The black ones they sent back
>>"From the Telegraph, a perfect and equable example of preserving genetic
interests:-
Mixed-race babies 'were sent to the US'
Thousands of illegitimate mixed-race children fathered by American
GIs were given up by their British mothers and ****pped across the
Atlantic, according to newly released papers.
The issue of how to deal with the unwanted offspring of the
illicit affairs divided the country towards the end of the Second
World War and exposed the racial prejudices of the time.
The problem began to emerge in 1944, when increasing numbers of US
servicemen were stationed around Britain. Many of the women they
fathered children with were wives of British soldiers fighting
abroad. The do***ents suggest that where the baby was white it was
often possible for husband and wife to be reconciled and keep the
child. However, this was rarely possible when the child was mixed
race.
... The files, released today by the Public Records Office in Kew,
include a letter from a Miss O. Clarke to her MP suggesting the babies
be placed in West Indies mission schools. However, a Whitehall
official wrote to the MP in July 1944: "The proposed solution is high-
handed and - if confined to coloured illegitimates - has a Herrenrasse
(master race) flavour not now popular."
By the end of the war pressure was mounting on the Government to
take action. In letters to the Ministry of Health in December 1945
and March 1946 Harold Moody, founder of the League of Coloured
Peoples, said Britain and the US must treat each baby as a "war
casualty" and warned: "Our anxiety is to forestall a social problem
which might not only affect the life of this country but which might
also affect Anglo-American relations."
In response Aneurin Bevan, health minister, said his policy was to
encourage mothers to keep their children, or failing that to tackle
the shortage of places in homes.
The Home Office, however, differed and one official wrote:
"Provided it is clear that the mother does not want the child and
there is a reasonably satisfactory home in the US the child will have
a far better chance if sent at an early age to the US than if it
brought up in this country."
Well, let's be clear. For my parents' generation illegitimacy carried
a stigma scarcely conceivable among the dozy and reproductive today.
Lives were completely ruined by it. But ... for tens of thousands of
girls the American military man was just too glamorous and exciting,
and too much fun in some very grey times, to ignore. It wasn't as if
there were thousands of English boys around anyway.
Even so, giving oneself to a negro - American or otherwise, soldier or
not - brought into focus a swathe of other, painful moral issues.
Irrespective of the elitist sensibilities of the Whitehall official
with his Herrenrasse fears, the public had what might be termed a
"direct" understanding of negroes. As understandings go, it was a
rather better and more honest one than the so vibrant, so-so enriching
official bilge that gets pumped at people today.
It was also too implacable to be blown away by a few cries of
"racism". For the family to rally round a daughter who produced an
illegitimate white baby was one thing. It was completely another if
that baby was black. No tales of a loved father lost at sea or in
battle far away could be spun to the curious and to the growing
child. A black father meant one type of relation****p only, with no
thought in the moment the deed was done for self-respect or
responsibility. It was simply too great a burden to bear through life
if there was any half-acceptable alternative - and, it transpires,
there was.
In fact, the alternative was a very good one from a perspective of
English genetic interests. In so far as was possible, thousands of
carriers of African genes were distanced from the English genepool,
while English genes travelled back to the segregated negro population
of America.
I am, though, intrigued by the Home Office statement that runs:
"Provided it is clear that ... there is a reasonably satisfactory home
in the US ..." Did the British government fund orphanages in America?
Did they pay American couples to adopt the children? How were these
reasonably satisfactory homes secured?
We are not told. But it is interesting to reflect on what can be
achieved when the political will exists, as one suspects it must exist
again some day. "<<
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