Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-race Koreans urge identity rethink

The Korea Herald
2011-12-07

Kirsty Taylor

Things have come a long way since the 1970s when mixed-race Koreans here were spat upon and beaten up for being different.

The kids of that time, whose fathers were often foreign soldiers who first came here during the Korean War, used to find it hard to walk down the street for fear of discrimination.

These days, the Korean government and charities are investing heavily in programs to support multicultural families and overt discrimination against Amerasians is rare.

But African-American Korean Yang Chan-wook, who goes by his Korean name here rather than his western name of Gregory Diggs, said that small daily occurrences remind him that this society does not yet fully accept him.

“In the 1970s these kids could not go to school, but even now, mixed-race Koreans going into public schools have a pretty high dropout rate,” he said.

“Sometimes when I am on the bus people will look at me and if they think that I am not Korean they will not sit next to me or they will move when I sit down. This kind of thing is still existent. Also, it can be difficult to get people to stop speaking English with me. Even if I have been speaking in Korean with them for 20 minutes they will still try to speak in English as if they thought I could not understand…

…After living with this prejudice, Yang started the M.A.C.K. Foundation (Movement for the Advancement of the Cultural diversity of Koreans) upon returning in 2003, basing it on a similar mission started in Chicago in 1995…

Read the entire article here.

Crossing Lines: Praxis in Mixed Race/Space Studies: Proposal Deadline

Crossing Lines: Praxis in Mixed Race/Space Studies
2012-03-16 throught 2012-03-17
University of California, Berkeley

Co-Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender and Ethnic Studies Department

Call for Proposals – Deadline: 2012-01-15

In traditional Ethnic Studies, mixed race scholarship has often been marginalized, misappropriated, tokenized or simply left out. In order to allow for a collaborative environment given the need for more critical scholarship on the experiences of mixed race people, in Fall 2009, a group of graduate students at UC Berkeley formed the inter-disciplinary working group at the Center for Race & Gender, Transnational Mixed Asians In-Between Spaces (TMABS). The goal of the working group is to to create a safe space for scholars to discuss issues of mixed race identity and also to provide a venue for those doing work in this area to present developing ideas and projects. Furthermore, the working group seeks to expand the notion of mixed race to include other factors such as culture and space. Overall, it is our intent to encourage and promote research on mixed race/culture in Ethnic Studies and bring together scholarship from multiple disciplines to collaborate on future research areas.
 
The co-founders of TMABS are: Kevin Escudero, Joina Hsiao, Ariko Ikehara and Julie Thi Underhill, doctoral students in the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley.
 
In Spring 2012, we will host our inaugural conference entitled, “Crossing Lines: Praxis in Mixed Race/Space Studies.” The conference will take place March 16-17th at the UC Berkeley campus and will include panels, film screenings, poetry performances and an art exhibit. We are currently seeking submissions that are of any of the following genres: academic papers, art work, poetry and/or film and that address the theme of emerging and future discourses in mixed race studies…

For more information, click here.

Some Asians’ college strategy: Don’t check ‘Asian’

The Associated Press
2011-12-04

Jesse Washington, National Writer/Race and Ethnicity

Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.

“I didn’t want to put ‘Asian’ down,” Olmstead says, “because my mom told me there’s discrimination against Asians in the application process.”

For years, many Asian-Americans have been convinced that it’s harder for them to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges.

Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these colleges’ admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the U.S. population, and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission. Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.

The way it works, the critics believe, is that Asian-Americans are evaluated not as individuals, but against the thousands of other ultra-achieving Asians who are stereotyped as boring academic robots.

Now, an unknown number of students are responding to this concern by declining to identify themselves as Asian on their applications.

For those with only one Asian parent, whose names don’t give away their heritage, that decision can be relatively easy. Harder are the questions that it raises: What’s behind the admissions difficulties? What, exactly, is an Asian-American — and is being one a choice?…

…Susanna Koetter, a Yale junior with an American father and Korean mother, was adamant about identifying her Asian side on her application. Yet she calls herself “not fully Asian-American. I’m mixed Asian-American. When I go to Korea, I’m like, blatantly white.”

And yet, asked whether she would have considered leaving the Asian box blank, she says: “That would be messed up. I’m not white.”

“Identity is very malleable,” says Jasmine Zhuang, a Yale junior whose parents were both born in Taiwan…
…Steven Hsu, a physics professor at the University of Oregon and a vocal critic of current admissions policies, says there is a clear statistical case that discrimination exists…

Hsu, the physics professor, says that if the current admissions policies continue, it will become more common for Asian students to avoid identifying themselves as such, and schools will have to react.

“They’ll have to decide: A half-Asian kid, what is that? I don’t think they really know.”…

Read the entire article here.

Anglo-Indian Identity, Knowledge, and Power: Western Ballroom Music in Lucknow

The Drama Review
Volume 48, Number 4 (Winter 2004)
Pages 167-182
DOI: 10.1162/1054204042442053

Dr. Bradley Shope, Assistant Professor of Music
Texas A&M Universtity, Corpus Christi

From the 1920s to the 1940s, Anglo-Indians relished Western popular music. For this marginalized group, this music was a way of promoting respectability. And though the music mimicked styles from America and Europe, its celebration was distinctly local.

Beginning in the first half of the 20th century, Western ballroom and dance music began to make its way into Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, as well as other cities in North India. It was imported via gramophone disks, radio broadcasts, and sheet music coming from Europe and America. In the 1930s, an increasing number of dance halls, railway social institutes, auditoriums, and cafes were built to cater to a growing number of British and Americans in India, satisfying their nostalgia for the live performance of the foxtrot, the tango, the waltz, the rumba, big-band music, and Dixieland. Influenced by sound and broadcast technology, sheet music, instrument availability, the railway system, and convent schools teaching music, an appreciation for these styles of music was found in other communities. Especially involved were Portuguese Goans and Anglo-Indians, defined here as those of European and Indian descent who were born and raised in India. For these two groups, it served to assert their identities as distinct from other South Asians and highlighted that their taste for music reached beyond the geographical boundaries of India. Numerous types of media, institutions, and venues contributed to this vibrant Western music performance culture in Lucknow in the early 20th century. James Perry, an elderly Goan musician, and Mr. John Sebastian and Mr. Jonathan Taylor, two elderly Anglo-Indian ex-railway workers, were involved in its performance and appreciation. By drawing from multiple field interviews in North India conducted with these individuals between 1999 and 2001, and by describing the character of the performance culture, I will highlight the role of music in creating socioeconomic mobility and a distinct identity among Anglo-Indians in Lucknow, and address issues of power relations and colonialism with reference to the consumption of the music.

Just before and during World War II, Lucknow was considered a strategic military defense location because of the fear of bombing campaigns in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) by the Japanese military. A large portion of the Allied Eastern Command was moved inland and established in Lucknow to counter…

Read or purchase the article here.

Le métissage dans l’œuvre indochinoise de Marguerite Duras

McGill University, Montreal
2006
106 pages

Elisabeth Desaulniers

Mémoire soumis à l’Université McGill en vue de l’obtention du grade de Maître ès arts (MA) en langue et littérature françaises

This dissertation focuses on the issue of hybridity in Marguerite Duras’ corpus of Indochinese texts, as well as on the meeting of identities in the colonial realm. In order to identify the problematics of colonial coexistence, we will address the themes of the encounter between the Orient and the Occident, the use of hybrid discourse and the role of memory in the process of rewriting. Edward Said’s Orientalism theory as well as Homi Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence in colonial discourse will serve as the basis for the analysis of the Indochinese cycle. Far from being a totalizing experience, hybridity will reveal itself as being a harrowing dichotomy.

Read the entire thesis (in French) here.

Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific

University of Nebraska Press
2012-06-01
504 pages
1 illustration
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-3795-7

Edited by:

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies
DePaul University

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe

The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented migration and interaction for Asian, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultures in the Americas and the American Pacific. Some of these ethnic groups already had historic ties, but technology, migration, and globalization during the twentieth century brought them into even closer contact. Transnational Crossroads explores and triangulates for the first time the interactions and contacts among these three cultural groups that were brought together by the expanding American empire from 1867 to 1950.

Through a comparative framework, this volume weaves together narratives of U.S. and Spanish empire, globalization, resistance, and identity, as well as social, labor, and political movements. Contributors examine multiethnic celebrities and key figures, migratory paths, cultural productions, and social and political formations among these three groups. Engaging multiple disciplines and methodologies, these studies of Asian American, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultural interactions explode traditional notions of ethnic studies and introduce new approaches to transnational and comparative studies of the Americas and the American Pacific.

Racial Realities: Social Constructs and the Stuff of Which They Are Made

Global Dialogue
Volume 12, Number 2 (Summer/Autumn 2010)—Race and Racisms

Eric C. Thompson, Associate Professor of Sociology
National University of Singapore

How can we deny the reality of race? It is a truth so many hold to be self-evident. Travel around the world, from Asia to Africa to Europe to South America: people look different in different places. Travel about in major global cities—Singapore, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, London—and physical diversity is close at hand. It would seem absurd to argue that the visible differences so apparent to our sight are socially constructed. Physiological differences—skin tone, eye shape, hair texture and the like—are not the outcome of our human imagination. The material reality of physiological differences grounds racial categorising. It is used as a point of reference and point of realisation to assert rhetorically the undeniable truth of any given scheme of racial categorisation.
 
The purpose of this article is to emphasise the error of such assertions. I aim also to point out the weakness of arguments for the “social construction” of race, which too often undermine their own case by denying the material reality of visible difference. I outline instead a way to incorporate the material reality of biological difference into an understanding of race as a social construct. My argument is simply this: biological difference is the material out of which our concepts of race are fashioned. These concepts are as many and varied as the diverse cultures of human societies around the world. In the case of race and other identities—such as ethnicity, gender and class—our social constructs are not fashioned out of thin air but out of material conditions. This said, the material conditions do not determine what we make of them—what we construct socially—any more than wood determines the myriad things a woodworker or craftsman might make out of a piece of timber.
 
In the first section of this article, I want to emphasise the socially constructed nature of “race”, “ethnicity” and similar concepts. The idea that race is a sensible way to talk about the material reality of biologically inherited diversity continues to reappear in new forms despite our best efforts to teach students and colleagues about its socially constructed nature. The attempt to depoliticise such concepts, to make them function as objective categories in the service of science or medicine, is a fraught undertaking. Race and ethnicity are deeply political categories, as many investigations into the historical circumstances of their social construction demonstrate. I will discuss this history in general ways in the case of the United States and in some greater detail in the internationally less well-known case of Malaysia, with the development of the concepts of bangsa in Malay and minzu in Chinese, which map varyingly and imperfectly onto the English terms “nation”, “race” and “ethnic group”. The imperfection of translation across Malay, Chinese and English itself demonstrates the tenuous relationship between these signifiers of types of peoples and the various extra-linguistic referents—of biology and culture—through which attempts are made to ground and reify such concepts as “race” and “ethnicity”.
 
But I also wish to move beyond this by now well-worn understanding of the social construction of “race”, “ethnicity” and similar concepts. The problem with social constructionist arguments, usually raised to try to dismiss racial, ethnic and other identities as ephemeral, is that they generally have no answer to the naive—though by no means foolish—realist reference to the difference and diversity of physical features, thought and behaviour which seem so true and apparent. There are people who look different from one another in patterns we map onto “racial” difference and who act differently in ways we attribute to cultural or ethnic difference. In response, I want to provide a means by which to take this sensible reality (i.e., a reality apparent to our senses) into account, to bring it into our understanding of the social construction of race, ethnicity and the like, while still maintaining the argument that biology and culture by no means determine such categories. Rather, biology and culture merely provide the raw materials from which we socially construct ideas of difference and community. As with raw materials out of which we fashion buildings or clothing, the materials we rely on have some bearing on the structures we build or the fashions we weave out of them, but they do not determine the form of the final products, let alone the uses to which we put them…

…Compare this to the United States. Barack Obama is widely considered to be America’s first “black” president. The default categorisation of racial identity in America, with Obama and others, is to classify individuals of “mixed” white and minority parentage as belonging to the minority category. In Singapore, by contrast, racial classification is a patrilineal inheritance: at birth, a child’s race is recorded as being that of the father. In the United States, President Obama is considered black or African American primarily on a biological, not a cultural, basis. But while physical appearance derived from biological inheritance may be the main touchstone of race in America, and cultural traits may be the main standard for race (or ethnicity) in Malaysia, in both countries these two race signifiers are also greatly conflated and combined. Obama, for instance, has been scrutinised for his language, mannerisms, sports preferences and, most prominently and perversely, his religious affiliations, all as a measure of how “black” or how “American” he is. Similarly, in Malaysia, although “Malay”, “Chinese” and other racial categories are associated more strongly with cultural traits, including language and religion, than with biological traits, the latter are frequently invoked when it suits a particular cause. For example, the former long-serving prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, known as a vocal proponent of the Malay community and head of the politically dominant United Malay National Organisation, was nevertheless alleged by some political opponents to be of paternal Indian biological lineage and therefore not to be a “real Malay”…

Read the entire article here.

Faking It: Poetics & Hybridity: Critical Writing 1984-1999

NeWest Press
Spring 2000
288 pages
Paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-896300-07-8

Fred Wah

According to Fred Wah, the act of thinking critically is one of exploration and discovery. In Faking It, Wah demonstrates how writing poetry is writing critically. This scrapbook of Wah’s work—collected from fifteen years of his writing—contains essays, reviews, journals, notes and, most importantly, poetic improvisations on contemporary poetry and identity. Faking It was written between 1984 and 1999—during major shifts in critical thinking and cultural production—and the hybrid style of the book is an apt reflection of these changing times, as well as a reflection and study of Wah’s own hybrid identity.

Diamond Grill (10th Anniversary Edition)

NeWest Press
Fall 2006
208 pages
paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-897126-11-0

Fred Wah

This story of family and identity, migration and integration, culture and self-discovery is told through family history, memory, and the occasional recipe.

Diamond Grill is a rich banquet where Salisbury steak shares a menu with chicken fried rice, and bird’s nest soup sets the stage for Christmas plum pudding; where racism simmers behind the shiny clean surface of the action in the cafe.

An exciting new edition of Fred Wah’s best-selling bio-fiction, on the 10th anniversary of its original publication, with an all new afterword by the author and the same pagination as the original publication.

The Other Loving: Uncovering The Federal Government’s Racial Regulation of Marriage

New York University Law Review
Volume 86, Number 5 (November 2011)
pages 1361-1443

Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis

This Article seeks to fill a gap in legal history. The traditional narrative of the history of the American racial regulation of marriage typically focuses on state laws as the only sources of marriage inequality. Overlooked in the narrative are the ways in which federal laws also restricted racially mixed marriages in the decades before 1967 (when the Supreme Court invalidated antimiscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia). Specifically, during the American occupation of Japan after World War II, a combination of immigration, citizenship, and military laws and regulations led to restrictions on marriages along racial lines. These laws also converged to prevent married couples, many of whom were White American soldiers and local Japanese women, from living in the United States together. Accordingly, this Article claims that the confluence of immigration, citizenship, and military laws functioned as a collective counterpart to state antimiscegenation laws.

By unearthing this neglected history, this Article seeks to deepen the conventional account of the public regulation of mixed marriages. As the Article reveals, racial barriers to marriage were far more pervasive than previously acknowledged. Contrary to the familiar chronicle, racial restrictions on marriage occurred through federal laws, were enforced by federal officials, took place beyond state borders, and effected distinct harms on interracial couples whose experiences have largely escaped legal and scholarly inquiry. Recovering this lost history thus provides a more complete story of antimiscegenation regulation. Moreover, it draws attention to the largely undertheorized role that immigration law played in preventing interracial marriages and provides insight into contemporary debates on federal involvement in marriage regulation.

• INTRODUCTION
• I. FEDERAL EXCLUSION OF RACIALLY INADMISSIBLE WIVES
  • A. The Conventional Narrative of Antimiscegenation History
  • B. The Story of John and Helene Bouiss
  • C. Bonham v. Bouiss: Between Wife and Country
• II. DISENTANGLING THE FEDERAL ANTIMISCEGENATION REGULATORY SCHEME
  • A. Citizenship Law and Race
  • B. Immigration Law, Racial Inadmissibility, and Construction of a White Nation
  • C. Military Marriage Regulations
• III. THE CONVERGENCE OF FEDERAL LAWS FACILITATED BARRIERS TO INTERRACIAL MARRIAGES ABROAD
  • A. The War Brides Act
  • B. Immigration Inadmissibility as a Basis for Denying Marriages to Japanese Spouses
  • C. Immigration Law’s Bar Against Racially Inadmissible Wives
• IV. BOUISS AS THE OTHER LOVING
  • A. Bouiss and the Amendments to the War Brides Act
  • B. Congressional Recognition and Remedy of Obstacles to Interracial Marriages
• V. THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE FEDERAL ANTIMISCEGENATION REGULATORY SCHEME
  • A. Immigration Law’s Promotion of White Supremacy Through Marriage Restrictions
  • B. Extraterritorial Antimiscegenation Regulation
  • C. Country and Citizenship Versus Wives and Children
  • D. Mixed-Race Children and Lack of Citizenship
• VI. CONTEMPORARY IMPLICATIONS
• CONCLUSION

“Except under very unusual circumstances, United States military personnel, and civilians employed by the War Department, will not be granted permission to marry nationals who are ineligible to citizenship in the United States.”

—U.S. Army, Circular No. 6

INTRODUCTION

On May 9, 1946, Helene Emilie Bouiss, a half-Japanese, half-German woman, and her husband, John Bouiss, a White American soldier, arrived in Seattle, Washington, aboard a military ship. The two were newlyweds, married by the captain of the ship just days before landing in Seattle. Their decision to marry prior to coming to the United States was significant. This is because six months earlier, Congress had passed the War Brides Act of 1945 (War Brides Act), which conferred on persons who were serving or who had served in the U.S. military the right to sponsor the expedited admission of their spouses to the United States. Thus, Helene‘s marriage to John, an honorably discharged soldier, provided the basis for her entry into the country. Or so they thought…

…D. Mixed-Race Children and Lack of Citizenship

One of the most compelling and troubling aspects about the deployment of immigration and citizenship law in the restriction of overseas marriage was the effect that the inability to marry in Japan had on the children of American soldiers. Children of American-Japanese couples, like their counterparts in the United States, faced discrimination in Japan and were considered inferior because of their mixed racial background. As the Supreme Court noted in Loving, bans against interracial marriage were rationalized as helping to prevent “obliteration of racial pride” and a “mongrel breed of citizens.” Mixed children evidenced the “corruption of blood” that would have destroyed the “quality of . . . [Virginia’s] citizenship.” Indeed, such fear compelled a judge in Louisiana to refuse to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple as recently as October 2009. According to the judge, “[t]here is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage.” Ample scholarship has been devoted to the various social and legal problems that confronted mixed-race children. These problems included the illegitimate status of children whose parents were legally prohibited from marrying.

The federal regulation of interracial marriage similarly led to a generation of out-of-wedlock children in Japan, who were referred to as “GI babies,” “Occupation babies,” or “half-half babies.” As already explained, many American soldiers were prohibited from marrying their Japanese girlfriends. Other couples chose to marry without the military’s approval. In both situations, the relationships lacked the official recognition of a valid marriage. As a result, children of these American-Japanese couples were considered illegitimate. To be sure, the precise numbers of illegitimate Occupation babies whose parents either unsuccessfully sought to marry or married without the official approval of the military are unknown. Indeed, one scholar noted that the U.S. military prohibited both military and Japanese officials from conducting a census of Occupation children…

Read the entire article here.