Mixed Race Studies

Naked Bodies, Bodies of History

Hyphen Magazine: Asian America Unabridged
2013-06-27

Jenny Lee

“She mimics the speaking. That might resemble speech. (Anything at all.) Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words…From the back of her neck she releases her shoulders free.  She swallows once more.”

So begins the story of the halting diseuse, or female storyteller, of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-defying text Dictée, first published just over three decades ago in 1982. Organized in nine parts named after the Greek Muses, Dictée has been described in mythic terms – a Korean Odyssey, a rewriting of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, a theatrical ritual, a shamanistic exorcism.  Above all, however, Cha’s work interrogates history, refracting the history of Korea in the twentieth century through the themes of exile, the displacement of colonized bodies, and the lost – and resurrected – bodies and voices of women…

…I must have had Dictée on the brain, because I thought of Cha’s work again a few weeks ago when I dropped by the DePaul Art Museum to see the exhibit War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, curated by DePaul and San Francisco State University professors  Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis. The exhibit is part of a larger project that features visual media produced by nineteen artists who hail from the rapidly expanding community of 2.6 million Americans (and counting) who identify as Asian American plus one or more ethno-racial groups. While the exhibit blurb explains that the show “examines the construction of mixed heritage Asian American identity in the United States,” this actually doesn’t do justice to its ambitious range, which not only investigates the historical origins of these identities (U.S. wars in Asia, colonialism, transnational adoption, the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia outlawing laws against interracial marriage) but breaks down insidious present-day theories about “post-racialness,” while also featuring work by a younger generation of artists who seem to stay out of the conversation completely.  

In an interview, Dariotis revealed that the title of the exhibit was inspired by her own experience fielding annoying questions about her background (which, incidentally, is Chinese, Greek, Swedish, English, Scottish, German, and Dutch). According to Dariotis, people would inquire whether her parents “met in the war.” “And I always ask myself, ha, I was born in 1969, we were not at war with China in 1969. Where did they get this image?” Dariotis’s story highlights persistent mainstream assumptions about mixed-race (if not mixed-ethnic) Asian Americans of a certain age as either/or – that is, either the product of military personnel and Asian women, or free-love hippies indulging in illegal interracial sex. If Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show offers a critique of the sexualizing of women’s bodies, War Baby/Love Child draws attention to the cultural sexualization of specifically Asian (and mostly female) bodies through the bodies of their mixed-race offspring…

Read the entire article here.

Who Is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide

Lynne Rienner
2003
230 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-58826-337-7

George Yancey, Professor of Sociology
University of North Texas

“By the year 2050, whites will be a numerical racial minority, albeit the largest minority, in the United States.” This statement, asserts George Yancey, while statistically correct, is nonetheless false.

Yancey marshals compelling evidence to show that the definition of who is “white” is changing rapidly, with nonblack minorities accepting the perspectives of the current white majority group and, in turn, being increasingly assimilated. In contrast, African Americans continue to experience high levels of alienation. To understand the racial reality in the United States, Yancey demonstrates, it is essential to discard the traditional white/nonwhite dichotomy and to explore the implications of the changing color of whiteness.

Contents

• Alienation and Race in the United States.
• How To Become White.
• “They Are OK—Just Keep Them Away From Me”: Residential and Marital Segregation Patterns.
• The End of the Rainbow Coalition.
• The Changing Significance of “Latino” and “Asian.”
• The Black/Nonblack Society.

Black/Non-Black Divide and The Anti-Blackness of Non-Black Minorities

Still Furious and Brave: Who’s Afraid of Persistent Blackness?
2013-04-03

Robert Reece
Department of Sociology
Duke University

Last week, an Asian-American fraternity at the University of California Irvine posted a parody of a music video featuring one of their members in blackface. Blackface has become the go-to type of public racism for many types of white people across the political spectrum, and the internet is overflowing with analyses of why it’s racist so I won’t bother with that here. My concern is that an Asian-American fraternity is the culprit this time and what that may mean as we enter an era where our racial boundaries may be shifting as dramatically as the racial demographics.

I’m certainly not surprised that an Asian-American fraternity harbors racial stereotypes, both about themselves and other minorities. White supremacy is partially rule by consent, with subordinate groups believing in their own pathology (I’m looking at you Bill Cosby), but I think this incident, in this moment, deserves much more attention.

Proclamations by demographers about the coming white minority are used by both liberals and conservatives to promise inevitable political change. Liberals discuss how minorities outnumbering whites will signal as intense power shift in politics that will usher in an unprecedented age of progress and liberalism, and conservatives fear that they will lose their country to the brown hoards resting just over the horizon. But sociologist George Yancey, in Who is White?, questions the very demographers claiming that a white minority is certain. Yancey argues that demographers cannot account for shifting racial boundaries when making their predictions. So while their raw numbers may be correct, their racial predictions are probably incorrect because racial categories are always changing…

…This is the phenomenon at play when an Asian American fraternity implicitly approves of an act of anti-black racism. And this isn’t an isolated incident of negative black attitudes. In Racism Without Racists, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva presents survey results showing that Asian American political attitudes, including those regarding stereotypes of blacks, are very similar to those of whites. On some items, Asian Americans even demonstrated stronger anti-black attitudes than whites. In this way, they are following in the footsteps of other formerly marginalized groups who demonized blackness on their way to whiteness.

In The Wages of Whiteness, historian David Roediger chronicles how the newly immigrated Irish of the 19^th century made a strategic decision to pit themselves against blacks despite their acknowledgement of a common oppressor. They essentially built their case for inclusion into whiteness on the back of their anti-black attitudes. Anti-black racism was the glue that bound white ethnics to whiteness, and it may serve a similar purpose as our current racial project progresses. In the case of the Irish, their attitudes eventually manifested in an emulation of whiteness, in committing mob violence against blacks. But in 2013, popular violence against blacks doesn’t come in the form of gruesome beatings in the streets (police brutality notwithstanding); it comes in the form of YouTube videos of fraternity boys in blackface that, just like the mob violence of the 19^th century, goes unpunished by authorities.

Read the entire article here.

Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Résumé, Ages 0 to 22

HarperCollins
2011-03-15
336 pages
Trimsize: 6 3/4 x 9 1/4
Paperback ISBN: 9780062009234; ISBN10: 0062009230
eBook ISBN: 9780062078650; ISBN10: 0062078658

MariNaomi

From her father and mother’s interracial marriage to her own “you show me yours, I’ll show you mine” moments on the playground—from drug experimentation to sexual/identity questions—MariNaomi lays her inner life bare. Kiss & Tell is her funny and frank memoir in graphic form: a fresh and offbeat coming-of-age story unfolding against the colorful backdrop of San Francisco in the ’80s and ’90s. Through deft storytelling and charming illustration, MariNaomi carries us through first love and worst love, through heartbreak and bedroom experimentation, as she grows from misfit teen to young woman.

‘Americanah’ Author Explains ‘Learning’ To Be Black In The U.S.

Fresh Air from WHYY
National Public Radio
2013-06-27

Terry Gross, Host

When the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was growing up in Nigeria she was not used to being identified by the color of her skin. That changed when she arrived in the United States for college. As a black African in America, Adichie was suddenly confronted with what it meant to be a person of color in the United States. Race as an idea became something that she had to navigate and learn.

The learning process took some time and was episodic. Adichie recalls, for example, an undergraduate class in which the subject of watermelon came up. A student had said something about watermelon to an African-American classmate, who was offended by the comment.

“I remember sitting there thinking, ‘But what’s so bad about watermelons? Because I quite like watermelons,’ ” Adichie tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

She felt that her African-American classmate was annoyed with her because Adichie didn’t share her anger — but she didn’t have the context to understand why. The history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was not taught to students in Nigeria. Adichie had yet to learn fully about the history of slavery — and its continuing reverberations — in the U.S.

“Race is such a strange construct,” says Adichie, “because you have to learn what it means to be black in America. So you have to learn that watermelon is supposed to be offensive.”

Adichie is a MacArthur Fellowship winner and author of the novels Purple Hibiscus and Half of A Yellow Sun. Her new novel, Americanah, explores this question of what it means to be black in the U.S., and tells the story of a young Nigerian couple, one of whom leaves for England and the other of whom leaves for America.

The title, she says, is a Nigerian word for those who have been to the U.S. and return with American affectations.

“It’s often used,” she says, “in the context of a kind of gentle mockery.”…

Read the transcript here. Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

Racial Capitalism

Harvard Law Review
Volume 126, Number 8 (June 2013)
pages 2151-2226

Nancy Leong, Associate Professor
University of Denver, Sturm College of Law

Racial capitalism—the process of deriving social and economic value from racial identity—is a longstanding, common, and deeply problematic practice. This Article is the first to identify racial capitalism as a systemic phenomenon and to undertake a close examination of its causes and consequences.

The Article focuses on instances of racial capitalism in which white individuals and predominantly white institutions use non-white people to acquire social and economic value. Our affirmative action doctrine provides much of the impetus for this form of racial capitalism. That doctrine has fueled an intense legal and social preoccupation with the notion of diversity, which encourages white individuals and predominantly white institutions to engage in racial capitalism by using non-white people to acquire social and economic value. An examination of these consequences is particularly timely given the Supreme Court’s recent grant of certiorari in Fisher v. University of Texas.

Racial capitalism has serious negative consequences both for individuals and for society as a whole. The process of racial capitalism requires commodification of racial identity, which degrades that identity by reducing it to another thing to be bought and sold. Commodification also fosters racial resentment by causing non-white people to feel used or exploited by white people. And the superficial value assigned to non-whiteness within a system of racial capitalism displaces measures that would lead to meaningful social reform.

In an ideal society, commodification of racial identity would not occur. Given the imperfections of our current society, however, the Article instead proposes a pragmatic approach of reactive commodification. Under this approach, we would discourage commodification of race. But if commodification did occur, we would identify it as commodification, call attention to its harms, and ensure that non-white individuals received compensation for the value derived from their racial identity. This approach would ultimately allow progress toward a society in which we successfully recognize and respect racial identity without engaging in racial capitalism.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION
• I. Valuing Race
  • A. Whiteness as Property
  • B. Diversity as Revaluation
  • C. The Worth of Non-Whiteness
• II. A Theory of Racial Capital
  • A. Race as Marxian Capital
  • B. Race as Social Capital
  • C. Racial Capital
• III. Critiquing Racial Capitalism
  • A. Commodification
  • B. Individual Harms
    • 1. Fractured Identity
    • 2. Performance Demands
    • 3. Economic Disadvantage
  • C. Social Harms
    • 1. Impoverished Discourse
    • 2. Racial Resentment
    • 3. Displaced Reform
• IV. A Way Forward
• CONCLUSION

…This Article is the first to identify racial capitalism as a systemic phenomenon and the first to describe the way that non-whiteness, in particular, is capitalized. Of course, assigning value to race is nothing new for America. Whiteness has been a source of value throughout our history, conferring power and privilege on the possessor. Courts have recognized the value of whiteness—for example, they have held that calling a white person “black” constitutes defamation and therefore qualifies for legal redress. Litigants have also acknowledged the value of whiteness—for example, in Plessy v. Ferguson, Homer Plessy referred to his racial identity as the “most valuable sort of property.” And scholars have examined the value of whiteness—for example, Cheryl Harris’ acclaimed work Whiteness as Property posits that whiteness is a kind of “status property” that can be both analogized to conventional forms of property and literally converted to those forms…

Read the entire article here.

A Nation of Mutts

The New York Times
2013-06-28

David Brooks

Over the past few decades, American society has been transformed in a fit of absence of mind. First, we’ve gone from a low immigrant nation to a high immigrant nation. If you grew up between 1950 and 1985, you grew up at a time when only about 5 percent or 6 percent of American residents were foreign born. Today, roughly 13 percent of American residents are foreign born, and we’re possibly heading to 15 percent.

Moreover, up until now, America was primarily an outpost of European civilization. Between 1830 and 1880, 80 percent of the immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe. Over the following decades, the bulk came from Southern and Central Europe. In 1960, 75 percent of the foreign-born population came from Europe, with European ideas and European heritage.

Soon, we will no longer be an outpost of Europe, but a nation of mutts, a nation with hundreds of fluid ethnicities from around the world, intermarrying and intermingling. Americans of European descent are already a minority among 5-year-olds. European-Americans will be a minority over all in 30 years at the latest, and probably sooner…

…Soon there will be no dominant block, just complex networks of fluid streams — Vietnamese, Bengalis, Kazakhs. It’s a bit like the end of the cold war when bipolar thinking had to give way to a radically multipolar mind-set.

Because high immigration is taking place at a time of unprecedentedly low ethnic hostility, we’re seeing high rates of intermarriage. This creates large numbers of hybrid individuals, biracial or triracial people with names like Enrique Cohen-Chan. These people transcend existing categories and soften the social boundaries between groups.

This won’t lead to a bland mélange America but probably a move to ethnic re-orthodoxy. As Alvaro Vargas Llosa points out in his book, “Global Crossings,” the typical pattern is that the more third-generation people assimilate, the more they also value their ethnic roots. We could soon see people with completely unaccented English joining Chinese-American Federations and Honduran-American Support Networks…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

‘One Drop of Love’ (Theatre Review)

The Chic of Domesticity: A Woman-to-Women Conversation on All Facets of Life – Fashion – Politics – Religion – Style – Travel
2013-06-29

Jennifer Vaughn-Estrada

Plans free for tomorrow evening? I recommend catching the final performance of One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father’s Racial Approval at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Race is an uncomfortable, and often confusing, subject for us “mixies,” and Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, co-founder of the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival, addresses it head on in this one-woman play about identities, stereotypes, and family frustrations…

Read the entire review here.

Obama hails Mandela ‘inspiration’ in South Africa visit

BBC News
2013-06-29

US President Barack Obama has praised Nelson Mandela as “an inspiration to the world” while visiting South Africa.

The US leader, who was speaking in Pretoria after talks with President Jacob Zuma, does not intend to visit the 94-year-old, who has been critically ill for nearly a week.

But he met the Mandela family in private and spoke by telephone to his wife, Graça Machel.

Riot police clashed with anti-Obama protesters in Soweto.

The American leader was in Soweto to deliver a speech to young African leaders at the University of Johannesburg.

According to Mr Zuma, Mr Mandela remains “stable but critical”, and he added that he had “every hope that he will be out of hospital soon”.

However, South Africa’s last apartheid president and the man jointly awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr Mandela, FW de Klerk, is to cut short a visit to Europe due to Mr Mandela’s poor health, his foundation said in a statement…

…Mrs Machel, who remains by Mr Mandela’s side in the hospital in Pretoria, said after their phone call that she had conveyed their “messages of strength and inspiration” to her husband.

Mr Zuma said that as the first black leaders of their respective countries, Mr Obama and Mr Mandela were “bound by history” and so “carry the dreams of millions of people in Africa and in the diaspora who were previously oppressed”…

Read the entire article here.

Miracle Fruit

Tupelo Press
2003
86 pages
9.1 x 6 x 0.3 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9710310-8-1

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

As three worlds collide, a mother’s Philippines, a father’s India, and the poet’s contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates the senses while remaining down-to-earth and genuine.