Oxford Handbook of Clinical Immunology Book

Right now you're thinking: Is this book racist? No doubt the title is controversial, as are its contents, but I can happily reassure you, as a mixed race individual myself, it's not racist.

'Human variation is real, and it's foolish to ignore it or sweep it under the rug. It's not something to be ashamed of or to avoid for fear of conflict... Our diversity is a gift, and to keep ourselves separated and compartmentalized would be to waste that gift.'

What do Steve Jobs, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Bob Marley, Nicki Minaj, Bruno Mars, Naomi Campbell, Vin Diesel, Jimi Hendrix, Ne-Yo and Jessica Alba all have in common? You know many more mixed race individuals than you think.

I jump on anything that refers to mixed race individuals as I'm the product of a British born black mother of Barbadian descent and a British born white father. I think I first heard of this book when I watched Channel 4's Is It Better to Be Mixed Race? presented by a geneticist and mother of a mixed race child, and more recently I watched the BBC's Mixed Britannia documentary series.


A History Lesson

Historically, we were referred to as "mongrels", "halfbreeds", "half-nigger", and "mulatto" - a reference to mules. Some believed whites and blacks were two separate species and therefore shouldn't be able to successfully interbreed, like the mule, which is infertile as the offspring of a horse and a donkey. Over in Europe they figured out this wasn't the case and sought to rectify it:

'After the First World War... The Nazis thought it was a scandal that White German women had children with Africans from an enemy army and in 1937, 385 of these children were rounded up and sterilised in clinics.'

Miscegenation, the interbreeding of people considered to be of different racial types, was ruled illegal in America. In the early days white slave owners covertly broke the very laws they passed by raping their slaves, and those found out who couldn't buy their way out of it were banished from the colonies. Ministers performing mixed marriage ceremonies were heavily fined, but from 1924 bride and groom were imprisoned for up to five years. In 1958, having married, Mildred Jeter (black) and Richard Loving (white) were sentenced to one year in prison and a 25-year exile from Virginia. Nine years later, in 1967, the Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. This was the year before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. However, South Carolina in 1998 and Alabama in 2008, 38% and 40%, respectively, still voted to keep their anti-miscegenation laws.

Last week I watched a documentary on the life of Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple . I didn't realise quite how brave she was in marrying her white husband and having a mixed race daughter while living in a state which outlawed it, the stress of which was magnified after TCP was released. I'm surprised they escaped physically unscathed, if not mentally.

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