Mixed Race Studies

‘Improving’ the Māori: Counting the Ideology of Intermarriage

New Zealand Journal of History
Volume 34, Number 1 (2000)
pages 80-97

Kate Riddell
Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington

IN 1996 THE CENSUS gave a total of 3,681,546 New Zealanders, of whom 524,031 were self-described as Māori or of Māori descent — thus, around 14%. The 1896 census gave 743,214 New Zealanders, and of that figure only 39,854 were described by the enumerators as Māori — around 5%. The closest thing to the category ‘of Māori descent’ in that census was the 5,762 ‘half-castes‘ described either as living as Pākehā or Māori. The New Zealand population in 1769 has been estimated as perhaps 100,000, and was 100% Māori.

These figures expose vast changes in the Māori population in size and compilation, from 100% of the population to a nadir of 5%, and back to an increasingly significant percentage of the overall New Zealand population at the close of the twentieth century. But the figures alone tell a small part of the revival of a supposedly ‘dying race’. This article explores the ideology of the censuses and the enumerators who contributed to them. At the core of this investigation is a belief that the prevalence of intermarriage between Māori and Pākehā directly affected popular views of whether or not the Māori population would survive the experiment of contact.

In 1896, with the Māori population at around 5% of the total population (and thought to be dropping), many did not believe that Māori would survive. That belief, however, flew directly in the face of much contemporary evidence to the contrary. Perhaps in one aspect, however, it was not so very wrong. Even some of the most ardent ‘fatal impact’ protagonists allowed that intermarriage with Pākehā would slow the extinction of the Māori. Others, perhaps best characterized as ‘assimilationists’, promoted intermarriage as the tool to save the Māori from themselves. To such people, the ‘half-caste’ product of intermarriage would improve the Māori ‘race’, both in terms of their statistical significance and as a people — rather like European husbandry would improve the land.

‘Half-caste’ is a problematic term. In New Zealand it has been used to describe both cultural and physical forms of the fruits of intermarriage. But it has almost never been used in a strictly biological sense. Once contact between Māori and Pākehā became widespread, ‘half-caste’ was never either a legal definition or a precise term for measuring blood-mixture. This is in direct contrast with strict legal and biological definitions in other New World colonies. In the censuses, the term came to be closely linked with the idea of ‘improving’ the Māori, like the land, by degrees. Intermarriage and the production of half-castes became synonymous with clearing away the native and planting the introduced…

…The Māori censuses to 1921 will be explored through three related myths. The myths are not easily separated, but each has some distinctive features. The first is an ambiguous one: the idea that Māori were better off either in close contact with or in isolation from Europeans. This myth expressed the belief that Māori were dying whether in close contact with Europeans or not, but that some factors could temporarily ameliorate or limit the effects of that contact. The second myth was that Māori were not worthy possessors of their own land. If they did not use it as Pākehā believed land was ordained to be used, then Māori would lose it. In this view, ‘improving’ the land and ‘improving’ the Māori went hand in hand. The third myth was that ‘half-castes’, the physical product of Māori and Pākehā intermarriage, were the only possible future for Māori (if Māori were to have a future at all). This explanation will be followed by a discussion of how the myths remained intact, despite the numerical evidence of the censuses to the contrary, and despite Māori opposition to the ideology of assimilation through intermarriage…

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This, That, Both, Neither: The Badging Of Biracial Identity In Young Adult Realism

The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults
The official research journal of the Young Adult Library Services Association
2013-04-22

Sarah Hannah Gómez, Graduate Student
School of Library and Information Science
Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts

Editor’s Note: “This, That, Both, Neither” was accepted for the peer reviewed paper session at YALSA’s third annual Young Adult Literature Symposium held November 2-4, 2012 in St. Louis. The theme of the conference was “Hit me with the next big thing.”

Only in the lifetime of the Millennial generation has it become legally acceptable to mark more than one race on a federal form. In the 2010 Census, 2.9 percent of respondents indicated that they were two or more races, with even more assigning themselves other designations that speak to the many types of multiracial identities common today. As this population grows in real life, it also flourishes in young adult literature, where ever more protagonists identify with more than one racial or ethnic group and must decide how to assert themselves and what to call themselves. This paper explores some of these novels and tracks each character’s progress towards creating a “badge” of identity.

Introduction

Every year when I was a student, my school district held awards ceremonies to honor distinguished students of color from all grade levels. There was an African American ceremony, a Hispanic ceremony, and presumably an Asian American and Native American one as well. High-achieving students were invited to their respective ceremonies as well as any students of color, although I’m not entirely sure. I didn’t even know the awards existed until seventh grade, when two girls in my homeroom asked me why I hadn’t been at the African American ceremony the evening before.

I hadn’t been invited.

“Oh.” It hit me. “The district has me down as white.”

If you’d been looking at me when I said that, you would be confused. I don’t exactly look like a character in a Nella Larsen novel. But it wasn’t a lie. I am white. I’m also black. And I’m adopted, so I also share a second mixed identity with my sister, one in which we are ethnically Jewish and Latina.

My mother knew that her children were mixed, and she wanted us to have the advantage of going to a diverse magnet elementary school, so when we started kindergarten, she checked the box marked “white.” This was the late 1980s and early 1990s, when you were only allowed to be one race. And so, without having to lie, my mother helped me and my sister pass as white—at least on paper…

…I share this story not because I’m writing my autobiography, but because this is an experience shared by other mixed-race individuals, an increasingly larger part of the young American population. These teens, I believe, are the future of young adult (YA) literature. For fifteen years now, Americans have been able to officially identify as mixed. As people who identify as mixed-race begin to publish novels that tell their stories, it seems natural that their fictional worlds will represent the worlds they see around them. As Michele Elam notes, “the census box represents the new nonviolent resistance, a finger in the eye of the racial status quo,”  and we all know YA literature to be about testing boundaries and making bold statements…

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Mixed bloods of the Upper Monongahela Valley, West Virginia

Washington Academy of Sciences
Volume 36, Number 1 (1946-01-15)
pages 1-13
Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library

William Harlen Gilbert, Jr.
Library of Congress

We are accustomed to think of West Virginia as a racially homogeneous State populated by Old Americans of English, Scotch, and Scotch-Irish descent with an additional contingent in recent years of Poles and Italians in the mining areas. It may come as somewhat of a surprise to many to learn that there exists in the northern counties of the State a racial island of mixed bloods, known locally as “Guineas,” numbering several thousand persons. The origin of this mixed race is unrecorded, and the relative proportion of white, Negro, and Indian blood entering into its makeup is difficult to ascertain. The main seat of this people is in northern Barbour County and southern Taylor County, but small groups are to be found in over half a dozen adjoining counties and in Garrett County, Md. From their homes in the hill country many have gone in recent years to the factory cities of West Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan in search of economic opportunity and social betterment.

It is difficult to find a completely acceptable term to designate these mixed people. Stigmatized by white public opinion as a sort of outcast group, they dislike and resent any designation used by outsiders for themselves. They especially resent the terms “Guinea” or “Guinea Nigger,” which are most generally applied to them by their white neighbors. There are several possibilities in explaining the origin of this sobriquet.

An educated member of this group is said to have worked out a genealogy for them several years ago in which he claimed that an English nobleman went to the Guinea coast of Africa in the early days (possibly as a remittance man), married a native Negro woman, and produced a large family of crossbreeds. Later some of these descendants came to America and became the ancestors of the “Guineas.” Hu Maxwell, in his History of Barbour County (pp. 310-311), asserts that the mixed bloods of that county are called “Guineas” under the mistaken notion that they are Guinea Negroes. They are said, however, to have claimed for many years a descent from one of the Guineas (British, French, or Portuguese) in Africa or from one of the Guianas (British, French, or Dutch) in South America, and that their blood was native Negro or Indian…

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Half-castes between the Wars: Colonial Categories in New Zealand and Samoa

New Zealand Journal of History
Volume 34, Number 1 (2000)
pages 98-116

Tocolcsulusulu D. Salesa
Oriel College, University of Oxford

BY THE 1930s ‘half-castes‘ seemed a near-universal product of colonialism. They were a natural outcome of the human activity of procreation, and not a colony in the world was without them. In New Zealand and Samoa, half-castes had risen to prominence, not always with admiration, and occupied a territory somehow between natives and Europeans. They were a kind of human borderland, markers of the differences between the two populations. Half-castes were born of a ‘queer magic’, as Noel Coward called it, children of natural human desires, yet often treated as unnatural; left in a position which could attract both envy and disdain. In the years between the World Wars, the well- known figure of the half-caste gained a new kind of relevance as, among others, eugenicists, racial biologists, colonial experts and governments found newer ways of considering them. The prevailing contemporary view did not seem a kind one. The anti-racist scientist Cedric Dover lamented in 1937 that the half-caste was depicted as ‘an undersized, scheming and entirely degenerate bastard. His father is a blackguard, his mother a whore. His sister and daughter . . . follow the maternal vocation.’

Colonial authority was built on the assumptions that European society in the colonies was an obvious and discrete social and biological whole—a ‘natural’ community—and that the boundaries which separated colonizer from the colonized were easily drawn and unmistakable. Half-castes were living proof that these assumptions were false, and daily they had to deal with the trauma their existence exposed. Unintentionally they had the capacity to traverse categories, or be cast from one to another, and this often attracted distrust and suspicion. Their variability meant that although the term ‘half-caste’ was in use from the mid-nineteenth century in both New Zealand and Samoa, the substance it enclosed continually changed. Moreover, each reconfiguration of what half-caste meant potentially reconfigured the limits of ‘Native’ or ‘European’, and how distant or different these categories were. This changing nature of the half-caste reveals the creative and plastic nature of colonialism and its terms of government. But it does much more than this, as such terms were part of a vocabulary commonly used by colonizers, and government was implicated in a broader discussion where varied definitions and understandings of half-castes might inform each other, and where definitions remained mercurial and contested. In Samoa and New Zealand half-castes attracted not only political and social interest, but also scientific and scholarly concern. The years on which this article focuses, the 1920s and 1930s, were a highpoint for this.

At this time both New Zealand and Samoa were under the same colonial power—New Zealand—yet in the two countries the half-caste category was not the same. The many differences make comparison intriguing. Samoa was a tropical, plantation colony, with a small population of Europeans; New Zealand was a temperate, settler colony, with an increasing white population. Their histories, however, are entangled, and in several ways the fortunes of half-castes in Samoa and New Zealand shaped each other. Margery Perham, a colonial ‘expert’ and Oxford don, passed through both New Zealand and Samoa in 1929 on a worldwide tour of British colonies. She realized the degree of entanglement between New Zealand and Samoa when she observed that ‘every event in the [Samoan] islands found immediate echo in New Zealand, and New Zealand’s response re-echoed back in the islands’ .Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler have written that ‘metropole and colony, colonizer and colonized, need to be brought into one analytic field’. Half-castes in Samoa and New Zealand offer an opportunity to do just that…

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the changing face of “caucasian”

The State
2013-04-21

Adam Rothstein, Insurgent Archivist and Researcher

It’s been widely mentioned among a certain set on social media networks that the suspect in the Boston bombings is Chechen, and therefore, “Caucasian.” The good-natured purpose of this being to foil the usual insipid bigotry let loose in similar situations, which assumes that all terrorists are non-White, that Muslims are of a separate, lesser race, and/or that any particular terrorist act is part of some larger, epochal war of “us versus them.”

All of these racist conclusions are ridiculous, and would be easily refuted with the most basic and widely-accepted social and scientific data of contemporary times. However, stating that because the suspect is from the region of the Caucasus Mountains he “is White” is a troubling statement. Most readily, this reifies a notion of Whiteness. But additionally, this overlooks the history of the term “Caucasian,” and how the racial history of anthropology brought this term into common parlance. To a person from the United States, where “Caucasian” is a synonym for racial Whiteness, there is an etymological connection that would allow you to say this, and think you are correct. But “Whiteness” has always only ever been exactly what “White people” want it to be. What part of the world a person is from has little to no affect on whether anyone thinks s/he is actually “White”, because “White” is a social class, not a place.

“Caucasian” was first identified as a race by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1779, as one of five: the others being Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American. These categories were based upon the measurement of the human skull. While he was a proponent of “Degreneration Theory,” that theorized that all humans were originally Caucasian before having their appearance change due to poor living conditions, he was able to note what is now widely known—that phenotypical differences within races are as large as those between races. In other words, in any measureable characteristic, there is as great a difference between individual Africans, and as great a difference between individual Europeans, as there is between Africans and Europeans compared…

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Age of First Cigarette, Alcohol, and Marijuana Use Among U.S. Biracial/Ethnic Youth: A Population-Based Study

Addictive Behaviors
Volume 38, Issue 9, September 2013
pages 2450–2454
DOI: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2013.04.005

Trenette T. Clark, Associate Professor of Social Work
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Otima Doyle, Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Illinois, Chicago

Amanda Clincy
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Highlights

• We found an intermediate biracial phenomenon.
• White-American Indian youth start smoking cigarettes earlier than all groups.
• White-Asian youth begin smoking marijuana and drinking at earlier ages than Whites.
• White-Asian youth engaged in all substances at earlier ages than Asian youth.

This study examines age of first cigarette, alcohol, and marijuana use among self-identified biracial youth, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We found an intermediate biracial phenomenon in which some biracial youth initiate substance use at ages that fall between the initiation ages of their 2 corresponding monoracial groups. When controlling for the covariates, our findings show White-Asian biracial youth begin smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol at earlier ages than Whites and engaging in all forms of substance use at earlier ages than Asian youth. Results indicate White-American Indian youth start smoking cigarettes at earlier ages than all biracial and monoracial groups. Our findings underscore the need for future research to examine substance-use initiation and progression among biracial/ethnic youth.

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Hamilton school board asks aboriginal families to “self identify”

CBC News
Hamilton
2013-04-19

Taylor Ablett

The Hamilton Wentworth District School Board is asking aboriginal families to “self identify” as First Nations, Métis, or Inuit.

“We are encouraging families to self-identify because it will enable us to determine programming and supports to increase First Nation, Métis and Inuit student success and achievement,” said Sharon Stephanian, Superintendent of Leadership & Learning in a press release. The board will keep the information collected confidential.

“The information will only be used for the purpose of developing relevant support programs, services and resources”.

The board has sent out notices to parents and caregivers of children under the age of 18 and directly to students over 18…

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Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 (review) [Sheffer]

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 37, Number 4, Winter 2012
DOI: 10.1353/mel.2012.0061
pages 203-205

Jolie A. Sheffer,  Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

Julia H. Lee’s Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 offers new insights on how African American and Asian American identities were defined in relation to one another during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. As Lee explains, the book seeks to show how “American identity emerges from the interplay between the fantasies of the ‘Negro Problem’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’” (5). Lee focuses on iconic texts and court cases, as well as lesser-known novels, memoirs, and films in order to show how widely the trope of interracial encounter traveled, and how varied were its permutations.

Interracial Encounters follows from a recent wave of works committed to comparative and interethnic analysis, such as Vijay Prashad’s Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2001), Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen’s edited collection AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (2006), Caroline Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (2009), and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials’s Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (2011). These books continue the ground-breaking work of Werner Sollors and Elizabeth Ammons to see patterns across ethnic literary traditions while carefully attending to the particular ways American ethnic and racial identities have been negotiated in relationship to other minority groups. Lee maintains the specificity of each group’s experiences in the United States and offers an important contribution to the study of American racial formation.

Lee makes coherent sense out of the complex and contradictory laws, court cases, and racial ideologies of the period she analyzes. Her re-reading of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is particularly impressive, providing a powerful contribution to the scholarship of this pivotal court case while also shedding new light on its influence on literature and culture. Interracial Encounters does not oversimplify or selectively celebrate scenes of inter-racial solidarity; instead, Lee shows the “multiple logics of exclusion”  that were deployed in the period (5). While she provides ample evidence of cross-racial identification, she also illustrates the pattern of one group demanding inclusion at the expense of the other. Interracial Encounters reveals the tensions and alliances between Asian Americans and African Americans, as well as these groups’ shifting relationship to normative whiteness. For example, her readings of the films The Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Cheat (1915) illustrate the contradictory ways African American and Asian American racialization appeared in popular cultural texts.

Lee is attuned to the complexity in how racial ideologies affect minority populations whose rights were (and still are) unevenly recognized and enforced. As she notes, “an American national identity was natural, desirable, universal—and utterly impossible for African Americans and Asians to attain” (10). While underscoring the US historical context for African American and Asian American literary production, Lee also traces the transnational and at times post-national implications of Afro-Asian encounters. Racial ideologies travel beyond the nation’s borders, particularly in this period when the US became a global superpower.

The introduction lays out Lee’s major claims and the theoretical concepts undergirding her work. Chapter Two contextualizes Asian American and African American racialization in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, particularly through the spatialization of the segregated train car, a site central to Plessy v. Ferguson. Chapter Three continues the discussion of segregated train travel by analyzing key scenes in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and Wu Tingfang’s memoir America, through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat (1914).

Chapter Four addresses the transnational and imperial dimensions of racialization and orientalism as illustrated by the writings of the Anglo-Chinese-Canadian-American sisters Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far). By studying their fiction and nonfiction set in the US and Jamaica, Lee shows the women’s competing strategies for asserting their status as representative Americans. Edith Eaton depicts Asian Americans and African Americans (and Afro-Caribbeans)…

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Pacific Islander Americans and Multiethnicity: A Vision of America’s Future?

Social Forces
Volume 73, Issue 4 (1995)
pages 1365-1383
DOI: 10.1093/sf/73.4.1365

Paul R. Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Rowena Fong, Ruby Lee Piester Centennial Professor in Services to Children and Families
University of Texas, Austin

Americans are rapidly becoming an ethnically plural people. Not only are there many different peoples in the U.S., but a sharply increasing number of individuals are coming to have and to recognize multiple ethnic strains within themselves. The current literature on ethnicity is inadequate, for it assumes that people have only single ethnic identities when, in fact, many people, like Pacific Islander Americans, have long held multiethnic identities. Drawing on survey data and interviews as well as literary sources, this article analyzes the features of Pacific Islander American multiethnic identity: it is situational; individuals commonly simplify their ethnicity in practical living; and people with multiple ancestries are admitted to group membership on much the same basis as people with single ancestries. The bases of Pacific Islander American ethnicity include ancestry, family, practice, and place.

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“Citizen Sure Thing” or “Jus’ Foreigner”?: Half-Caste Citizenship and the Family Romance in Onoto Watanna’s Orientalist Fiction

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 13, Number 1, February 2010
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.0.0067
pages 81-105

Jolie A. Sheffer,  Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

In “a contract” (1902), one of Winnifred Eaton’s popular orientalist romances published under the pen name Onoto Watanna, O-Kiku-san, a young Japanese woman, explains to her suitor, the Japanese-born but racially white businessman Masters, the difference between citizenship and belonging. She tells him, “You Japanese citizen sure thing . . . all the same you jus’ foreigner, all the same.” Masters protests, insisting, “You are trying to rob me of my birthright. Am I or am I not Japanese?” (56). Kiku’s answer is unwavering: “Japanese citizen, yes. . . . Japanese man? No, naever” (56). Speaking as a full-blooded Japanese woman in Japan, Kiku articulates the vast gap between legal rights and social recognition, between being a “sure” citizen under the law while nevertheless (“all the same”) being perceived as “jus’ foreigner,” one who is virtually indistinguishable from all other foreigners (as indicated by the repetition of “all the same”). In this scene, Masters wants to be recognized as Japanese, and the most effective means by which he imagines achieving recognition is to marry a Japanese woman, with the hope that “the next of our line possibly may be partly Japanese, and the next” (56). In this story, as throughout Eaton’s body of work, those who look different on account of race—whether as a white man in Japan or a biracial woman in the United States—are perpetually seen as “jus'” foreigners. The white man’s status as perpetual foreigner in Japan neatly reverses the far more common experience of Asians in early-twentieth-century America, particularly since Kiku’s judgment of Masters’s foreignness is also based on his apparent failure to assimilate: he was educated in the West and lives in the English colony within Japan. Here, as throughout Eaton’s fiction, mixed blood is the primary measure of and means to cultural acceptance, more powerful than the legal rights granted by citizenship and more persuasive than residency.

Eaton’s formulation of the “citizen sure thing” who is nonetheless a perpetual foreigner complicates Lisa Lowe’s now-paradigmatic account of the ways that “the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally.” Again and again in Eaton’s fiction, the route to recognition is imagined through romance, breeding, and familial ties, embodied by the figure of the “half-caste,” the offspring of a white man and a Japanese woman. With her focus on the plight of the biracial figure born of the West’s previous encounters with the East, Eaton’s stories should be read as aggressive dramas of national belonging in which white men desire mixed-race women, and mixed-race children demand recognition in the U.S. family. In the story “A Half Caste” (1899) in particular, Eaton merges the interracial love story with a familial reunification plot in order to make the controversial claim that the threat of incest may be productive, serving as the means by which the half-caste can secure her rights as daughter and citizen. In Eaton’s fiction, the moment of incestuous desire and its disclosure occasions recognition of the half-caste’s rights as a member of the family and, by extension, as a citizen of the American “fatherland.”

The term “half-caste,” which was invented to define the mixed-race children of European fathers and Indian mothers on the subcontinent, relies upon the entrenched gendering of raced bodies and the racialization of women. In America as in Europe, masculinity and fatherhood have long been associated with the West, while femininity and motherhood have been aligned with racial and cultural Otherness. In the United States, ever since Commodore Matthew Perry “opened” Japan to American trade in 1853, American audiences have responded enthusiastically to the image of an American captain penetrating the mystical, oriental East via military and economic might—symbolized by the cannons extending from Commodore Perry’s ships when he entered Tokyo Bay. This “scenario” of Western political-sexual conquest, to use Diana Taylor’s term for the “predictable, formulaic, hence repeatable” forms that tropes of…

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