black, it caused outrage across the United States. Many saw Woods’s declaration as a rejection of his black heritage. In America, a country where the ‘drops of blood’ mentality still exists – measuring black identity into halves, quarters and eighths – one drop means you are black.

Even senior political figures, such as the former Secretary of State Colin Powell, weighed in. ‘In America,’ said Powell, ‘when you look like me, you’re black.’ But Woods rejected such polarisation. His heritage is Caucasian, Black, Native American and Asian. He has invented a word to describe himself: Cablinasian. The debate in the US highlighted that, hidden behind the idea that the colour of a person’s skin is irrelevant, there is a real issue for people who consider themselves neither black nor white – and, partly thanks to Woods, sport has become the focal point of the debate.

Read the full article here…

Written by Anna Kessel, Sunday, 29 October 2006, The Observer