The War Babies of Black GIs and White British Women: Experiencing Racism and Exclusion and Searching for a Sense of Belonging

Two wonderful recent memoirs by mixed-race women point to a couple of disconcerting questions they faced as children: “What are you?” and “Where are you from?” Tessa McWatt (born to parents of mixed heritage in the late 1950s in British Guiana) writes of how she desires “a new language of belonging. A who-are-you space to gather in with others, rather than a biological ‘what’ am I.”1 In relation to the second question, Hazel Carby (born to a white British mother and a Jamaican father in 1948) reflects: “When officials asked her [Hazel] where she was born and she replied Devon, England, they demanded to know where she had come from before that [...] Being Black British was incomprehensible, an impossibility between two mutually exclusive terms.”2 Although a few years older than Carby and McWatt, the children born during World War II to white British women and Black American servicemen faced exactly these same unsettling, racist questions...