Vigil outside Holloway prison in June 2017, London. Credit: Nandini Archer.

On 11 January 2016 Sarah Reed became the last woman to die in Holloway Prison. According to the Ministry of Justice, she was ‘found unresponsive’ in her cell at 8 am; prison staff ‘attempted CPR, but she was pronounced dead shortly after’.

The 32-year-old mixed-race woman had suffered severe mental health problems ever since the death of her baby in 2003, including grief, depression, schizophrenia and bulimia.

Four years before her own death, Sarah had been brutally assaulted by white police officer James Kiddie on the floor of a shop in Regent Street, accused of shoplifting. The assault was caught on CCTV cameras; the police officer’s punishment was a community order.

In 2015 Sarah had been sectioned at a mental health unit, where she was charged with an alleged assault on another patient. She told her family she had been defending herself from attempted rape. Sarah was sent on remand to Holloway for psychiatric reports, where she was classed as at low risk of self-harm. She was placed in segregation, and then moved to C1, the psychiatric unit that had become notorious in the 1980s.

When her mother Marylin visited, she found her daughter looking unwell and acting strangely; it appeared she wasn’t being given her antipsychotic medication. One of her last letters home read: ‘Mum, this is just to say Merry Xmas . . . PS. Get me out of jail.’

Sarah Reed’s death quickly became linked to the Black Lives Matter movement, which had started in the United States and which highlighted deaths of black women and men in custody. Lee Jasper, who coordinated a justice campaign, wrote that: ‘This is a horrific tale of institutional racism, sexual violence, corruption and brutal incompetence/negligence that defies belief.’

“This is a horrific tale of institutional racism, sexual violence, corruption and brutal incompetence/negligence that defies belief.”

On the night of 8 February, the day of Sarah’s funeral, hundreds gathered for a vigil outside Holloway Prison. Her name was marked out in candles on the pavement, and the crowd chanted, ‘Say her name: Sarah Reed. Black Lives Matter.’

Racism within the prison service had only been officially recognized in the year 2000, but there had been reports of racist treatment inside Holloway since at least the 1980s. Few records exist on the experiences of women from black, Asian and minority ethnic groups prior to this, and in the first 100 years of Holloway’s existence the vast majority of inmates were white.

Holloway prison, London 2008. Photo: Matt S/Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Some rights reserved.

By the 1980’s an estimated 30% of Holloway’s prisoners were black. As in the United States, the number of black prisoners was increasing at a faster rate than any other ethnic group. Black women were more likely to be arrested and given custodial sentences than white women, especially for drug offences, and less likely to be given bail.

Black women experienced discrimination right the way through a criminal justice system that was dominated – then as now – by white male police, judges and QCs. Within prison, meanwhile, black women received harsher treatment – denied medical attention, excessively punished, and verbally and physically assaulted by both staff and other prisoners.

“Black women received harsher treatment – denied medical attention, excessively punished, and verbally and physically assaulted by both staff and other prisoners.”

Adaku, jailed at Holloway in the 1980s, described being sent to the punishment block for two days after a fight with a white inmate: ‘She called me a black bitch …then she hit me and I had to hit her back.’ Black women were refused baths, their visitors were more thoroughly searched and watched, and hair, skin and cosmetic products handed out on reception were only for white women. Aduku was also refused access to her inhaler for asthma, told she only wanted it to ‘make myself high’.

Another inmate, Abbena, spent the first five months of a 20-month sentence at Holloway in solitary confinement because the prison authorities wouldn’t recognize her Rastafarianism or its dietary beliefs. ‘They kept coming each meal time, each week, with a pork sausage. This one officer kept calling me all these names like gollywog and nig-nog . . . One day I was having a wash and she was standing at the door calling me a black bastard and I threw the soap at her.’

Prisoners were refused black magazines like West Indian World, as well as Marcus Garvey books, and staff tried to keep black women separated from each other: ‘They’ll put one black girl in among 30 white girls. It’s common practice.’ There were no senior officers who were black, and no black doctors, while ‘one racist doctor . . . used to prescribe Depixol for non-white prisoners. About two-thirds of the black women prisoners are drugged.’

Between 1994 and 2003 the number of black females imprisoned in the UK rose by nearly 200%, higher than all other ethnicities. Angela Devlin, author of Invisible Women, identified two main stereotypes when it came to staff attitudes to black female prisoners: ‘poor mules’ and ‘strong fighters’. Poor mules were women serving long sentences for importing drugs from abroad, often West Africa, and they were regarded with some sympathy.

British black women on the other hand were seen as physically strong, aggressive and potentially violent and were treated very differently from white women on admission, despite being charged with similar offences.

‘White women, especially if they were young, attractive and well dressed, were patted on the head and told to run away and behave better in future,’ writes Angela Devlin, while black women’s crimes were regarded more judgementally and ‘any attempt at assertiveness was quashed immediately.’ Black prisoners were more likely to be disciplined, and heavily supervised, and male officers described them as ‘loud’, ‘mouthy’ and ‘gobby’.

Protest outside Yarl’s Wood Immigration Detention Centre, Bedford, May 2017. Photo: Wasi Daniju/Flickr. Wasi Daniju/Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Some rights reserved.

The rate of foreign national women in prison was also beginning to rise in the 1980s and many were young black women, ‘poor mules’ charged with drug-related offences. Some had been forced to import drugs at gunpoint and made to swallow lethal amounts of heroin or cocaine in ‘fingers’ of rubber gloves. But instead of focusing on the traffickers, punishment fell on the victims and they were sent to Holloway.

Foreign national women were also charged under immigration laws – often initially arrested for a minor crime and then incarcerated at Holloway. By the beginning of the twenty-first century up to a third of its 500 prisoners were foreign nationals, and the prison was also a designated detention centre for alleged illegal immigrants.

One woman, ‘Ms K’, had come to the UK from Nigeria as a victim of torture. She took part in a five-week hunger strike over conditions and treatment at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre in Bedfordshire, and in 2010 she was transferred to Holloway where she was told, ‘You are from the jungle, you should go back.’

Denise McNeil, a black woman from Jamaica who had left to escape domestic abuse, was labelled a ‘ringleader’ at Yarl’s Wood and held at Holloway for a year – without being charged. Prison was being used to control and punish ‘loud’ behaviour, and being black was almost an offence in itself.

Sarah Reed’s death in 2016 brought attention back to racism in the prison service. The last woman to die in Holloway Prison was working class, mixed-race and highly vulnerable, and like thousands of women before her, she should never have been jailed in the first place.

Caitlin Davies is a novelist, non-fiction author and award-winning journalist. Bad Girls: A History of Rebels and Renegades grew out of her longstanding interest in Holloway Prison, where she completed her teacher training. She was the only journalist to be given access to the prison’s extensive archives before it closed.

Courtesy:https://www.opendemocracy.net
 

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Gorée Island is known as the location of the House of Slaves, and was used for the slave trade. John Karwoski/flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Growing attention to the racial and colour-based discrimination that sub-Saharan Africans and African slave descendants face in the Maghreb and in the Middle East has opened up new spaces to debate the relationship between ‘racism’ and legacies of slavery in the two regions. While these debates are far from new in a context like Mauritania, where former slaves and slave descendants have struggled for decades against descent-based discrimination, in many other North African and Middle Eastern countries they have emerged only relatively recently. This is perhaps because, as the Moroccan historian Chouki El Hamel notes, a “culture of silence” has long prevented these countries from engaging with, and discussing overtly, questions of race, slavery and colour.

With this week’s special series, we seek to unpack the ‘racial issue’ in different post-slavery contexts in West Africa, North Africa and the Middle East by interrogating its connections with local histories of slavery and their contemporary legacies. Drawing on fresh case studies from Senegal, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Emirates and Yemen, the contributors reflect on the complex intersections of historical and contemporary dynamics that shape present imaginations of ‘blackness’, black identities, and belonging. They also look at new forms of racial discrimination and activism based on specific constructions of race.

A “culture of silence” has long prevented these countries from engaging with, and discussing overtly, questions of race, slavery and colour.

Very few authors have looked at the racial legacies of slavery in these contexts to date, in contrast to the relatively large amounts of scholarly attention shown to the memory of the transatlantic slave trade and race in the post-slavery Americas. That is thankfully starting to change. A growing body of historical works (think Paul Lovejoy, Martin Klein, Alice Bellagamba, Ann McDougal, Ehud Toledano, John Hunwick, Eve Troutt Powell, Terence Walz, Kenneth Cuno, Bruce Hall, Chouki El Hamel, Ismael Montana and Behnaz Mirzai) have significantly enriched our knowledge of the history of slavery and race in West Africa and the Mediterranean Muslim world. A number of anthropological studies have furthermore explored the shadows of slavery in the lives of slave descendants and haratin (a term generally translated as ‘freed blacks’ or ‘free blacks’), especially in Mauritania and in the Maghreb area.

However, we need to explore if and how current developments are reshaping racialised dynamics in social, political and intimate lives. Tracing the local meanings of race, with its complex relations to ideas of colour, origin, blood and descent, the contributors seek to interrogate how current expressions of racism connect with historical experiences of slavery.
 

Breaking the silence

Since the early 2000s, the francophone magazine Jeune Afrique has published personal testimonies of both Black Maghrebians and sub-Saharan Africans. The questions posed regarding identity and discrimination in these narratives became more urgent following the protests and revolutions that took place in many North African and Middle Eastern countries in 2011. In post-revolution Tunisia, for example, we’ve seen unprecedented forms of black rights activism that question the very idea that black emancipation can exist without a continued struggle against racism.

In 2014, in Morocco, the national campaign “my name is not a negro” (ma smitish ‘azzi) gave public visibility to the issue of racism in Moroccan society. In March 2016, a network of associations launched the international anti-racist campaign “neither serfs nor negro: stop that’s enough” (ma oussif, ma ‘azzi: baraka wa yezzi) in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Mauritania. From Mauritania to Yemen, local anti-racist movements and societal debates have enabled novel political practices, languages and subjectivities to emerge. To what extent, we ask, are current anti-racist movements and debates on race able to capture the complexity and multiplicity of the experience of ‘blackness’? What histories and vocabularies are mobilised to raise public awareness and attain political goals?

Engaging with these questions, some pieces reflect on the emergence of race in their interlocutors’ political imaginations and public actions. In Mauritania, where slavery was abolished in 1981, the anti-slavery organisation El Hor (established in 1978) has denounced the persistence of slavery and its consequences on the lives of the haratin in terms of the socio-political stigmatisation and chromatic demonisation. However, as Giuseppe Maimone shows, with IRA Mauritanie, a local organisation founded by Biram Dah Abeid in 2008, ideas of colour and racial discrimination have started to replace the classic focus on slavery and descent-based forms of discrimination of previous antislavery movements.

In Yemen, a political discourse based on colour has been mobilised by the akhdam, a dark-skinned marginalised group, to gain a public voice and denounce their socioeconomic and political discrimination. As Luca Nevola shows, in a society in which individuals and groups are ranked according to their genealogical origin, an emphasis on colour entails a crucial shift in the common sense representations of this group. Crucially, Nu’man al-Hudheyfi, the political leader of the akhdam, reference prominent figures like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela to give international visibility to his political struggle.

In Morocco, it has been the growing public attention to violence and discrimination against sub-Saharan Africans that has recently opened a debate on the issue of anti-black racism and its connections to the history of slavery. Against the backdrop of these debates, Laura Menin shows how Senegalese students and young professionals experience, interpret, and reckon with racism in their everyday lives. Their stories suggest that while the legacies of slavery affect local constructions of ‘blackness’, current racism against black Africans also speaks to contemporary dynamics in Morocco, in which media stigmatisation, unemployment, widespread poverty and social insecurity work together to nourish social tensions and resentment vis-à-vis the “new” comers.

From different perspectives, these pieces show the complex ways in which ‘blackness’ is embodied, experienced, represented and contested by different social actors – be they slave descendants of African origins, haratin, or Sub-Saharan African students and professionals.
 

Lived legacies and present pasts

The processes of abolition and emancipation followed different paths and took place at different times in North Africa and the Middle East. The consequences have also varied greatly depending on the context. Yet while not all black-skinned people are descendants of slavery, nor are all slave descendants black, one important legacy that this history has left behind across the board is the close connection between blackness and slavery in the popular imagination. This had led socially ‘white’ people to position socially ‘black’ people in lower or subordinate positions.

An important legacy that the region’s slave history has left behind across the board is the close connection between blackness and slavery in the popular imagination.

In many contexts, colour attribution reveals more about local dynamics of power, status and origin than colour itself. This emerges clearly in Marta Scaglioni’s piece on the meanings and practices associated to ‘blackness’ among the ‘Abid Ghbonton, a community of slave descendants in southern Tunisia. She shows how visions of ‘blackness’ rooted in the history of slavery in Tunisia re-emerge, in different guises, in her interlocutors’ everyday lives and aesthetics. This makes both ‘blackness’ and colour central concerns, for women especially, in relation to marriage, beauty, and social prestige.

Not all countries have, like post-revolution Tunisia, begun to centre questions of race and colour in public debates. In other contexts, like the Emirates, these remain taboo topics. Former slaves became Emirati citizens in 1971, several years after abolition in 1963, and since then the process of modern state-building has since sought to include them within a single ‘Arab’ national identity. As a consequence, the roots of many Emiratis in the Indian Ocean and East Africa have become lost. They have not been forgotten, however, and even though the slave past is officially silenced, Idil Akinci shows how the daily dynamics of colour, origin, and race expose the limits of Emirati citizenship in absorbing difference.

It is often when marriage is at stake that questions of colour and origin matter, making a slavery past vividly present in people’s lives. Alice Bellagamba’s contribution focuses precisely on marriage, a crucial question in the Kolda region of Senegal, as one important site where the shadows of slavery become palpable. In this context, a marriage between a slave descendant and a person of free or noble ancestry isnot only met with social opprobrium on the side of the latter, but also considered unideal by the person ‘marrying up’. Even though an increasing number of young people aspire to a marriage based on love rather than on local norms, questions of origin and race continue to have an impact in a context where marriage remains a key factor of social reproduction.

Taken together, the pieces found in this special feature draw attention to the multiple and complex ways the shadows of slaveryare experienced, reckoned with, and even politically mobilised by different social actors in West Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. These present pasts, as Alice Bellagamba reminds us, overlap with and influence current socio-political dynamics.

Laura Menin is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Milano Bicocca. She has conducted research in Morocco since 2008, working on migration, love and intimacy, political violence during ‘the years of lead’, and ‘race’ and racism.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net
 

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Mothers across all cultures may worry about being judged for their child’s appearance. But for African-American mothers, a child’s hairstyle can be especially anxiety-inducing. If they don’t properly care for it, many fear they are violating community norms. So they fashion it to appear less curled and unruly, sometimes even using chemical straightening products on kids as young as 36 months old.
Failure to do so can lead to intense backlash.

In 2014, a Huffington Post headline announced, “Beyoncé responds to Blue Ivy hair drama with a perm.”

The article described the uproar over the decision of singer Beyoncé Knowles and her husband, Jay-Z, to leave their daughter Blue Ivy’s hair in a natural, curly state. Some called the couple negligent for not grooming their daughter’s hair. Others accused them of “cruelty” for leaving her hair “nappy.” A petition even circulated calling Blue Ivy’s hair “disturbing.”

More recently, African-American Olympic gold medalist Gabby Douglas faced a barrage of insults about her hair on social media during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Many complaints focused on her hair looking “unkempt.”

Why is hair such a hot-button issue in the African-American community? And what if hair weren’t a source of tension and shame, but instead served as an opportunity for African-American parents to bond with their kids?

For two decades, these questions have formed the basis of my research. They’re complicated ones – deeply ingrained in negative stereotypes – but I’ve been able to show how a simple daily task can help heal wounds caused by centuries of oppression.

Four hundred years of trauma

As a direct descendant of enslaved Africans who grew up in an African-American community, I have fond memories of sitting between my mother’s legs as a young child and getting my hair combed. For me, the daily ritual of hair combing was a special mother-daughter bonding time.

But while parents across all cultures comb their children’s hair, my research during graduate school revealed how, for African-American parents, the task is uniquely layered in emotionally charged, negative stereotypes about hair.

The origins of these attitudes are over 400 years old, deeply rooted in the psychological trauma of slavery. Part of the denigration of people deemed “property” meant vilifying all physical characteristics associated with their status, from dark skin color to thick, tightly curled hair – a stark contrast to the straight, thin hair of their oppressors. These debilitating stereotypes were merely one arrow in a quiver of psychological warfare used to subjugate the millions of enslaved men and women who outnumbered their owners.

Yet the negative intergenerational messages about hair still resonate today. Ironically, although these stereotypes about hair were originally perpetrated by whites, negative reactions to African features are also held by many African-Americans.

A hair-straightening kit marketed to African-Americans: Target

They’ve laid the psychological foundation for today’s “hair wars” within African-American communities: straight hair – deemed “good” hair – versus tightly curled, coily hair (“nappy” or “bad”). In many ways, it’s also related to the tendency to value light skin over dark skin.

Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as “internalized oppression,” or identification with the oppressor. A billion-dollar beauty industry that includes straight-haired wigs and skin-bleaching creams speaks to the legacy of this historical trauma.

Mothers who have internalized these historical stereotypes about what constitutes “good” and “bad” hair may express these attitudes in how they interact with their child while combing the child’s hair. For many parent-child relationships, hair remains a flashpoint for conflict and shame.

Flipping a negative into a positive

As a psychologist, I worry about parents who possess these subconscious beliefs about their child’s dark skin color or tightly curled hair – that these beliefs will be expressed in acceptance or rejection of children.
Numerous studies demonstrate that strong, supportive bonds between a parent and child – what’s called secure attachment – are required for infants to grow into healthy adults. This begins with the unconditional acceptance of infants from birth and continues with consistent encouragement and support in the child’s first months and years.

Hair combing interaction can play a key role in establishing secure attachments.

Findings from my research suggest that this simple task, which takes only around 10 minutes per day, facilitates some core parenting behaviors that lead to more secure attachments: positive verbal interaction, loving physical touch and responsive listening. (For example, research has shown just how important healthy physical touch is to both human development and survival.)

By studying videotaped interactions of mothers and daughters from a variety of income groups, I’ve been able to show how a young child can feel secure or insecure during the everyday routine of hair combing. In some instances mothers would laugh, invite the child to participate in the activity and praise the playful antics of the child’s pretend play. In these interactions, emotional skills were reinforced in the child that led to self-confidence and a strong gender identity, while laying the groundwork for healthy adult interpersonal relationships.

On the other hand, some children would be forced to sit stoically as their mother jerked the comb through their hair, their cringing faces reflecting the fear and pain they experienced. Perhaps the parents simply didn’t enjoy the task; or the hair elicited unconscious feelings of shame that begin during their childhood.

When I founded the Center for Natural Connections (CNC) at Tulane University in 2004, I hoped to promote the positive benefits of daily hair combing as an opportunity for parents to connect with their children, culture and community.

The CNC has translated findings from 15 years of research into cost-effective, community-based interventions. All the programs – which include Gentle Grooming for Hospitalized Children, Parent Café & Miranda’s Green Hair Puppet Show, and the Talk, Touch & Listen While Combing Hair parent support group – promote positive attitudes toward hair combing as an opportunity for caregivers to connect to their child.

The programs enhance parental self-efficacy, emotion recognition, conflict resolution and social support among parents. With seminars being held in community centers, it’s a psychologically safe place for parents of color to disrupt a legacy of trauma and create a new, positive narrative for future generations.

By recognizing the toxic stereotypes associated with their hair and skin color and learning from a community of fellow parents, African-American parents can begin to live out the African proverb “It takes village to raise a child.”

Courtesy: The Conversation

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