This short paper, the beginnings of my new project on the history of transracial adoption in Britain, will attempt to delineate some of potential themes and problems arising from research on the relationships between white British women and African-American soldiers and the mixed-race babies that resulted.
The US entered the war ...
(Show more)This short paper, the beginnings of my new project on the history of transracial adoption in Britain, will attempt to delineate some of potential themes and problems arising from research on the relationships between white British women and African-American soldiers and the mixed-race babies that resulted.
The US entered the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in Dec 1941, and from Jan 1942 GIs started arriving in Britain. From the beginning there was concern about the arrival of black GIs. By the end of the war, of the 1 and a half million to 2 million US soldiers who had passed through Britain, 133,000 were African American. There were various attempts to discourage intimate relations between black GIs and white British women, for example, the War Office, in August 1942, decreed that the British Army should lecture their troops, including the women in the ATS, on the need to keep contact with black GIs to a minimum. It clearly felt the need to be discrete as although it wanted to keep America sweet, and thus was not going to oppose segregation overtly, it didn’t want to disaffect colonial troops on whose services Britain was also very dependent. Although many of the British were horrified by the white GIs’ racist attitudes towards blacks, and stressed British tolerance against the segregation of the American armed forces, they did not necessarily condone intimacy, indeed were often hostile to interracial sex and marriage. While many were committed to being friendly and polite, they drew the line at sexual relations. White women in relations with black men were deemed ‘unpatriotic’. Once babies started to appear the disapproval heightened, for not only were these babies illegitimate, but they were mixed race. The black GIs were forbidden by the military to marry their white girl-friends. While some of the mothers and/or their families kept their babies, many placed them in homes with the object of adoption, such was the stigma of illegitimacy and the burden of racism.
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