Suchergebnisse

This book reveals the little-known history of the mixed-race children born to black American servicemen and white British women during the Second World War. Of the three million American soldiers stationed in Britain in 1942-1945, about 240.000 were African-American. Their relationships with white British women resulted in the birth of an estimated 2.000 children, which the African-American press named 'brown babies'; the British called them 'half-castes'. The American army was racially segregated and black GIs were forbidden to marry their pregnant white girlfriends. Up to half of these mothers, faced with the stigma of illegitimacy and a mixed-race child, gave up their children for adoption. Often, they ended up in children's homes, sometimes followed by fostering and occasionally adoption, but adoption societies frequently would not take on 'coloured' children, thought 'too hard to place'. Based on extensive interviews and including over fifty photographs, Britain's 'brown babies' presents the stories of more than forty of these children against the backdrop of shifting government policy and attitudes of the time. Lucy Bland brings to light the struggles they face, including racism in a (then) very white Britain, and a lack of family or a clear identity.

This article examines miscegenation fears in Britain in the period after World War I, noting three dominant discourses: that miscegenation leads inevitably to violence between white and black men (focusing on the 1919 race riots), that these relationships involve sexual immorality (analysing the 1920 'Black Horror on the Rhine', a case involving a white woman, a Chinese man and drugs and a trial of a white woman for killing her Egyptian husband) and that miscegenation has 'disastrous' procreative consequences. It is suggested that miscegenation stood as one British boundary marker, separating the nationally acceptable and the nationally threatening. The parties concerned – the 'primitive' man of colour, the white woman of a 'low type' and the 'misfit' offspring – were each pathologised in terms of their deviant sexuality. Yet interracial relationships did not decrease, quite the contrary. The move in Britain towards a more racially mixed community began in the years after the Great War, when certain white women made choices against the norms of respectable femininity.