Britain's Brown Babies

‘That’s my dad. I know who I am and it just wipes out all the pain. All the emptiness and all the sadness. Full circle, just peace and joy...’1 Monica was one of the forty-five people interviewed by Lucy Bland in her study of Britain’s ‘brown babies’.2 Born to white British women during the Second World War, and fathered by African-American GIs stationed in the United Kingdom, estimates of the total number of such babies vary from between 1,800 and 2,000.3 The number is relatively tiny, the ramifications huge. Lucy Bland’s study of this small demographic throws light on far wider issues of black history: on individual and institutional attitudes to race, gender and illegitimacy, on personal stories of belonging and rejection. The history of the black presence in Britain has been partially obscured by what David Olusoga refers to as the ‘Windrush myth’,4 the assumption...

Emptiness · Kingdom · Mythology · Race (biology) · Sadness · Sociology · Theology · White (mutation) · Australian History and Society · Classics · Gender Studies · History · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology