Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-Race Celebrities on Race, in their Own Words

Time Magazine: Healthland
2011-02-15

Meredith Melnick, Reporter and Producer

Who Are You?

If biracial and multiracial celebrities have anything in common, it is that they are often asked to explain themselves. That may sound familiar to any person of mixed ancestry for whom questions like “What are you?” and the slightly more delicate “Where are your parents from?” are the norm.

“Historically, racism is equated with segregation, separating people,” says Marcia Alesan Dawkins, a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. “In turn, we think racial progress is racial mixing. But the problem is, [that progress is] still based on appearance.”

People who embody racial diversity can’t be expected to explain the concept to everybody else, but their thoughts on the matter are often illuminating. As Dawkins said, “It’s still important to bring issues of multiracial identity to the public’s attention.”…

Read the entire article here.

Asian American Studies: Building Academic Bridges – Nitasha Sharma

The Department of African American Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois
October 2010

Ronald Roach

NITASHA TAMAR SHARMA Title: Assistant Professor of African-American and Asian American Studies, Northwestern University Education: Ph.D., Anthropology, University of alifornia at Santa Barbara; M.A., Anthropology, University of California at Santa Barbara; B.A., Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz Age: 35

With a dual appointment in the African-American Studies department and the Asian American studies program at Northwestern University, Dr. Nitasha Sharma is well positioned to produce scholarship that bridges the two disciplines. Sharma’s forthcoming book, based on her anthropology dissertation, Claiming Space, Making Race: South Asian American Hip Hop Artists, examines the influence that African-American-inspired hip hop culture has had on young musicians of South Asian descent, developing what some scholars see as fertile ground in ethnic studies—cross-cultural and comparative inquiry on U.S. racial and ethnic groups.

In her third year as an assistant professor at Northwestern, Sharma is regarded as a skillful and popular teacher. Her courses have included “The Racial and Gender Politics of Hip Hop”; “Race, Crime, and Punishment: The Border, Prisons, and Post-9/11 Detentions”; and “Cracking the Color Lines: Asian and Black Relations in the U.S.” Sharma has also done considerable work on mixed-race populations, including those in the U.S. and Trinidad. The African-American Studies department has awarded its Outstanding Teaching Award to Sharma in both her first and second years.

In addition, Sharma’s dual appointment has attracted the attention of Asian American studies scholars as well as Asian American student groups nationally and has resulted in numerous speaking engagements for the young professor. “(These individuals and organizations) really want to have the framework to understand the collaborations that my appointment symbolizes,” she says…

…“Nitasha is especially attractive in the way that she complicates our understanding of how race is constructed… And she is very good at demonstrating the impact of African-American culture and history on diverse populations around the globe,” Hine adds.

Sharma’s personal background may help explain her rise as a young scholar. She knew as a youngster growing up in Hawaii that she wanted to follow in the footsteps of her parents, both professors. Her father, a retired University of Hawaii history professor and Indian immigrant, and mother, a still-active University of Hawaii anthropologist in Asian studies and Brooklyn, N.Y., native of Russian Jewish descent, met and married in the United Kingdom and settled in Hawaii. “I wanted the life that my parents had. They had summers off and traveled around the world; they were frequently at home during the week days… The talk at the dinner table was largely about academic life and their work,” Sharma says…

Read the entire article here.

‘Land of our Mothers’: Home, Identity, and Nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India, 1919–1947

History Workshop Journal
Volume 54, Issue 1
pages 49-72
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/54.1.49

Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London

This paper explores the symbolic and material intersections of home, identity and nationality for Anglo-Indians (previously known as ‘Eurasians’) in the period between the Montague Chelmsford Reforms and Indian Independence. Community claims for a legitimate heritage were articulated through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and were closely tied to political attempts to gain a legitimate stake in national life. The paper examines public debates about home, identity and nationality with reference to the two main Anglo-Indian leaders of the twentieth century, Henry Gidney and Frank Anthony. While a British imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, political debates about home, identity and nationality largely erased the figure of an Indian maternal ancestor and instead focused on Mother India and on the domestic roles of Anglo-Indian women. The political recognition of both women and the home was an attempt not only to domesticate Anglo-Indian women, but also to domesticate a new national identity that regarded India more than Britain as home. But the home life of Anglo-Indians remained more British than Indian and political attempts to foster national loyalty to India as motherland were contested on a domestic scale. The mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was thus both manifested and erased in public debates about the future and status of the community.

…This paper is about India as ‘land of our mothers’ at a time when questions of home, identity and nationality were bound together in complex and contested ways for Anglo-Indians and other minority communities in India. Through my focus on a distinct community of mixed descent, I examine the ways in which national identity was embodied in gendered and racialized ways that reflected and reproduced a dual affiliation to both Britain and India as home. Community claims for a legitimate heritage were articulated through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and such claims were closely tied to political attempts to gain a legitimate stake in national life. For this reason, I analyse public debates about home, identity and nationality, drawing on political representations by Anglo-Indian leaders and on articles and letters published in the Anglo-Indian Review. I focus on the period from the Montague Chelmsford Report of 1919, which laid the foundations for Indianization in government employment and political representation, to independence in 1947. This also allows me to contrast the policies of the two main Anglo-Indian leaders of the twentieth century. Henry Gidney led the community from 1919 until his death in 1942, when he was succeeded by Frank Anthony, who served as president of the [All-India Anglo-Indian Association] AIAIA and as a nominated member of parliament representing community interests from 1942 until his death in 1993. Rather than render spaces of home as more symbolic than actual in forging a national identity, I argue that political attempts to foster a greater national loyalty to India as motherland rather than Britain as fatherland were contested on a domestic scale. Anglo-Indian homes continued to be imagined as more British than Indian despite political attempts by Gidney and Anthony to identify the community as a nationalist minority. Rather than explore the home merely as a feminized space, I am interested in how it also came to be shaped by a masculine imperial heritage. While a British imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, political debates about home, identity, and nationality largely erased the figure of an Indian maternal ancestor and instead focused on Mother India and on the present and future political roles of Anglo-Indian women within and beyond the home. While ideas of home and identity were potent sites in shaping ideas of nationality, the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was thus both manifested and erased in public debates about the future and status of the community…

Read the entire article here.

Anglo-Indians in Hollywood, Bollywood and Arthouse Cinema

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (February 2007)
pages 55-68
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082939

Glenn D’Cruz, Senior Lecturer of Performance Studies
Deakin University, Australia

Apart from a few disparaging remarks about offensive stereotypes by Anglo-Indian writers and politicians such as Gloria Jean Moore, Frank Anthony and Gillian Hart, critics have paid very little attention to the representation of “mixed-race” Anglo-Indians in the cinema. Drawing on screen theory and recent theories of cinema spectatorship, this essay provides a comparative analysis of how Hollywood, Bollywood and arthouse films represent Anglo-Indians. More specifically, it analyses three paradigmatic films: Bhowani Junction (1956), Julie (1975), and 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981). Combining formal analysis of narrative structure, mise-en-scne and genre with historical analysis, the paper examines the ideological work performed by these texts, which use Anglo-Indians to dramatise specific political conflicts in India such as those generated by the British partition of India in 1947 and the more recent issue of globalisation.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Other Hafu of Japan

Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanses Daily News
2011-01-14

Brett Fujioka, Rafu Intern

A new documentary examines the lives of racially mixed individuals as they explore their own identities.

Is a ship the same if you take it apart piece by piece and replace its frame? No simple answer exists, as anyone who has tackled this philosophical Rubik’s cube knows.

The ethno-national equivalent to this riddle grows exceedingly more complicated with the swelling number of international unions each year. Statistics in 2004 chart that 1 in 15 marriages in Japan were international and that 1 in 30 children born there possesses a parent of non-Japanese descent. Japan’s ethnic constituency is rapidly changing and its people may need to rethink what it means to be Japanese in a country where blood and national identity are considered one and the same.

The same applies for the hafu (mixed Japanese) community. The lives for each individual half-Japanese vary from person to person and the filmmakers for the upcoming documentary, “Hafu,” and their subjects best represent this.

“Hafu” is the tentative title for an upcoming documentary in Japan following the lives of several half-Japanese individuals as they explore their identities.

Both Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi spent most of their lives away from Japan. Takagi is half Spanish and stayed in Madrid, Sydney, Washington D.C., and Ottowa due to her diplomat father’s itinerant career. She eventually completed her higher education at the Francisco de Vitoria, Complutense and Waseda Universities before finally returning to Japan.

Nishikura, likewise, lived her childhood spread throughout the world. She stayed in Beijing, Manila, Honolulu, DC, Berlin, London, and Los Angeles and graduated from New York University.

“Lara and I have unusual stories and come from international backgrounds,” said Nishikura in an interview with the Rafu. “I don’t know if that’s representative of a lot of the mixed Japanese community.”

There’s a reason why they’re so hesitant to pinpoint a grand narrative for the hafu experience. There is no all-encompassing hafu story and the eclectic subjects of the documentary are indicative of this…

Read the entire article here.

The Hapa Project: How multiracial identity crosses oceans

UH Today
University of Hawai`i
Spring 2007

Alana Folen and Tina Ng

Hawai`i—often overlooked as nothing more than a scenic paradise—recently started to live up to its “melting pot” reputation when a U.S. senator representing Illinois formally announced his presidential candidacy. With personal ties to Hawai`i, Sen. Barack Obama inadvertently put Hawai`i in the spotlight.   

It was his physical appearance that separated Obama from his competitors. Obama is hapa. His father was black and from Kenya; his mother was white and from Kansas. His unique look brought attention to the hapa population in Hawai`i.

Although the growing population of hapa people is beginning to get recognized, their experiences in Hawai`i and the continental United States vary from each individual. The cultural implications of having multiple identities have surfaced and more hapa people have needed to defend who and what they are…

Read the entire article here.

Crossing borders, erasing boundaries: Interethnic marriages in Tucson, 1854-1930

University of Arizona
392 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3398995
ISBN: 9781109735864

Salvador Acosta

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of History In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate College The University of Arizona

This dissertation examines the interethnic marriages of Mexicans in Tucson, Arizona, between 1854 and 1930. Arizona’s miscegenation law (1864-1962) prohibited the marriages of whites with blacks, Chinese, and Indians—and eventually those with Asian Indians and Filipinos. Mexicans, legally white, could intermarry with whites, but the anti-Mexican rhetoric of manifest destiny suggests that these unions represented social transgressions. Opponents and proponents of expansionism frequently warned against the purported dangers of racial amalgamation with Mexicans. The explanation to the apparent disjuncture between this rhetoric and the high incidence of Mexican-white marriages in Tucson lies in the difference between two groups: the men who denigrated Mexicans were usually middle- and upper-class men who never visited Mexico or the American Southwest, while those who married Mexicans were primarily working-class westering men. The typical American man chose to pursue his own happiness rather than adhere to a national, racial project.

This study provides the largest quantitative analysis of intermarriages in the West. The great majority of these intermarriages occurred between whites and Mexicans. Though significantly lower in total numbers, Mexican women accounted for large percentages of all marriages for black and Chinese men. The children of these couples almost always married Mexicans. All of these marriages were illegal in Arizona, but local officials frequently disregarded the law. Their passive acceptance underscores their racial ambiguity of Mexicans. Their legal whiteness allowed them to marry whites, and their social non-whiteness facilitated their marriages with blacks and Chinese.

The dissertation suggests the need to reassess two predominant claims in American historiography: first, that Mexican-white intermarriages in the nineteenth-century Southwest occurred primarily between the daughters of Mexican elites and enterprising white men; and second, that the arrival of white women led to decreases in intermarriages. Working-class whites and Mexicans in fact accounted for the majority of intermarriages between 1860 and 1930. The number of intermarriages as total numbers always increased, and the percentage of white men who had the option to marry—i.e., those who lived in Arizona as bachelors—continued to intermarry at rates that rivaled the high percentages of the 1860s and 1870s.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• ABSTRACT
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: ARIZONA’S MISCEGENATION LAW AND THE VULNERABILITY OF ILLICIT MARRIAGES
• CHAPTER 2: THE DISCOURSE OF MANIFEST DESTINY AND THE MEXICAN QUESTION
• CHAPTER 3: UNDERMINING MANIFEST DESTINY: AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES
• CHAPTER 4: THE MEXICAN QUESTION REACHES ARIZONA
• CHAPTER 5: INTERMARRIAGES IN TUCSON, 1860-1930
• CHAPTER 6: MARRIAGES BETWEEN MEXICANS AND NON-WHITES
• CHAPTER 7: MARITAL EXPECTATIONS: PROPERTY, NETWORKS, AND VIOLENCE AMONG INTERETHNIC COUPLES
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• REFERENCES

LIST OF FIGURES

• Figure 5.1. Interethnic unions for men and women of white ancestry and men and women of Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Figure 5.2. Average number of years by which men were older than their interethnic partners, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Figure 5.3. Occupations of men involved in interethnic relationships, excluding those listed as retired or with no occupation, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Figure 5.4. White man-Mexican woman couples versus other kinds of interethnic unions between whites and Mexicans, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Figure 5.5. Interethnic unions involving white, Mexican, and mixed (white-Mexican) men and women, 1930. N=279
• Figure 5.6. Ethnic background of the spouses of men of white-Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1900-1930
• Figure 5.7. Ethnic background of the spouses of women of white-Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1900-1930
• Figure 5.8. Mexican (M) and white (W) households as a percentage of total households in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: white 53.6%, Mexican 36.7%)
• Figure 5.9. Interethnic couples as a percentage of all couples in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: 7%; 228 of the 236 couples were between Mexicans and whites)
• Figure 5.10. Mexican-white couples as a percentage of all couples involving people of white ancestry in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: 12%)
• Figure 5.11. Mexican-white couples as a percentage of all couples involving people of Mexican ancestry in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: 18.2%)
• Figure 5.12. Geographic distribution of Mexican households, 1930. N=2304
• Figure 5.13. Single white women as percentage of the total population, United States and Tucson, 1870-1930
• Figure 5.14. Single white women sixteen years and over as a percentage of the total population in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: n=574 or 2.8%, average age=26.6 years; nationwide for whites: 4.9%)
• Figure 5.15. Probable marital status of white men in endogamous relationships, Tucson, 1910. N=927
• Figure 5.16. Percentage of interethnic unions for white men according to probable marital status when residing in Arizona, Tucson, 1910
• Figure 5.17. Probable marital status of foreign white men involved in endogamous relationships, Tucson, 1910. N=166
• Figure 5.18. Percentage of interethnic unions for foreign white men according to probable marital status when residing in Arizona, Tucson, 1910
• Figure 6.1. Distribution of black and Chinese residents per census district, Tucson, 1930. Citywide: 484 black men (BM), 477 black women (BW), 152 Chinese men (CM), and 60 Chinese women (CW)
• Figure 7.1. Charges cited in divorce petitions of intermarried couples, Pima County, 1873-1930

LIST OF TABLES

• Table 1.1 Interethnic unions involving blacks, Chinese, Mexicans, and descendants of these combinations, Pima County, 1860-1930
• Table 5.1. Population, couples, and single men and women, Tucson, 1860-1880
• Table 5.2. Interethnic couples as percentages of all couples, Tucson, 1860-1880
• Table 5.3. Population, households, and single white women, Tucson, 1900-1930
• Table 6.1. Black men and women and interethnic couples, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Table 6.2. Chinese immigrants to the United States by decade, and Chinese residents in Tucson by census year, 1870-1930
• Table 6.3. Chinese adult residents and interethnic couples, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Table 6.4. Chinese men sixteen years old and over, Tucson, 1880-1930
• Table 6.5. Racial classification for people of Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1930
• Table 7.1. Intermarriages and divorce cases among intermarried couples, Pima County, 1873-1930

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Chinese in the Caribbean [Book Reveiw]

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2005)
8 paragraphs
ISSN 1547-7150

Kathryn Morris

Andrew R. Wilson, Editor. The Chinese in the Caribbean. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2004, xxiii+230 pp.

The Hakka are a migratory people. We move outwards on the tides of history. Most of us have relatives in Surinam, Panama, the British West Indies, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and other parts of South-east Asia. After several more generations in Canada, will it still be significant that we sojourned for a few generations in Jamaica? For now and as far we can see, that is how we identify ourselves and that is also how we are perceived by the wider Canadian community . . . In this generation we became part of a North American community, with significant concentration in Miami, New York, Toronto and other U.S. and Canadian cities and even London, England, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan.

—Patrick A. Lee, Canadian Jamaican Chinese 2000.

Culturally, the signifier “Chinese” in the Caribbean context has evolved into a broad term that encompasses the latest group of emigrants to the region; the hyphenated (Trinidadian, Jamaican, etc.), third- or fourth-generation, mixed-ancestry Chinese; and the countless members of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora who are still “on the move.” Toronto, home to a large population of people who define themselves as Chinese—insert Caribbean country here—Canadian, has become a major center for Chinese Caribbean diasporan activity aimed at maintaining connections to the Caribbean and to China. For example, Patrick Lee’s work, excerpted above, presents pictorial and narrative histories of Jamaican Chinese families spanning five generations; Lee’s work pays tributes to his father, Lee Tom Yin’s earlier work, Chinese in Jamaica (1957), which commemorated the 100-year anniversary of the Chinese arrival in Jamaica. Reaching further out into the world, the celebrity of Jamaican reggae artist Sean Paul, who claims Chinese among his ancestors, has put the Chinese-Caribbean connection in the international spotlight. This substantial community is now a dragon with a foot on every continent and is growing in size and visibility. Andrew R. Wilson’s The Chinese in the Caribbean, which begins with the statement, “The macro-historical significance of Chinese emigration [since the 1830s] is undeniable,” is the latest publication to bring critical attention to this Caribbean and global phenomenon (vii).
 
The Chinese in the Caribbean is a collection of eight essays that together provide a fairly detailed overview about the Chinese presence in the Caribbean. Divided into three parts—The British West Indies, Cuba, and Re-Migration and Re-Imagining Identity—this book manages to be accessible to those seeking introductory information on the topic, and yet detailed enough for scholars to engage in topical research.
 
Read the entire reveiw here.

Chinese America and the Multiracial Family

Chinese American Forum
Special Edition (June 2004)
pages 15-19

Amy Klazkin

This week my husband and I sold our second car. We live in the city, and we don’t need two, so we listed the car on an internet forum and got lots of responses. The first and most enthusiastic was from a young woman named Meilin Gee. She said she would come over at 2:00 on Sunday to see the car and give it a test drive. Without even thinking about it, we had constructed a mental picture of what someone named Meilin Gee would look like, when, at two sharp, the doorbell rang. We opened the door and saw a young, attractive, intelligent, and friendly African American woman: Meilin Gee. She doesn’t look it, but her dad’s Chinese.

This is the changing face of America. Where I live, we use the Hawaiian term hapa for mixed-race people. When I walk down the street with my Chinese daughter, who does not look even a tiny bit like me, people in San Francisco usually assume that my husband is Asian and she is hapa. She attends the Chinese American International School, where a third of the kids are hapa. Contrary to the stereotype that only Chinese American women marry whites, about half of the biracial kids at her school have white moms and Chinese dads. Some mixed-race kids look Caucasian, others look Asian, others look mixed. But what all the children learned way back in preschool is that kids and parents don’t have to match visually. And that’s been a wonderful thing for my daughter, because it normalizes multiracial families and creates an environment of acceptance for difference within a family as well as within a community…

Read the entire article here.

Student director tackles ‘mixed race’ issues

Daily Titan
California State University, Fullerton
2009-05-17

Sean Belk

From hapa to mestizo to mulatto, ‘Half ‘n’ Half’ acts out stories and history of miscegenation. Bright colorful faces peered through shadows of the low-lit set.

The multi-cultural group of student actors then formed a circle, surrounding an infant, and simultaneously shouted, “What would it be like to shake someone’s hand and not know what they are?”

Then, the set went dark.

It was a small 30-minute production, but the subject matter touched on a big topic that some feel has gone under-reported – the aspect of growing up as two races and the discrimination that can go along with it.

The short sketch was part of the Cal State Fullerton Theatre and Dance Department’s Spring 2009 One Act performances, May 8 and 15 in the Arena Theatre, where advanced directing students presented short plays they had been working on throughout the semester for an audience of friends, family and faculty.

“Half ‘n’ Half,” an adaptation from a 1998 compilation of essays written by 17 writers and edited by Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn, was the only play with an original script adapted from a book. The play was partly written and directed by Lissa Supler, a 25-year-old senior theatre directing major.

Half Filipino and half caucasian, Supler wanted to both share her experience on the subject of being a “mixed race” and also educate people about the history of miscegenation, a term once used to describe interracial marriages that were illegal in the United States until a Supreme Court ruling in 1967…

Read the entire article here.