Mixed Race Studies

“The Face Is the Road Map”: Vietnamese Amerasians in U.S. Political and Popular Culture, 1980–1988

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 14, Number 1 (February 2011)
pages 33-68
E-ISSN: 1096-8598; Print ISSN: 1097-2129

Jana K. Lipman, Assistant Professor of History
Tulane University

During the 1980s, U.S. politicians and the media presented Vietnamese Amerasians as quintessential Americans who could be brought home rather than as foreigners or as immigrants. However, Amerasians were non-white immigrants and their rights to enter the United States intertwined with debates over immigration restriction and the ongoing search for American Prisoners of War. The popular emphasis on Amerasians’ American “look” resulted in a discourse which valued whiteness, and sometimes blackness, at the expense of Vietnamese mothers and Asian identities. This article argues how Amerasian immigration policies re-inscribed hierarchies of race and sexuality grounded in the history of Asian exclusion.

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Miengun’s Children: Tales from a Mixed-Race Family

Mrs. Jessie W. Hilton of Albuquerque, N.M., who summers at her cottage Mi-en-gun Walszh (Wolf’s Den) in Northport, was hostess at 5:00 o’clock Wednesday at Schuler’s of this city honoring Mrs. C. Stuker of Oak Park, III., house guest of her sister, Mrs. Basil Milliken of Oklahoma City, Okla., summer resident at Northport.

Traverse City [Michigan] Record Eagle, July 7, 1954

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Numbers 2/3, Intermarriage and North American Indians (2008)
pp. 146-185
DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0016

Susan E. Gray, Associate Professor of History
Arizona State University

At the time of this gathering of summer society in a northern Michigan resort town, Jessie Milton was eighty-nine years old. For more than fifty years, she had been a summer resident of Northport, on the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, north and west of Traverse City, leaving her home in Oklahoma City every June and returning from Michigan in October, events noted in the society pages of newspapers in both places. The only break in this pattern occurred in 1947, when she moved from Oklahoma City to her daughter’s house in Albuquerque, from which she continued to commute each summer to the Leelanau. Despite Jessie’s social standing, however, her annual pilgrimages differed from most sojourns of the genteel and well-heeled to northern Michigan. Twice divorced, she was long accustomed to supporting herself, and she ran a shop in Northport during the summer tourist season, selling Indian handicrafts and pies that she made from the cherries for which the Traverse region is famous. The silverwork for sale at the “Cherry Buttery” came from New Mexico, but the sweet grass and split ash baskets were the work of local Odawa and Ojibwe people, some of whom Hilton had known far longer than she had been summering on the Leelanau. Indeed, the annual arrival of Jessie Hilton, society matron and purveyor of Indian handicrafts, at the Wolf’s Den signaled the complexity and fluidity of a mixed-race identity that she, like her twelve brothers and sisters, had spent a lifetime negotiating.

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Hybrid Knowledge

History Workshop Journal
Published online 2011-02-25
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbq062

Anna Winterbottom, Tutorial Fellow in Early Modern History
Sussex University, Brighton, England

The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820, ed. Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, James Delbourgo; Science History Publications, Sagamore Beach MA, 2009; 552 pp.; 0-88135-374-4.

As the editors of this volume note, the terms ‘broker’ and ‘go-between’ tend to evoke back-room introductions and the shuffling of suspicious papers, rather than the traditionally triumphal images of Enlightenment knowledge. The people who embodied the global connections through which information flowed between cultures have only relatively recently become a focus of English-language scholarship. This is in part the legacy of dualistic conceptualizations of race, empire and science in Anglo-American colonial discourse. In an imagined world divided between black and white, ruler and ruled, modern and traditional, scientific and emotional, rational and spiritual, the people or ideas that crossed boundaries posed not only an administrative headache, but also a threat to the cosmic order. A rejection of the idea of mixing, physically or intellectually, also came from many of those who opposed colonialism. For example, Anglo-Indians were generally sidelined rather than celebrated in the Indian independence movement. Writing from a colonial gaol, Nehru argued that despite the efforts of a few more enlightened individuals, opportunities for cultural, social and scientific exchange were deliberately quashed and that European and Asian systems of knowledge remained more or less separate.  During the colonial period, therefore, people who crossed the borders of knowledge, like those who transgressed racial categories, were characterized on all sides as untrustworthy and potentially treacherous.

In Spanish, Portuguese and French, the words for the intermingling of cultures and those who are the agents of this process have a longer history of academic discussion and cultural politics. While fears concerning the dangers of cultural and racial…

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More Hawaii residents identify as mixed race

USA Today
2011-02-24

William M. Welch

Hawaii, the nation’s most ethnically diverse state, has seen a big increase in residents identifying themselves as being of mixed race, according to Census data released Thursday.

Among adults 18 and older, those saying they are of two or more races rose 31% from 2000 to 2010. They make up 18.5% of the state’s adult population.

Among all ages, the increase of those citing two or more races was 23.6%. Overall, almost one in four Hawaii residents are of mixed race.

Residents citing some Asian heritage make up 57.4% of the state’s population. Their numbers grew by 11%, though other ethnic groups grew more rapidly.

Sarah C. W. Yuan, a demographer at the University of Hawaii’s Center on the Family, said the racial trends reflect growth and acceptance of multiracial marriages and an increased willingness of people to claim more than one racial identity. She said the decline in people identifying with one race only, from 78.6% in 2000 to 76.4% in the 2010 Census, was expected.

“Hawaii’s population has been more diverse over the years,” she said. “There are many multiracial marriages, so we do see two-or-more-race groups increase over the years.”

Hawaii’s overall population grew 12.3% to 1.36 million…

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Black, Red and Proud: An Interview with Radmilla Cody

The Root
2011-02-22

Cynthia Gordy

Radmilla Cody’s crowning as Miss Navajo Nation in 1997 triggered an outcry and a conversation about what it means to be Native American. Now she’s featured in a museum exhibit showing the rarely told history of African-Native Americans.

In a 1920 edition of the Journal of Negro History, Carter G. Woodson observed, “One of the longest unwritten chapters in the history of the United States is that treating of the relations of the Negroes and the Indians.” [See: C. G. Woodson, “Negroes and Indians in Massachusetts,” Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, Number 1 (January 1920).]

“Red/Black: Related Through History,” a new exhibit at Indianapolis’ Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, illuminates this rarely told story. Since the first arrival of enslaved Africans in North America, the relationships between African Americans and Native Americans have encompassed alliances and adversaries, as well as the indivisible blending of customs and culture.

“It’s not received a lot of attention because it’s not the dominant culture’s story, although it’s very important to the dominant culture’s bigger view of the past,” says James Nottage, curator of the exhibit, which includes narratives of enslaved blacks who traveled the Trail of Tears with their Native owners; slaves who intermarried into Native tribes as an escape from bondage; and the largely African-featured members of the Shinnecock tribe of New York, as well as shared traditions in food, dress and music…

…Cody, also the subject of a 2010 documentary, Hearing Radmilla, talked to The Root about growing up both black and Navajo, and how she handles frequent “Wow, you don’t look Indian” comments.

The Root: The experience of having your Miss Navajo Nation reign challenged calls to mind the debate over the Cherokee Freedmen. Is this a common issue across the Native community, of African-Native Americans having trouble finding acceptance?

Radmilla Cody: I grew up having to deal with racism and prejudices on both the Navajo and the black sides, and when I ran for Miss Navajo Nation, that especially brought out a lot of curiosity in people. It’s something that we’re still having to address as black Natives, still having to prove ourselves in some way or another, because at the end of the day, it all falls back to what people think a Native American should look like.

But there’s been many times when people have said to me, “Oh, my great-great-grandmother was an Indian.” I’ll ask them if they know what tribe, and they don’t. It’s very important because in order to be acknowledged as a tribal member, you have to be enrolled. So I can see where Native people are protective about defining who’s a tribal member, and are questioning of people claiming Native ancestry…

…TR: What does that preparation entail, exactly? I understand it’s not a typical pageant.

RC: Basically you’re tested on your knowledge of the Navajo government, the culture, the stories, the songs and the Navajo philosophy of life. You’re tested on butchering a sheep and making fry bread and other traditional foods of the Navajo people. It usually lasts about a week. What separates our pageant from the Miss USA pageant is the bikini—we don’t have a swimsuit category!…

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Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America [Review: Daniel]

Contemporary Sociology
Volume 22, Number 3 (May 1993)
pages 381-382

Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America, by Paul R. Spickard. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 532 pp. cloth ISBN: 0-299-12110-0. paper ISBN: 0-299-12114-3.

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

As an ethnohistory conversant with sociological discourse, Paul Spickard’s Mixed Blood is not only a valuable resource for both historians and sociologists specializing in race and ethnic relations but also a welcome change from traditional social science litera- ture on this topic. These previous studies, by seeking to construct generalizable models from quantitative data, unfortunately have not taken into account the nuances of personal experience and subtleties of space and time. In Spickard’s study, however, intermarriage emerges as a multivariate historical process of attitudes and behavior which are derivative of not only intergroup, but also interpersonal, dynamics, as illustrated by the author’s rich anecdotal sources.

The main portion of Mixed Blood is devoted to a comparative study of the intermarriage patterns of Jewish, Japanese, and African Americans. This choice allows Spickard to highlight important contemporary variations in the strength of pluralism and integration, that is, the persistence and permeability of boundaries of gender, race, culture, ethnicity, and class as they relate to the pretwentieth century history of each of the three groups. Spickard’s analysis of the intergenerational increase in out-marriage by Jewish Americans, for example, clearly indicates that the boundary which formerly might have marked an intermarriage is less distinct than it had been among European- Americans from different ethnocultural backgrounds…

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Multiracial: Border Crosser: Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu navigates nations, cultures and academia

Nichi Bei: A mixed plate of Japanses American News & Culture
2010-05-20

Akemi Johnson

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu is looking again toward Japan.

A psychotherapist, writer and academic, Murphy-Shigematsu has lived in Palo Alto, Calif. the past eight years, teaching at Stanford University and running an independent multicultural consulting practice. Life in the Bay Area, he says, is easy for someone like him, the son of an Irish American man and Japanese woman. Conflict—tensions associated with being mixed race—is rare.

This wasn’t always the case. Early in his career, Murphy-Shigematsu, who was born in Tokyo in 1952 and raised in Massachusetts, faced questions about his legitimacy working in Asian American studies. In 1984 he began an internship at the National Asian American Psychology Training Center. One of the first people who welcomed him there said, “So, you’re interested in working with Asian Americans?”

“That really threw me,” Murphy-Shigematsu said. The other man saw him as an outsider to the workshop, whereas Murphy-Shigematsu viewed himself as an insider, a fellow Asian American.

Or there was the time in the late ’80s when Murphy-Shigematsu spoke to an Asian American studies class at San Francisco State University.

“Are you Asian?” the students asked.

“Why do you ask?” Murphy-Shigematsu replied.

“Because you don’t look Asian,” they said.

At academic conferences, Murphy-Shigematsu would stand out physically, and some people would regard him with an attitude of “Why are you here?”

An influential figure for Murphy-Shigematsu during that time was Lane Hirabayashi. Hirabayashi, a noted mixed-race Japanese American scholar, had advocated using the word “hapa,” and claiming the right to self-define, instead of being labeled by well-intentioned others. Impressed with this, Murphy-Shigematsu sought out Hirabayashi…

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More students identifying as multiracial

Collegiate Times
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)
2011-02-17

Sarah Watson, News Reporter

More students pursuing a secondary education identify themselves as multiracial or multiethnic.

Students across the nation and in the Virginia Tech community are checking the box “two or more races” when filling out college applications. However, this increase is not based on more opportunity for multiracial students, a new categorization system for race or any other preconceived ideas alone.

Multiracial and multiethnic movements are not a new phenomenon, according to Wornie Reed, director of the center for race and social policy research.

“This has been going on for some time,” Reed said, adding that multiracial movements have been occurring for the past three decades. 

Reed said the moments were part of a new social context “that race is not a biological construct, but a social construct — but it doesn’t make it any less real.”

According to Ray Williams, director of Tech’s multicultural programs and services, the increase of students identifying themselves as multiracial or multiethnic has been influenced by the post-Civil Rights movement era that encapsulates our society.

“People are more comfortable coming out and saying that they are either one thing or another, or a mix,” Williams said…

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Civil War Fires Up Literary Shootout

The New York Times
2009-07-29

Michael Cieply

LOS ANGELES — History repeats itself. But sometimes it needs a little polishing up from Hollywood.

Over the last few weeks, the writers of a pair of Civil War-era histories about the anti-Confederate inhabitants of Jones County, Miss., have been trading barbs in an unusual public spat. It began when the author of one book, rights to which had been sold to Universal Pictures and the filmmaker Gary Ross, discovered that Mr. Ross had spurred the publication of a new and somewhat sexier work on the same subject.

The encounter has created unexpected bad blood over incidents that occurred—or not—more than 100 years ago. And it offers a glimpse of the way that show business and its values have become entwined with the academic book world and its decision-making process.

On June 23 Doubleday published “The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy,” a narrative history by the Harvard scholar John Stauffer and the Washington Post writer Sally Jenkins. The book, which on Monday was ranked No. 83 on Amazon’s best-seller list, presented Newton Knight, the leader of the renegade county, as a morally driven hero in the mold of John Brown—but whose appeal was enhanced by his romance with an ex-slave who, in the book’s account, became the love of his life as relations with his white wife cooled.

In the book’s acknowledgments, the authors thanked Mr. Ross, who they said had brought the idea to their editor, Phyllis Grann at Doubleday, and whose screenplay had served as “our impetus and our inspiration.”

This all came as a surprise to Victoria Bynum, a history professor at Texas State University, San Marcos. Her own book on the subject—“The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War”—had been published eight years earlier by the University of North Carolina Press, which sold the film rights to Universal as material for Mr. Ross’s project in 2007…

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Blurring the color line: the new America

The Tufts Daily
Medford, Massachusetts
2011-02-22

Sylvia Avila

Students identify as multiracial more than ever before

Once considered a black and white issue, racial identity is hazier than ever.

According to findings released in June 2010 by the Pew Research Center, the current generation of American college students is the most multi−racial in history. One out of every 19 children born in the United States is the product of parents of different races or ethnicities and one out of every seven marriages today is between people of different races or ethnicities—a particularly noteworthy statistic considering interracial unions were illegal in some states as recently as 1967.

But the marked expansion in numbers brings unique complexities to the lives of mixed−race Americans. Issues can range from the trivial—indicating racial background on documents—to the critical, such as why and how to self−classify one’s race. President Barack Obama, perhaps the most prominent individual of mixed descent in the world, considers himself African−American rather than biracial.

Senior Jeewon Kim said that he doesn’t face a dilemma when asked about his race on paperwork.

“Nowadays you can always do multiple ones, so I always put ‘Caucasian/White’ and ‘Asian−American,’ and specifically ‘Korean’ if it lets me,” he said.

Kim explained that he has been at peace with his dual identity since high school…

…According to Lecturer in Anthropology Cathy Stanton, the reversal of the stigmatization of multiracial identity has been a long time coming.

“It seems like social thinking about this has finally come around to reflecting that fact and a lot of people are just saying, race doesn’t work for me as a category to capture who I am,” Stanton said.

Kim sees the potential for greater awareness of the distinctions and similarities both within and between racial groups.

“I hope that it means that there will be less ignorance… The question of ‘who are you?’ is more complicated than guessing it by sight and you would actually have to stop and learn something about that person,” he said.

Stanton, however, is less optimistic.

“If we’re in a moment where socially people are saying, ‘I don’t need the construct of race anymore to describe who I am politically and in a broader social context,’ are we at a point where we can stop talking about it?” she said. “Probably not, because of the historical injustices and divisions and hierarchies are still in place and their effects are still in place.”

Professor of Sociology Susan Ostrander expanded upon these inequalities.

“Research shows that individuals who are perceived to be black or Latino (whether they actually are or not) get fewer call−backs on job interviews, are arrested more often, have shorter life expectancies, are less likely to go to college,” Ostrander said in an e−mail to the Daily. “You can’t stop any of those events by shouting, ‘But I’m not really black. I’m half−white!'”…

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