Identity for mixed-race kids? ‘Eurasian’ already exists

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Oceania, Social Science on 2013-03-30 18:41Z by Steven

Identity for mixed-race kids? ‘Eurasian’ already exists

The Straits Times
Singapore
Forum Letters
2013-03-30

Michael Ang York Poon

I am baffled by Mr Peter Wadeley’s letter (“S’porean identity must include mixed-race kids“; March 16).

What he is calling for already exists – that is, Eurasians, who are one of Singapore’s four main racial groups.

In the first four decades of Singapore’s independence, immigration was not as common as it is now, and the number of migrants relatively insignificant. Hence, it would have been absurd to even wonder if Eurasian youngsters were non-native…

Read the entire letter here.

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Cross-Cultural Affinities between Native American and White Women in “The Alaska Widow” by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far)

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2013-03-30 16:30Z by Steven

Cross-Cultural Affinities between Native American and White Women in “The Alaska Widow” by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far)

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 38, Number 1 (Spring 2013)
pages 155-163
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mls002

Mary Chapman, Associate Professor of English
University of British Columbia

When her work was recovered in the 1980s, Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) was credited with founding the canon of Asian-North American literature. The earliest Eaton scholarship focused on her resistance to yellow-peril discourse through her sympathetic portrayals of diasporic Chinese and Eurasians. This scholarship contrasted Edith Eaton’s “authentic” self-presentation as the half-Chinese “Sui Sin Far” with her sister Winnifred’s posturing as Japanese noblewoman author “Onoto Watanna.” Although fascinating in many ways, this scholarship was circumscribed by both an exclusive focus on the politics of race as it intersected with gender—and the lack of access to Eaton’s complete and more internally self-contradictory oeuvre. Scholars relying on the same handful of anthologized works—“The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese” (1910), “Her Chinese Husband” (1910), “In the Land of the Free” (1909), “The Wisdom of the New” (1912), “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1910), and “The Inferior Woman” (1910)—explored only a few of Eaton’s themes, most notably Eurasian marriage, tricksterism, and American anti-Asian racism. By focusing on Eaton’s depictions of North American Chinatowns, scholars have rarely recognized the broader transnational political contexts in which Eaton wrote or the cross-racial collaborations depicted in many of her works. Most have understated the significance of Eaton’s British, Canadian, Jamaican, and Chinese cultural referents and ignored significant interactions with the native communities—French Canadian, Caribbean, and even Native North American—that she depicts in much of her work. Nor have scholars adequately appreciated the carefully framed politics of what Sean McCann dismisses as Eaton’s “ordinary, mundane and domestic” settings (76).

In the past ten years, scholars have located numerous unknown essays, works of fiction, and journalism by Eaton that expand her known oeuvre and challenge the Asian American dualism for which she is known. In 2002, Dominika Ferens uncovered a daily column Eaton wrote…

Read or purchase the article here.

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Won’t Somebody Think of the Children

Posted in Articles, Gay & Lesbian, Law, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-03-30 04:00Z by Steven

Won’t Somebody Think of the Children

Slate
2013-03-27

Brian Palmer, Slate’s Chief Explainer

Do opponents of marriage equality always claim that they’re merely worried about the kids?

During yesterday’s oral arguments over the constitutionality of California’s ban on gay marriage, Justice Antonin Scalia claimed that there is “considerable disagreement among sociologists” as to whether being raised by a same-sex couple is “harmful to the child.” The lawyers arguing the case repeatedly brought up the landmark 1967 decision Loving v. Virginia, which struck down interracial marriage bans. Did supporters of the ban argue that interracial marriage was harmful to children in that case, too?

Absolutely. The state of Virginia presented two arguments in support of its interracial marriage ban in 1967. The first was that the authors of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution explicitly stated that they did not intend to strike down anti-miscegenation laws, which were common in the 19th century. The second argument was that interracial marriages were uniquely prone to divorce and placed undue psychological stress on children

Read the entire article here.

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Ai Means Love

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2013-03-29 18:01Z by Steven

Ai Means Love

The Kenyon Review
2010-03-27

Tamiko Beyer

Last week, the poet Ai passed away, unexpectedly. She was one of the first poets I read when I started studying poetry, and I have always admired the fierce bravery of her work.

From her poems, I learned about the poetic possibilities of the persona. I learned from the way she inhabited multiple voices with compassion and clarity, how she explored deep and often uncomfortable human truths. She did not turn away; she compelled us not to turn away.

I found out about her death, as I did Lucille Clifton’s recent passing, from a post on Facebook. But on the whole, the poetry world seems to have taken little notice.

This lack of discussion and celebration of Ai’s work is striking, especially compared to the outpouring that came after Clifton’s death.

I wonder if it has something to do with Ai’s insistence on the integrity of her multiracial identity. Identifying as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, she refused to align herself with just one part of her racial identity. This put her on perpetual borderlands of identity politics, and she knew it:

“I wish I could say that race isn’t important. But it is. More than ever, it is a medium of exchange, the coin of the realm with which one buys one’s share of jobs and social position. This is a fact which I have faced and must ultimately transcend.” – (from poetryfoundation.org)

Indeed, the Asian American poetry community did not claim her as one of our own. I once came across a mimeographed collection of Asian American women’s writing printed in the Bay Area in the late 70’s or early 80’s. One article listed all the Asian American women writers active at that that time, and I remember that Ai was included on the list, but with a kind of reluctance. Because she did not specifically address Asian-American themes, there was a question as to whether or not she could be called an Asian American poet. (If I remember correctly, there was a similar discussion in the article about Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and her work.)…

Read the entire article here.

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Focus on Research: Emma J. Teng F’06 on the Hidden Histories of Mixed Race Families

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-03-29 15:25Z by Steven

Focus on Research: Emma J. Teng F’06 on the Hidden Histories of Mixed Race Families

American Council of Learned Societies
ACLS News
2012-10-01

ACLS asked its fellows to describe their research: the knowledge it creates and how this knowledge benefits our understanding of the world. We are pleased to present this response from Emma J. Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In June 1914, a young American woman with a small baby boarded a ship bound for China. Although she was white, she traveled in accommodations meant “for Asiatic passengers only.” Why? Mae Watkins Franking, a native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was traveling to China to reunite with her Chinese husband, whom she had met as a student at the University of Michigan. Due to the Marital Expatriation Act of 1907, which stripped U.S. citizenship from all American women who married foreign nationals, Mae had taken Chinese nationality, and thus, in an age of segregated travel, she journeyed to Shanghai under this status. Mae might have felt apprehensive moving to China, for although racial intermarriage was legal in Michigan at the time of the Frankings’ wedding, the Chinese government prohibited the intermarriage of overseas students with foreign women. (Merchants and laborers were allowed to intermarry.) The Frankings had three children: Nelson, born in the U.S., was an American citizen by right of birth; while Alason and Cecile, born in China, were considered by the U.S. government to be “aliens ineligible for naturalization.” Although the family returned to the United States in 1918, Alason and Cecile would have to wait until 1943 to gain the right of naturalization—despite the fact that their ancestors had fought in the American Revolution. These are just a few examples of the legal injustices faced by mixed (and in this case transnational) families up through the first half of the twentieth century.

Supported by a grant from the ACLS, in 2007 I set out to write a book that would bridge China studies and Asian American studies by comparing ideas concerning Euro-Chinese intermixing, or hybridity, in the U.S. and China between 1842, when China was opened to Western trade, and WW II. As the writing took shape, I realized that this was a story not only about the history of ideas, but also about mixed families and individuals whose lives were shaped by these ideas, and the laws and social proscriptions they informed. I thus went back and did more research: a rare luxury in the academic world. As a result, the manuscript that subsequently evolved also takes up the subject of how mixed families, who faced discrimination from both sides, negotiated their own identities within the constraints and opportunities of their social environments. In keeping with the comparative spirit that first inspired my project, I decided to juxtapose the lived experiences of Eurasians in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, three sites where the “Eurasian problem” became a topic of public discourse…

…Why does it matter for us to gain a more nuanced, less monolithic understanding of the intellectual genealogy of ideas concerning mixed race? The subject of mixed race is particularly germane today with increasing rates of intermarriage in our society. These intermarriages suggest that the old taboos against intermarriage and the barriers between races have diminished in the years since 1967, when the Supreme Court struck down the last of the anti-miscegenation laws. Yet, some of the old presumptions remain. First of all, the very notion of “mixed race,” so frequently celebrated in the contemporary media, entertainment, and advertising industries, relies on the presumption that there are “pure races” to begin with. My research aims to debunk this presumption by adding to the growing scholarship showing intermarriage and intermixing as age-old phenomena, challenging the commonplace certainty by which many feel they can identify those who are “pure Chinese” or “pure white.” Understanding histories of migration, cross-cultural contact, and interracial mixing allows us to see that, in fact, no such groups exist, other than as social and legal constructions, which may vary from country to country, time period to time period…

Read the entire article here.

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Appo Will Serve Six Months

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Law, Media Archive, United States on 2013-03-29 03:31Z by Steven

Appo Will Serve Six Months

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Thursday, 1895-10-03
page 12, column 2
Source: Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection

George Appo, the Chinese half-bred, who obtained notoriety especially through his testimony before the Lexow senate investigating committee, and who pleaded guilty to assault in the third degree in the stabbing of Policeman Michael J. Rein of the West Thirtieth street station on April 9, was this morning sentenced to six months in the penitentiary by Judge Cowing in Part II, New York general sessions.

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Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical [Review by Alan Gomberg]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2013-03-28 21:35Z by Steven

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical [Review by Alan Gomberg]

Talkin’ Broadway
2013-03-27

Alan Gomberg

Much of Todd Decker’s Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical should prove fascinating to readers who have a deep interest in the creation and performance history of this classic, much-revived and -revised musical. Many of those Show Boat devotees probably already have Miles Kreuger’s superb 1977 book, Show Boat: The Story of a Classic American Musical, but Decker goes into more detail on many matters (while going into less detail on some others) so his book is far from being a rehash of Kreuger’s.

Also, the performance history of Show Boat since 1977 has been (to put it mildly) extensive and complex, giving Decker much new history to relate. Still, the most rewarding parts of the book are those that cover earlier productions and the 1936 film version. There is much information here on the major productions from 1927 through the late 1940s that is likely to be new even to those who already know a good deal about Show Boat.

One thing that separates Decker’s book from Kreuger’s is his focus on a sociological theme, as suggested by the book’s subtitle: Performing Race in an American Musical. He writes in his introduction, “My emphasis on race rests equally on definitions of whiteness and blackness. Magnolia and Ravenal perform their whiteness every bit as much as Joe performs his blackness and any actress playing Julie must perform that character’s mixed-race identity, whatever that has meant in particular times and places.” Part of the way in which Decker examines these matters is by discussing in detail the unique contributions of some of the performers in each major production. This extends beyond those who played the characters mentioned above…

Read the entire article here.

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Talkin’ Race with Laura and Wei Ming

Posted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Audio, Identity Development/Psychology, Interviews, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-03-28 13:27Z by Steven

Talkin’ Race with Laura and Wei Ming

The Magic Mulatto: Bringing the fine art of Race Talk straight to the people
2013-03-26

Brett Russell Coleman, Doctoral Student of Community & Prevention Research
University of Illinois, Chicago

“In 1969, we weren’t at war with China.”

If that sentence leaves you perplexed in any way, you need to do two things. First listen to the audio of the conversation I had with Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis

…The second thing you need to do is check out their project, War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, which investigates constructions of mixed heritage Asian American identity in the United States. This is a “multi-platform project (book, traveling art exhibition, website and blog) that examines how, or even if, mixed heritage Asian Americans address hybrid identities in their artwork, as well as how perspectives from critical mixed race studies illuminate intersections of racialization, war and imperialism, gender and sexuality, and citizenship and nationality.”…

Read the article and listen to the interview here.

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Race and the Census: The “Negro” Controversy

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, History, Media Archive, United States on 2013-03-27 02:22Z by Steven

Race and the Census: The “Negro” Controversy

Pew Research: Social & Demographic Trends
Pew Research Center
2010-01-21

D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer

The topic of racial identification on census forms has a long, fascinating history, which has generated fresh debate as the 2010 Census begins. Why, some ask, does the form include the word “Negro,” along with “black” and “African American,” among the options that Americans can choose for their self-identification? Isn’t that term out of date?

As you can see from the review that follows here, racial terms have come in and out of favor from one decade to the next. There was a similar debate about “Negro” in the 2000 Census, as there have been about other race terms in previous census years.

Before 1960, census-takers filled out the enumeration forms and chose the category for each American they counted. They used a detailed set of instructions from the government, key points of which are listed below. The 1960 Census was a transitional year in which census-takers chose the race for some Americans, and others self-identified from a list of categories.  From 1970 to 1990, most Americans filled out their own forms and checked off a race category for themselves. Starting in 2000, they could choose more than one.

When the census began in 1790, the racial categories for the household population were “free white” persons, other “free persons” by color, and “slaves.” Census-takers did not use standard forms in the early censuses.

For 1850-1880, the codes for enumerators were generally white (W), black (B) and mulatto (M). Beginning in 1850, the data item was labeled “color.” In 1870, Chinese (C) and Indian (I) were added. In 1880, the data item was not labeled; it was “whether this person is…” In 1890, “Japanese,” “quadroon” and “octoroon” were added…

Read the entire article here.

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Paralegal claims discrimination by law firm because of mixed-race heritage

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Law, Media Archive, Texas, United States on 2013-03-26 03:36Z by Steven

Paralegal claims discrimination by law firm because of mixed-race heritage

The Southeast Texas Record: Southeast Texas’ Legal Journal
Beaumont, Texas
2013-03-25

John Suayan, Galveston Bureau

HOUSTON – Montgomery County resident Darren Chew claims he was subjected to racial discrimination while working for a collections law firm and has filed a lawsuit.

Recent court papers filed March 15 in the Houston Division of the Southern District of Texas allege Rausch Sturm Israel Enerson & Hornik LLC mistreated Chew because of his mixed heritage.

The plaintiff, whose father is of Chinese descent and mother white, worked as a paralegal/paraprofessional at the time of the events in question.

He states that derogatory racial terminology was often used at the respondent’s office and within the management’s earshot.

According to the suit, Chew was occasionally referred to as a “chink”, “chinaman”, “Uncle Tom” and “cracker”…

Read the entire article here.

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