Mixed Race Studies

Koreans & Camptowns: Reflections of a Mixed-Race Korean

Korean American Story
2015-11-04

Cerrissa Kim

I’ve often stood out from the crowd, and not in a way that made me feel like a rock star—far from it. Growing up in a rural town filled with dairy cows and Caucasian farmers, and then in a bedroom community lacking ethnic diversity, I was the sole Asian kid at school until fifth grade. To my classmates, I was a slanty-eyed chink. Jap. Gook. Yigger. They’d never even heard of Korea.

I don’t look like my Irish/Scottish American father, nor do I have the distinctly Korean features of my mother. Like many mixed-race people of my generation, I was Asian to the outside world, but not Korean enough to the Korean side of my family. I’ve looked for faces that resembled mine in some small way everywhere I’ve gone. I’ve scanned crowded spaces and deserted diners—anywhere I traveled—hoping for camaraderie with others who might make me feel my appearance was normal.

This past September in Berkeley, California, I opened the doors to the David Brower Center, slightly nervous and excited, I stepped into a room filled with mixed-race Korean Americans attending the one-day Koreans and Camptowns Conference. Even though I grew up with my biological parents, I still carry the scars—physical and emotional—from being ostracized and bullied for looking different from the other children in my bucolic California communities. Many of the people attending the conference were Korean adoptees (KADs) who had even more reason to search through crowds to find someone who resembled them. Not only were most KADs raised in places with no other KADs or Koreans, but they also didn’t look anything like their adoptive parents and other family members.

During and after the Korean War, camptowns were established outside of military installations, offering locals a way to earn a living— including entertaining soldiers with nightclubs and prostitution. Many of the mixed-race children born between the 1950’s and 1970’s were conceived and born in these camptowns, fathered by American and other Allied soldiers. Their mothers, the camptown women, were marginalized by society because most of them came from poor families and had to work as cooks, maids, sex workers, or other low-paying jobs to support themselves as well as their parents, grandparents and siblings. These women often waited for fathers of their children to return, hoping for a way out of the grueling camptown life. But more often than not, this didn’t happen, either because the soldiers were uninterested in going back, or because the military made it difficult—or even impossible—for them to return and marry Korean women…

Read the entire article here.

Measuring Race And Ethnicity Across The Decades: 1790-2010

Random Samplings: The official blog of the U.S. Census Bureau
United States Census Bureau
2015-11-02

Beverly M. Pratt
Population Division

Lindsay Hixson
Population Division

Nicholas A. Jones
Population Division

Over the years, the U.S. Census Bureau has collected information on race and ethnicity. The census form has always reflected changes in society, and shifts have occurred in the way the Census Bureau classifies race and ethnicity. Historically, the changes have been influenced by social, political and economic factors including emancipation, immigration and civil rights. Today, the Census Bureau collects race and ethnic data according to U.S. Office of Management and Budget guidelines, and these data are based on self-identification.

A new interactive visualization released today shows how race and ethnicity categories have changed over time since the first census in 1790. This allows us to better understand the relationship between historical classifications and the present time. A static version of this same visualization was presented in April 2015 at the Population Association of America’s annual meeting.

We created this interactive timeline to establish a starting point for the public — including community stakeholders, academics and data users — to understand how race and ethnicity categories have changed over 220 years in the decennial census. This understanding is important as we interpret results from the 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment and the current middecade testing of race and ethnicity questions, including the 2015 National Content Test. The National Content Test will inform design changes for collecting data on race and ethnicity in the 2020 Census and other ongoing demographic and economic surveys conducted by the Census Bureau.

Read the entire article here. View the infographic here.

The day my daughter realized she isn’t white

The Washington Post
2015-11-03

Lisa Papademetriou

“Mama,” my 4-year-old daughter said. “Did you know that darks and lights didn’t used to be able to go to the same places?”

“What?” I asked. It was bedtime, and I was tired. I wondered vaguely how Zara knew so much about laundry.

“There are some people who have dark skin color,” she said. “Lights would go one place, and darks would go another,” Zara went on, indignant. “There were signs saying the darks couldn’t go into where the lights were!”

“Who told you about that?” I asked, and she explained that a special visitor had come to her classroom to talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She very earnestly explained the Civil Rights movement and Dr. King’s message to me. “He said that everyone should be able to go into the same places. He said people should take down the signs that kept the darks out.” Growing more passionate, Zara cried, “Kylie and I agreed that we wouldn’t go anywhere if there was a sign that said, ‘Lights Only!’ We would rip up that sign and say, ‘Everyone can go here!’” Kylie has blue eyes and curly blond hair.

“Zara, honey, I’m so glad you feel that way,” I told her. “But do you realize that you’re not white?”

Stunned silence.

And then: rage. “I am white!” she shouted. “You’re white!”

“Yes,” I told her. “I’m white, so you are part white. But Daddy is from Pakistan. He’s brown. And that means that, in those times, you would have been considered brown, not white.”

“I am white!” Zara wailed. “I’m everything!” And she burst into tears…

Read the entire article here.

Minelle Mahtani is the New Host of “Sense of Place” on Roundhouse Radio 98.3 Vancouver

Sense of Place
Roundhouse Radio 98.3 Vancouver
98.3 FM
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2015-07-14

Minelle Mahtani is an author, journalist and professor. She is an Associate Professor of Human Geography and Planning, and the Program in Journalism, at University of Toronto-Scarborough. She has written two books, “Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality” and “Global Mixed Race.” She has worked in the not-for-profit sector in Vancouver for the former firm IMPACS – Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society and sits on the steering committee of UBC’s journalism school. She is former President of the Association for Canadian Studies and has won several awards, including a Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Award for her contributions to journalism. She is a former CBC TV journalist who worked on “The National.”

I’m on leave from the university to take on this exciting role. I’m taking it on because of what Roundhouse represents and exemplifies. Roundhouse is about active community citizenry. Roundhouse’s commitment to solutions-oriented programming echoes my own professional passions – thinking about ways to encourage a heightened sense of human flourishing for all Vancouver residents. Roundhouse hopes to be a conduit for so many underrepresented groups in this city. As a person of colour, of mixed race descent, I’m obviously supportive of that project. I’m personally committed to entertaining audiences, but also educating and inspiring our listeners to shed light on the complexities of city life today.

For more information, click here.

Williams: A positive among the attack ads in the Gecker-Sturtevant race

Richmond Times-Dispatch
Richmond, Virginia
2015-11-02

Michael Paul Williams, Columnist

During the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina, John McCain was the target of a whisper campaign that he’d fathered a black child out of wedlock. McCain, who in reality had an adopted Bangladeshi daughter, suffered a pivotal loss to eventual nominee George W. Bush.

Fifteen years later, with control of the Virginia State Senate in the balance, the Republican and Democratic candidates — both white — are showcasing their black children in televised campaign ads…

…No politician places his children before the camera with the idea that it will cost him votes. But we must never become so cynical, so suspicious of motivation, that we lose the capacity to acknowledge positive change when we see it.

“It’s hard to call this anything but good news,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “I remember the 1950s and 1960s, when Virginians would openly decry racially mixed marriage or the adoption of children of another race. And the Senate race is in the Richmond area, once one of the most resistant to change.

“Today,” Sabato said, “a mixed-race family is a political plus. Without saying a word, you project an image of progress and modernity.”

Of course, it’s hard to imagine a mixed-race family as part of a political master plan, given the love, commitment, energy and money required to raise a child. And what happens if you lose the election?

But evidence abounds that Sabato is on to something.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his African-American wife, Chirlane McCray, are the parents of college-age daughter Chiara and son Dante, who wears a prodigious Afro hairstyle. And south of the Mason-Dixon Line in Kentucky, Republican gubernatorial candidate Matt Bevin and his wife have run ads including their four adopted Ethiopian children…

Read the entire article here.

BU community urged to increase open, uncomfortable conversation

The Daily Free Press
The independent student newspaper at Boston University
ISSN 1094-7337
2015-11-03

Joe Becker

Keynote speaker and comedian W. Kamau Bell speaks about his mixed race children during “Let’s Talk About It,” a dialogue about race, identity and social action, on Monday night. PHOTO BY BRITTANY CHANG/DAILY FREE PRESS CONTRIBUTOR

Boston University College of Arts and Sciences Student Programs and Leadership hosted the “Let’s Talk About It: Race, Power and Privilege” talk Monday evening, featuring a keynote and question-and-answer session with socio-political comedian W. Kamau Bell. The dialogue touched on the social fabric on campus and around the country.

More than 100 attendees, comprised of mostly students and faculty, gathered in the Metcalf Hall of the George Sherman Union. Sitting at round tables, attendees, assisted by a minimum of one student facilitator, engaged in intimate conversations with each other throughout the event.

Bell elicited humor from often-uncomfortable social issues in his talk. He spoke of his interracial marriage with a white woman and the difficulties of talking about race and racism with his two mixed-race daughters.

“Remember the first time you saw an iPad? That’s how people react to mixed-race children,” he said during the event. “It’s not that big of a deal. You can tell kids anything. The construct of race is real, and racism is definitely real.”…

Read the entire article here.

Shaun King: I’ve been called the N-word since I was 14, but now those same people want me to be white

The New York Daily News
2015-11-03

Shaun King
Atlanta, Georgia

Robin Rayne Nelson

EDITOR’S NOTE: Our policy at the Daily News is to censor most racial pejoratives. We have made an exception in the following column because of the personal and historic context of the subject matter:

For the last 22 years of my life, I’ve been called a nigger. And now they want me to be white.

In 1993, I was a freshman at Woodford County High School in rural Versailles, Ky. On a dozen different occasions, white students brazenly used the slur to my face, put it on notes in my locker, and yelled it from passing vehicles. Occasionally some of my friends and I would build up enough courage to report it. The racist students would deny it. Nothing would happen. Eventually, we just stopped reporting it altogether.

Racist graffiti stayed on the walls and stalls of our high school bathrooms for months at a time without being painted over or scrubbed off. It was so commonplace, that we grew used to it. Sadly, my life in 2015 has resembled 1993, far more than I ever imagined possible. Since speaking out against police brutality over the past year, I have been called a nigger and every variation thereof.

But it never got me down…

…Generally, if you are Asian and white, you are considered Asian. If you are Latino and white, you are considered Latino. If you are black and anything else, you are black. Halle Berry, Alicia Keys, Drake, and President Obama are all seen by the world as being black—even though we all know their story is much more nuanced than that. In fact, the entire world is much more biologically and genetically nuanced than hegemonic power structures will ever concede.

Even though my skin is fair, not once have I considered what it would be like to somehow transform myself into “being white.” I wouldn’t even know where to begin. By the time I was in the seventh grade, I exclusively sat at the “black lunch table,” not as a guest, but as a resident. I’ve been sitting there ever since.

With each year that passed, it was increasingly clear that I wasn’t truly welcomed anywhere else…

Read the entire article here.

Biracial Identity: My Choice, Not Society’s

The Huffington Post
2015-11-02

Natasha Sim, Law Student, Writer, Animal Lover

Being biracial or multiracial is becoming increasingly common in the world, but it is still an unfamiliar concept to many. Many people probably know at least one biracial or multiracial person, but the intricacies of biracialism and multiracialism are still far from understood. The global interest around biracialism ramped up when Barack Obama became president, but it is something, that as a biracial person, I have wondered about my entire life.

My identity is not clear-cut and that can make things confusing. Some days I think I am white, and other days, I identify as Asian. Some days I identify as every possible nationality that I am affiliated with —New Zealander, English, Scottish, Irish and Chinese. Some days I am simply a biracial Asian and white person. My changing identity is not unique among mixed race people  –  as the recent PEW survey of multiracial people found, it is common for biracial and multiracial people to switch between identifying as one race or two or more races. My identity is ever-changing, and as some biracial or multiracial people describe their experience, “schizophrenic.” But, regardless of how confusing my identity may be, as I’ve matured and grown, I have realized that my identity is my choice – not society’s…

Read the entire article here.

Contributors: Allyson Hobbs

The New Yorker
2015-09-22

Allyson Hobbs began writing for newyorker.com in June, 2015. She writes about race, gender, politics, and culture. She is an assistant professor in the History Department at Stanford University. Allyson’s first book, “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life,” published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. “A Chosen Exile” won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians: the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American history and the Lawrence W. Levine Award for best book in American cultural history. The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a “Best Book of 2014” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and a “Book of the Week” by the Times Higher Education in London. The Root named “A Chosen Exile” as one of the “Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014.”

Is race a choice?

VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal
Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
Centre for Economic Policy Research
2015-01-26

Emily Nix, PhD candidate in Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Nancy Qian, Associate Professor of Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Race is usually treated as a fixed, exogenous characteristic in academic studies and policy discussions, but a growing body of evidence calls this assumption into question. This column presents evidence from historical US census data that more than 19% of black males ‘passed’ as white, around 10% of whom later ‘reverse-passed’ to being black. Passing was associated with geographic relocation and with better political-economic and social opportunities for whites relative to blacks, providing prima facie evidence that passing was endogenous.

The relationship between a person’s race and/or ethnicity and her economic, political, and social behaviour has been a focal point for numerous policy discussions. This is because the composition of race and ethnicity are often found to be associated with outcomes such as conflict, earnings, educational attainment, and voting. This is true in many different contexts across the world, including rich countries such as the US, middle-income countries such as Brazil and India, and very poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the interpretation that race has a causal impact on the aforementioned outcomes critically depends on whether one believes that race and ethnicity are exogenous and fixed characteristics – i.e. outside the control of an individual and constant over her lifetime.

The literature typically assumes that racial and ethnic identities are fixed and exogenous. For examples, see the reviews of the political economy literature by Alesina and Ferrara (2004) and of studies of the US black-white wage gap by Lang and Lehmann (2012)…

Read the entire article here.