White Women Mothering Mixed-Race Children in a Black-White Interracial Relationship

It is over five decades since ‘River of Blood,’ the speech about race in Britain, has been acknowledged as the symbol of discrimination towards immigration and minorities like Black British. Meanwhile, America, as another traditional western cultural center, has faced more serious issues during the process of human equality. Loving. V. Virginia, as a legal milestone of Civil Rights in the US, has influenced the public attitude of the majority towards interracial union; however, the discrimination and prejudice have become more invisible via the changing of societal environment. Although the anti-miscegenation movement has been treated as the big step of human rights, the union between black and white faces misunderstanding, even stigmas in their daily lives. Hence, taking black-white interracial relationships as examples, from white women’s perspective, this essay will examine the dilemma between their own cognition of cultural identities and being partially embedded into a different culture when ‘marrying-out’ and raising mixed-race children.

Phantom Pains: The Effect of Police Killings of Black Americans on Black British Attitudes

What effect does black politics in the United States have on the attitudes of black citizens in other national contexts? Literature on the black diaspora and transnationalism has characterized cultural and political linkages between black communities in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, especially during the mid-20th century. In this article, I exploit random timing in the administration of a public attitudes survey to demonstrate that such linkages persist and that the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014 negatively affected black Londoners’ attitudes toward the Metropolitan Police. Notably, I find the effect was largely concentrated among black Londoners: estimates of an effect on white and South Asian Londoners were small and largely insignificant. The evidence presented here demonstrates that racial violence in the United States can affect racial politics in other national contexts and helps frame the emergence of Black Lives Matter chapters and protests beyond the United States.

Target Oxbridge Year 10 programme

Target Oxbridge is Rare Recruitment's programme to help students with black African and Caribbean heritage to increase their chances of getting into Cambridge or Oxford Universities. Target Oxbridge and Trinity College, University of Cambridge, launched a unique programme called the Target Oxbridge Year 10 programme to demystify the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford in order to help more 14 and 15 year olds of black heritage prepare to apply to and gain places at these leading universities. This new programme for students in Year 10 featured webinars with Trinity College academics and students, and Target Oxbridge alumni provided advice to Year 10 black British students who are considering attending university. The webinars aimed to demystify Oxford and Cambridge Universities, offer insights into what college life is really like, provide information on the application process, and offer guidance on preparing applications. Students also learned about how degree subject choice can affect their career options. This article provides an evaluation report on the Programme's effectiveness.

An Ode to Black British Girls

This article delves into Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum, examining how the cultural text builds upon Black feminist media discourse, and intimately grapples with the nuances of Black women’s sexuality while explicitly challenging misogynoir. This work illustrates how Coel is helping develop a Black British cultural aesthetic that centers Black women’s liberation, specifically from an African immigrant perspective, by using satire, all the beauty, pain, and struggles that come with #blackgirlmagic, eccentric adornments, and ‘awkward’ ostentatious characters that at times play into racist images and tropes of Black womanhood to expose the absurdity of life in an anti-Black, sexist, and xenophobic society. In sum, this article understands Coel’s work in Chewing Gum to be Black girl surrealism – the intersection of Afro-surrealism, British dark comedy, and Black feminism.

Black Travel Writing

What does it mean for Black diasporic writers to travel to Africa? Focusing on the period between the 1990s and 2010s, Isabel Kalous examines autobiographical narratives of travel to Africa by African American and Black British authors. She places the texts within the long tradition of Black diasporic engagement with the continent, scrutinizes the significance of Black mobility, and demonstrates that travel writing serves as a means to negotiate questions of identity, belonging, history, and cultural memory. To provide a framework for the analyses of contemporary narratives, her study outlines the emergence, development, and key characteristics of the multifaceted genre of Black travel writing. Authors discussed include, among others, Saidiya Hartman, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips.

Olive and me in the archive: a Black British woman in an archival space

This article aims to explore how the archival life of Olive Morris might radically rebuff the devaluation of Black womanhood and identity in Britain. Harnessing a Black feminist framework, I approach Lambeth Archives, where the Olive Morris Collection is found as a therapeutic space. Through an understanding of Olive as complex, I disrupt hegemonic expectations of Black women and propose that within the space of this research, Black womanhood be allowed the freedom of self-definition. In a conglomeration of the documents and voices of the community that remembers Olive, marginalised epistemologies are legitimised. Their sometimes-conflicting accounts generate an unbounded image of Olive as a figure of Black British women’s history that harbours meaning as it is mobilised in social consciousness. Incorporating my own auto-ethnographic reflections, I explore the internal and external impact of Olive and my existence in this archival space.