“What happens to the racial consciousness of white women who marry black men and have black children? Professor France Winddance Twine reveals through a deep and extensive ethnography with forty white women in such relationships how their consciousness changes allowing them to become sensitive and adept at recognizing and dealing with racism. This is a truly original research that deserves a wide readership.”–Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of “Racism Without Racists”

France Winddance Twine is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil.

A WHITE SIDE OF BLACK BRITAIN

INTERRACIAL INTIMACY AND RACIAL LITERACYBy France Winddance Twine

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4900-6

Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS……………………………………………………………………………….ixACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………………..xiiiINTRODUCTION Territories of Whiteness in Black Britain…………………………………………..11. A Class Analysis of Interracial Intimacy…………………………………………………….312. Disciplining Racial Dissidents: Transgressive Women, Transracial Mothers………………………..603. The Concept of Racial Literacy……………………………………………………………..894. Racial Literacy in Practice………………………………………………………………..1165. Written on the Body: Ethnic Capital and Black Cultural Production………………………………1466. Archives of Interracial Intimacies: Race, Respectability, and Family Photographs…………………1717. White Like Who? Status, Stigma, and the Social Meanings of Whiteness……………………………1958. Gender Gaps in the Experience of Interracial Intimacy…………………………………………223CONCLUSION Constricted Eyes and Racial Visions………………………………………………….257NOTES………………………………………………………………………………………267REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………….279INDEX………………………………………………………………………………………297

Chapter One

A CLASS ANALYSIS OF INTERRACIAL INTIMACY

Whiteness as a site of privilege is not absolute but rather crosscut by a range of other axes of relative advantage and subordination; these do not erase or render irrelevant race privilege, but rather inflect or modify it.—RUTH FRANKENBERG, “ON UNSTEADY GROUND: CRAFTING AND ENGAGING IN THE CRITICAL STUDY OF WHITENESS” Taboos on sexual activity have been fundamental to state formation and to social stratification. In the 1920s, 30s and 40s, at the height of Britain’s imperial power, interracial marriage was deplored as a threat to racial boundaries and as a catalyst for racial conflict.—LAURA TABILI, “WOMEN OF A VERY LOW TYPE: CROSSING RACIAL BOUNDARIES IN LATE IMPERIAL BRITAIN”

On 17 July 1943 the Picture Post published an article titled “Inside London’s Coloured Clubs,” which was accompanied by a photograph of black American servicemen dancing with white English women (Nava 2007, 76). According to Mica Nava’s analysis, this photograph was a catalyst for censorship in the U.S. military: “After the publication in the American press in 1943 of black American servicemen dancing with white English women, the army command went to extraordinary lengths of imposing military censorship on all photographs portraying interracial dancing and social mixing. It also did its best to discourage such behavior in the flesh, though with only limited success, given its lack of authority over English women” (76). Nava, a cultural theorist, traces the emergence in urban London of “visceral cosmopolitanism,” which she defines as “the partly unconscious … in play in feelings of desire, sympathy and hospitality towards cultural and racial others and the foreign” (63). Focusing on urban commercial cultures during the interwar period, she offers a critique of earlier postcolonial and race literatures and also identifies gaps in the psychoanalytic literature which has provided little insight into the attraction of racial others:

Very little work has been done on the attraction of otherness. The empathetic identification of white women with black men and the construction of black men by white women as desirable has also been neglected by postcolonial critics and historians of race, for whom the focus has justifiably been on the most injurious legacies of difference. Yet the psychic and political forces at work in these relationships have had wide-ranging as well as contradictory repercussions. In the domain of sexual politics and everyday life, a romance with an excluded other man may enable the white women to diminish her own social marginality—but only in the context of the relationship itself. (92)

Drawing on diverse archival sources, including department store campaigns, dance, theater, and Hollywood films, Nava is careful to distinguish between the meaning of “the Negro” in Britain and the United States. She argues that although American commercial culture had an impact on British concepts of race and modernity, it produced “contradictory logics” in the meaning of racial difference. She also notes, “Women played a central part in the social reconfigurations of the period. The cultural response of English women to racial others which emerged during this conjuncture was ultimately both a product of Americanisation and a critical repudiation of it” (94).

On the other side of the Atlantic, in 1989, Ruth Frankenberg, a British-born feminist and antiracist scholar, examined the ways that race structured the lives of white women, in particular “white women’s places in the racial structures of the United States at the end of the twentieth century.” In White Women, Race Matters Frankenberg begins with the premise that white women’s lives are “sites both for the reproduction of racism and for challenges to it” (1993, 1). Using a concept she terms “the social geography of race,” Frankenberg details the ways that the “racial and ethnic mapping of environments in physical and social terms” structures the types of social relationships possible for the white women she interviewed. She argues, “There is no way for white women to step outside of the reach of racism’s impact on the material environment…. White women can and do challenge racist discourses” (71). Her aim is to “defamiliarize the white experience,” thus providing theoretical insights into the ways that whiteness, in this case white femininity, is a gendered, material, spatial, and sociopolitical experience always mediated by constructions of race and masculinity. The opening epigraph to this chapter reflects the careful attention that Frankenberg gives to the multiple and intersecting conditions (historical, material, political, social, and ideological) that structure the lives of white women and men.

At the end of the Second World War there were close to 130,000 black American GIs stationed in Britain. Their presence generated anxieties and ambivalence. Although the labor of black men was needed to support the war effort, interracial relationships between black American soldiers and white English women, both sexual and social, were defined as a problem by the British and the Americans. The British government feared what the press referred to as a “brown baby” crisis: an increase in the birth of children of interracial parentage. The British War Office established a series of policies designed to minimize interracial social contact and discipline the white women involved, all the while maintaining the appearance of tolerance and avoiding the vulgar forms of Jim Crow segregation common in the United States.

The British government worked in concert with the U.S. military to establish military and state policies that would ideally restrict black American men’s social and sexual access to white English women while maintaining “tacit racial segregation.” During a period when interracial marriages were illegal in thirty of the forty-eight states, black GIs socialized, romanced, and established relationships with white English women whom they met in cinemas, pubs, and dance halls. David Reynolds, a historian, details the forms of discipline employed in efforts to discreetly constrain and control the sexual activities of white women, while not appearing to participate in a British version of Jim Crow segregation:

Local police forces routinely reported women soldiers found in the company of black GIs…. Most common was the vigorous use of the wartime Defence Regulations, especially for prosecutions for trespass against women found with black GIs on U.S. military premises. Five, who were caught … in Leicestershire, were each sentenced to one month’s imprisonment in June 1943. In Leicester the following January, two factory workers from Preston, aged twenty and twenty-two, were found sleeping in a hut where black GIs were stationed. They were prosecuted under the Defence Regulations for trespass on a military camp and given three months hard labour. (1995, 229)

These punitive policies aimed at women did not prevent these relationships from occurring with regularity. Reynolds describes the conflicts between white and black men that ensued:

There were some particularly serious clashes in 1944 in Leicester between Black GIs and white paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division, veterans of the Sicily campaign. Relations with local women were the prime cause…. One Unionist MP in County Londonderry complained that the girls going out with black GIs were “mostly of the lowest type and belong to our ‘minority.'” (228)

What stands out in these descriptions is the assumption that only women of working-class or impoverished backgrounds would voluntarily engage in relationships with black men. This reflects an attempt to position these women as outside of middle-class norms and to establish a symbolic and class-inflected boundary between “respectable” middle-class women and hypersexual, irrational, working-class women.

While the British government cooperated with the U.S. government and set up socially segregated social events, it is important not to blur the distinctions between the American and the British response to race and racism. The refusal of white American troops to accept the fact that white English women did not reject black GIs was a catalyst for the segregation policies put in place by the British. The establishment of separate social events was a compromise imposed by the U.S. military on the British government. As Nava notes, “The indignation and aggression of many white troops about this state of affairs eventually led to the establishment of separate social events and dancing clubs for black servicemen, which white women could attend without fear of conflict. These were endorsed by the British government under pressure from the United States’ army command” (2007, 76).

After the war racial discourses among British politicians and the press about the impact on British society of black immigration and the assimilation of black colonial settlers centered on black poverty and interracial sexuality. In his analysis of the changes in British racial discourses and representations of blacks, Paul Gilroy argues that in the pre-Thatcher era (Thatcher served as primer minister in 1979–91) blacks were not yet represented as primarily a criminal class: “Miscegenation, which captured the descent of white womanhood and recast it as a signifier of the social problems associated with the black presence, emerged ahead of crime as a theme in the popular politics of immigration control” (1987, 79–80).

The Race Riots of 1958: White Racism and Interracial Intimacy in Postwar Britain

In the late summer of 1958 riots broke out in Notting Hill (London) and Nottingham (a city in the East Midlands), where white youth formed “lynch mobs” and attacked “coloured” men. Describing the events that led to the riots in Nottingham, Edward Pilkington writes:

It all started one Saturday night, 23rd August 1958, in the Chase Tavern in Nottingham, one of the only pubs in St. Ann’s where West Indians could drink. A Jamaican man was talking to a white woman next to the bar. This was clearly an impropriety in the eyes of a white man standing close by who shouted “Lay off that woman.” The Jamaican did not take kindly to this suggestion…. Who punched whom first is not known. But a scuffle ensued, provoking other scuffles, which in turn broke into a larger fight, spilling out of the pub onto the St Ann’s Well Road…. What had begun as a pub brawl turned suddenly into a major race riot. West Indians were ambushed down back-alleys and severely beaten and other black men jumped into cars and drove at high speeds at the crowd. According to Nottingham’s police chief Athelstan Popkess the row consisted almost entirely of whites hostile towards blacks. (1988, 106–7)

According to Pilkington, the Notting Hill riots were also sparked by the threat of interracial sexuality. Pilkington notes that in Gallup surveys taken at that time, this issue outweighed all other concerns:

But all of these prejudices looked tame in comparison with the one burning hate that consumed the passions of so many young white men in the 1950s—sexual relations between white women and black men. A Gallup poll conducted shortly after the race riots found that the most common resentments expressed by whites were that blacks should not be allowed to compete equally for jobs (37 per cent) and that blacks should not be able to enter housing lists on the same conditions (54 per cent). But these were dwarfed by a startling 71 per cent of respondents who were opposed to racial intermarriage. (92–93)

As Gilroy argues in his analysis of the profound changes in linguistic racism between the late 1940s and 1968, “Though the riots of 1958 may have marked a turning point in the history of modern racism, press coverage of the conflict in Notting Hill and Nottingham is notable for the degree to which the crime theme, though present, is again subordinate to other images and anxieties…. Black crime was not frequently cited as being a contributory factor” (1987, 79). The “other images and anxieties” on which the press focused had to do with sexuality and miscegenation.

The Notting Hill and Nottingham race riots generated vigorous debates about the “coloured problem.” Britain was shocked when reports of these racial conflicts were published, revealing that the youth employed language familiar in the United States, such as shouting “Lynch him.” Anthropologists and sociologists were hired to undertake community studies as part of a larger five-year study of race and racism. Some analysts argued that one cause of the riots was the growth of the minority population, especially of “undesirable coloured immigrants” (Glass 1961, 151). In the absence of any systematic data on racism in the public sphere, the Institute on Race Relations commissioned surveys of boroughs throughout the country that had significant coloured populations (Banton 1960, Glass 1961, Daniel 1968).

The postwar racial disturbances and racialized conflicts highlight the gendered nature of the struggle over the ways that racial privileges were intertwined and in tension with gender subordination. After the race riots vigorous debates raged in the media, Parliament, and pubs about how to assimilate immigrants into British society. Policy initiatives to manage race and racism were put into place and the government began to monitor, document, and try to prevent racial discrimination.

In the decades following the riots several groundbreaking studies were published on racism and racial discrimination (Daniel 1968). In 1966 the think tank Political and Economic Planning (PEP) designed a research study to determine how extensive racial discrimination was in Britain in fields not covered by the Race Relations Act of 1965. To answer these questions researchers interviewed immigrants about their experiences, spoke with white Britons who were in a position to discriminate (employers, landlords, mortgage lenders, and service providers), and conducted validating situation tests in which individuals of different ethnic backgrounds who possessed equal qualifications were sent to apply for jobs, housing, and services. The PEP survey concluded:

There is racial discrimination varying in extent from the massive to the substantial. The experiences of white immigrants, such as Hungarians and Cypriots, compared to black or brown immigrants, such as West Indians and Asians, leave no doubt that the major component in the discrimination is colour…. It is moreover impossible to escape the conclusion that the more different a person is in his physical characteristics, in his features, in the texture of his hair and in the colour of his skin, the more discrimination he will face. Of all groups the experience of the West Indians was consequently the worst, not only because their expectations were highest, so that they found themselves more often in situations where discrimination can occur, but also because prejudice against Negroes is most deep-rooted and widespread. (Daniel 1968, 209)

In this and subsequent government reports, however, white members of multiracial households were completely overlooked. Multiracial households were essentially treated as black households and their white members ignored despite how central they may have been to the economic and emotional life of the black members. It is in this context of racial discrimination, ambiguity, and ambivalence about blacks that white women established relationships with black men, bringing different forms of social, economic, and cultural capital to their relationships.

Bourdieu: Forms of Capital and Social Inequality

In his analysis of the reproduction of social and status inequality in French universities, Pierre Bourdieu (1994) identified four distinct types of capital that structure fields of power, social and class relations, and the distribution of resources in modern capitalist societies: economic capital, cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital. In Bourdieu’s schema, individuals operate in a social universe in which they struggle to accumulate and then convert into power the forms of capital they possess.

(Continues…)

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