Jackie Kay wins Scottish Book of the Year

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

By the 20th century these stories had morphed into stereotypes about “mixed-race” black women, which migrated into popular culture, where we now had the privilege of being represented as “tragic mulattos”; according to white supremacist discourse, the mulatto did not have the “right to live” the US senator Charles Carroll said in 1900. We were an abomination who disrupted the racial order, and as a result of our pathology were emotionally unstable, yet we were still perceived as seductresses. And that’s why it’s no coincidence that when these online imposters post as their light-skin black alter egos they post thirst-traps with sultry eyes and pouty mouths, yet in photographs as their white selves, they remain smilingly wholesome girls next door. They are operating in familiar terrain, reinforcing topes that emerged out of slavery and which have been developed and refined via mass media throughout the 20th and 21st century. None of this is about flattery, it’s about power, desire and ownership. A sinister reminder that people who once owned our bodies, still can, and of the troubled history and deep seated taboos that continue to define race relations between black and white in the 21st century.

Emma Dabiri, “white girls reinventing themselves as black women on instagram has to stop,” i-D, November 20, 2018. https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/nepzyg/white-girls-instagram-blackface-blackfishing.

Jackie Kay wins Scottish Book of the Year

Jackie Kay wins Scottish Book of the Year

The Edinburgh Reporter
2011-08-26

Creative Scotland is delighted to announce that award winning poet and author, Jackie Kay, has been awarded the 2011 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year, in partnership with Creative Scotland, for her autobiography Red Dust Road.

Jackie Kay received her £30,000 prize at a ceremony hosted by Dame Jenni Murray this afternoon at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student, Kay was adopted at birth by a white couple and brought up in Glasgow. Red Dust Road, published by Picador, is an autobiographical account of Jackie’s search to find her birth parents, a journey that is full of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions. In an amazing new chapter, a recent Guardian Podcast by Jackie Kay led to her making contact with her birth sisters for the first time…

Read the entire article and listen to the interview here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2012 at 05:38Z and is filed under Articles, Media Archive, United Kingdom, Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

Jackie Kay wins Scottish Book of the Year

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