Afro-Caribbean Communities Research Articles

Exploring the barriers to exclusive breastfeeding in black and minority ethnic groups and young mothers in the UK

UK health policy for many years has been to increase rates of breastfeeding because of the health benefits conferred on mothers and babies. World Health Organization recommends that babies should be breastfed exclusively for 6 months (without water or other fluids) and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence promotes the provision of peer supporters or breastfeeding support groups to increase breastfeeding rates. This study aimed to explore the barriers to exclusive breastfeeding to 6 months with black and minority ethnic groups and with young mothers, and the strategies for overcoming these barriers, including peer support. Twenty-two mothers from Somali, Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities or young mothers groups attended five focus groups. Transcripts were analysed using thematic and framework methods. There was enthusiasm for breastfeeding support groups, but with a wider remit to discuss other baby-related issues and provide general social support as well as support for breastfeeding. The Somali and South Asian women preferred the groups to be for their ethnic group, Afro-Caribbean women were keen that they should be open to all cultures and young mothers would like groups for their peers only. Encouraging mothers to breastfeed exclusively to 6 months should be promoted more and emphasized by health professionals when supporting women post-natally, and good support with breastfeeding management should be given to enable mothers to achieve this goal. Breastfeeding support groups may play a part in increasing breastfeeding continuation of breastfeeding, but for the groups studied this was not the greatest influence, with families and older women in the community having more influence in changing practice.

Analysing the historical evolution of ethnic education policy-making in England, 1965-2005

This research reviews the historical evolution of English ethnic education policy-making. The social provi sion of education when examining the implications on eth nic majorities and minorities raises many important issues and pose the following questions: Does the education sys tem exclude sections of the population i.e. ethnic minori ties? Can cultural diversity be taught and promoted? The research explores the implications these questions raise for Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Muslim communities. Assimila tionist, integrationist and multicultural education policies are analysed. By examining education and social policy documents and reports, the objective of this research is to make the reader think about how education policy shapes society and what consequences this can have on teaching ethnic educational issues concerning cultural diversity and institutionalised racism. Assimilationist and Integrationist Education Policy In 1965, a policy document was published by the Department of Education and Science (DES) entitled The Education of Immigrants that was published again as a Circular in 1971.3 The aim of the policy document seems to underline the significance of absorbing and assimulating Commonwealth children into the education system. It is interesting to note that 'educational difficulties' are highlighted as a problem generated by immigrant children rather than problems residing within the education system itself. The DES document goes further and actually implies that ethnic families are to blame for failures within the classroom.4 It is West Indian and Asian stereotypes that are being reinforced and highlighted here rather than the inability of the education system to cope 3 See: Department of Education and Science (DES) (1965) The Education of Immigrants (Circular 7/65) London, HMSO; DES (1971) The Education of Immigrants, London, HMSO. The 1971 DES document begins: 'Some schools before 1960 had a cosmopolitan range of nationalities among their pupils but had found relatively little difficulty in absorbing and educating children of the earlier post-war European immigrants. In the 1960's however, the concentration and rapid build-up in the numbers of children arriving from Commonwealth countries and entering the schools at different ages and at all times throughout the school year began to create serious educational difficulties (DES; 1971:1). 4 'For the West Indian child... The environment is one in which marriage is not always considered important in providing a secure basis for raising children ... to join his mother from whom he may be separated for several years ... the unknown father with whom his mother may be living, and perhaps, is very young, sent out to child-minders while his parents go out to work ... Asian mothers' tendency to live a withdrawn life and not to make outside contacts does not help ... Many [Asian parents] are shy at the thought of mixing with White parents with whom they have little or no contact out of school (DES, 1971:4-6).

"Nou Kwe nan Sentespri" (We Believe in the Holy Spirit): Music, Ecstasy, and Identity in Haitian Pentecostal Worship

Since the 1920s, has witnessed an evangelical movement characterized by the rapid growth of Protestant and Pentecostal churches (Jeanty 1989, 56). Despite persecution by the Catholic Church and a brief closure (1941-43) under President Elie Lescot, Pentecostal churches in continued to flourish in the 1940s and 1950s (Louis 1998, 197-198). When Francois Papa Doc Duvalier came to power in 1957, he began encouraging a greater influx of evangelical missions in an attempt to undermine the power of the Catholic Church (McAlister 2000, 3; Louis 1998, 156). By 1960, Protestants and Pentecostals comprised about twenty percent of the population, compared with only three percent in 1940. (1) Despite the persistence of the misleading adage Haiti is 90 percent Catholic and 100 percent vaudou (Dash 2001, 51), recent figures indicate that at the turn of the twenty-first century as much as one-third of the country self-identifies as Protestant or Pentecostal (Lain 1998, 72; Louis 1998, 197). Catholic churches have found perhaps the stiffest competition among Pentecostal organizations, such as the various Churches of God (e.g., Church of God in Christ, Church of God of Prophecy), and independent Pentecostal churches scattered throughout Haiti. Nevertheless, the rise of Pentecostalism and its profound impact on expressive culture have yet to be adequately researched. Most ethnomusicological literature on examines the music of Vodou (Fleurant 1987; Wilcken 1992; Yih 1995; McAlister 2002) and, to a lesser degree, classical and popular music (Largey 1991; Averill 1993, 1997); but gospel music (mizik evanjelik) constitutes a realm of expressive culture that remains largely untapped by ethnomusicologists. (2) It seems that music made in Christian churches is assumed to lack the richness of the supposedly more Haitian genres. I hope to call this notion into question by examining the dynamic links among music, ecstasy, (3) and identity in Pentecostal worship. Much of the existing ethnomusicological research on discusses mizik Vodou (Vodou music) as a means of serving the spirits (lwas). Fleurant (1987), Wilcken (1992), and Yih (1995) look at ways in which specific musical devices, such as distinct rhythms, dances, and lyrics, serve to induce spirit possession. A few writers, such as Belany (1998) and Romain (1986), offer historical and sociological treatments of Protestantism, but most scholars downplay the role of music in sustaining the evangelical revival throughout the Caribbean region. Conway's dissertation (1978) contains very little discussion of music, yet it remains the primary anthropological resource for research on Pentecostalism. Brodwin (1996, 2003) and McAlister (1995, 2000) are among the few scholars who have contributed insightful research on the topic. Brodwin (1996) deals with competition among the ethical systems of Catholicism, Protestanism, and Vodou as they relate to the practice of healing in rural Haiti. In a more recent essay, Brodwin (2003) explores Pentecostalism among migrants in Guadeloupe. Calley (1965), Toulis (1997), and Brodwin (2003) identify transnational issues surrounding Pentecostal practice, showing how marginalized Afro-Caribbean communities assert national, ethnic, and gender identities among dominant majority populations perceived as hostile. McAlister (2000) examines the influence of U.S. missions on both the historical development of Pentecostalism in and on contemporary debates concerning national identity. The baptism of the Holy Spirit, with the initial evidence of speaking in tongues (also known as glossolalia or xenoglossy) lies at the heart of Pentecostalism and distinguishes Pentecostal churches from mainline Protestant denominations. Although Pentecostal congregations generally share this belief, the character of musical worship in Pentecostal churches varies significantly according to the type of service and church in which musical worship takes place. …

Bridging South America and the United States in Black Music Research

Just as the idea of a as a symbolic construction of general is politically problematic, the concept of musical boundaries and borders within it is equally perplexing. Latin-American scholars have insisted on setting boundaries of musical traditions according to the existing social stratification at a given time and space. Most have perceived those traditions in a four-part model of stratification: primitive traditional indigenous communities, folk-rural-peasant groups, urban popular mestizo groups, and dominating elite urban groups. The basic difficulties with such a criterion of classification are that stratification is not fixed and stable and that sociocultural or ethnic can vary considerably in time and space, according to the various contexts in which it is negotiated and for what specific purposes. Boundaries and borders are clearly related to the question of and must be rethought with special attention to the various factors that contributed to forge an old or contemporary (Behague 2000). Actually, we must recognize as did Richard Morse, that the word keeps losing its edge and thus needs to be resharpened periodically. He writes, identity is not 'national character' as diagnosed by detached socio-psychiatry but collective awareness of historic vocation. Identity starts with tacit self-recognition (Morse 1995, 1). What seems particularly relevant, therefore, is the articulation of the relationship between music and the various contexts of (self-recognition) construction. In an earlier essay (Behague 1982), I called attention to the dubious benefit of previous searches for origins in Latin-American and Caribbean musical expressions in relation to the configuration of contemporary societies. I warned then that the general tendency in Europe and North America of viewing Latin America as a monolithic cultural area has often resulted in naive, simplistic, and reductionist generalizations about the traditional musics of Latin America, particularly in the writings of non-Latin-Americans. The actual diversity of the musics of the Latin-American continent has become clearer since the 1960s as a result of more field research being carried out by more scholars from Latin America, Europe, and North America. To day we have not, however, accumulated enough empiric knowledge of the vast music corpora of the continent to allow meaningful and comprehensive cross-cultural comparisons among music cultures that share a common ethnohistory but have developed different cultural expressions, as, for example, in the case of Afro-Caribbean communities of Cuba and Haiti and those of western Colombia and northeastern Brazil. I also argued at that time that the significance of the prominent social stratification that typifies Latin America's social organization elucidates to a large extent the musical expressions that function as class symbols. I asserted that stratification provides the keystone for accounting for the various musical and performative practices to be found in both rural and urban areas of the continent, assuming that the stratification is contextualized in very specific terms (time and space). Hence, the ways in which we have classified the musical traditions of the area need further reflection. The question becomes exponentially more intricate in attempting to bridge Latin American and U.S. black musical boundaries and traditions. In 1998, when Samuel Floyd approached me with very topic, my immediate response was that such a topic had never been dealt with before, to which he responded: this is the reason, of course, that we want to address it. And furthermore, the idea of a session on Traversing Musical Boundaries in Research and Writing was precisely to encourage a bridging of the Latin-American-Caribbean-U.S. connections, as well as a bridging of the geographical boundaries that plague black music scholarship and inhibit our knowledge of those connections. …

"One of Dese Mornings, Bright and Fair,/Take My Wings and Cleave De Air": The Legend of the Flying Africans and Diasporic Consciousness

Daedalus, Fly Away Home Drifting night in the Georgia pines, coonskin drum and jubilee banjo. Pretty Malinda, dance with me. Night is juba, night is conjo. Pretty Malinda, dance with me. Night is an African juju man weaving a wish and a weariness together to make two wings. O fly away home fly away Do you remember Africa? O cleave the air fly away home My gran, he flew back to Africa, just spread his arms and flew away home. Drifting night in the windy pines, night is a laughing, night is a longing. Pretty Malinda, come to me. Night is a mourning juju man weaving a wish and a weariness together to make two wings. O fly away home fly away --Robert Hayden Some people said that when a Negro died he went back to Africa, but this is a lie. How could a dead man go to Africa? It was living men who flew there, from a tribe the Spanish stopped importing as slaves because so many of them flew away that it was bad for business. --Esteban Montejo, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave The African don't eat salt, they say they come like a witch... those Africans who don't eat salt--and they interpret all things. And why you hear they say they fly away, they couldn't stand the work when the taskmaster them flog them; and they get up and they just sing their language, and they clapping their hands--so--and they just stretch out, and them gone--so--right back. And they never come back. --Ishmael Webster, qtd. in Alas, Alas, Kongo The legend of the Flying Africans is a canonical tale which resonates throughout the expressive traditions of that part of the African diaspora which has known slavery in the New World.(1) The three examples above, from, respectively, an African American, a Cuban, and a Jamaican, demonstrate the wide geographic currency of the legend within Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean communities as well as in the U.S., the latter being the geographic area where the legend is most commonly located by researchers. In fact, all the shores touched by the Atlantic slave trade produce a collective mythology. The fact of this legend's appearance and resonance in this widespread physical area demands both a pan-American and a pan-African analytic perspective, a theoretical framework which encompasses Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin geographic and cultural areas, in addition to looking at the perhaps more commonly cited North American examples. Along with being a canonical tale, the legend of the Flying Africans is commonly recognized, and subsequently categorized, as a piece of folklore. This classification subjects the legend to analysis in the discourses of the social sciences, specifically anthropology and folklore studies. There are two characteristics of this discourse which this essay will challenge. The first is the separation of folklore and literature. And the second is the notion that folkloric elements are static units which can disappear or be lost. My argument is that the novel form, as used by black women writers, constitutes an alternate realm of transmission and transformation for the canonical tales of black communities. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow are two novels which, in their transformation of the legend of the Flying Africans, articulate a counter-discursive historiography of slavery. The novels (as opposed to folklore collections) function as dynamic sites for contextualizing this legend, and for questioning previous versions of the legend as they have existed in cultural memory and in recorded folklore histories. Morrison's and Marshall's revisions and altered emphases raise questions about previous cultural definitions of heroism and community responsibility, seeing these now from a feminist and an Afro-centric perspective. …

Inequalities in Mental Health: the Inner City Mental Health Project

This paper draws on the evidence of a 3-year evaluation study of an inner city mental health project. Innovative service developments aimed at Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities are described, as are the reactions of providers of mainstream mental health services to these initiatives. The structural position of special projects aimed at Black communities is explored in relation to mainstream mental health services, as are the difficulties which may be encountered by service users and project staff when the project is integrated into mainstream mental health services.

Ethnic Business and Economic Change:An Overview

Peter Wilson is a partner in New Enterprise Development, a small business training and research organisation based in London. Professor John Stanworth is head of the Small Business Unit at the Polytechnic of Central London and Director-General of the Small Business Research Trust. Against a background of growing concern for the welfare of ethnic minority communities in Britain, attention is now firmly focused on the opportunities for business development among black groups. Racially motivated recruitment and promotion practices in large organisations restrict employment opportunities for black minorities, increasing the need to seek economic self-reliance through business ownership. This has been a traditional route for disadvantaged minorities. But contemporary economic and social conditions require new solutions to the crisis in which recent immigrant groups find themselves. It is the purpose of this paper to examine recent evidence of change in business ownership in the Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities in London, to compare and contrast their business performance and to identify the determinants of any revealed differentials. The paper concludes with some implications for policy formulation and for business development initiatives.

Report of an Ethnic Health Project 1979/1980

MANY Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigrants are thought to present special problems in medi cine. The medical world frequent ly defines these as being different from the indigenous population. It was in an attempt to evaluate the perceived health education needs of London's Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities, and to assess if local radio could be instrumental in that role, that the project reported here was devel oped and undertaken. It produced some useful lessons.