Mixed Race Studies

In ‘Black Lotus,’ Author Sil Lai Abrams Explores Search For Racial Identity

Here & Now
WBUR 90.9 FM, Boston, Massachusetts
2016-08-03

Sil Lai Abrams, author of “Black Lotus: A Woman’s Search for Racial Identity.” (Courtesy of Che Williams)

When Sil Lai Abrams was a child, her white father and her Chinese mother explained her dark skin and curly hair were a result of her Hawaiian birthplace. But when she was 14, her father told her that her biological father was a black man.

Abrams struggled for years to figure out just who she was, and tells her story in the new memoir “Black Lotus: A Woman’s Search for Racial Identity.” Abrams joins Here & Now’s Eric Westervelt to talk about the book…

Listen to the interview here. Read an excerpt from the book here.

Multiracialism and Its Discontents: A Comparative Analysis of Asian-White and Black-White Multiracials

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
July 2016
178 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/4
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4985-0975-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4985-0976-3

Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York

This book addresses the contemporary complexities of race, racial identity, and the persistence of racism. Multiracialism is often heralded as a breakthrough in racial reconciliation; some even go so far as to posit that the U.S. will become so racially mixed that racism will diminish. However, this comparative analysis of multiracials who identify as part-Asian and part-White and those who identify as part-Black and part-White indicates vastly different experiences of what it means to be multiracial. The book also attends to a nuanced understanding of how racism and inequality operate when an intersectional approach of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation is taken into account. It takes a focused look at how multiracialism is shaped by racism, but ultimately reveals a broader statement about race in the U.S. today: that there is no post-racial state and any identity or movement that attempts to address racial inequality must contend with that reality.

Contents

• Chapter 1: Multiracialism: A New Era
• Chapter 2: A Historical Primer: Asians and Blacks in the United States
• Chapter 3: The Synthesis of a Multiracial Identity
• Chapter 4: Seeing Racism, Responding to Racism
• Chapter 5: White Enough and Salient Blackness
• Chapter 6: The Matrix: Complicating the Color Line
• Conclusion: Multiracialism and Its Discontents
• Epilogue: Multiracials Give Advice
• Appendix: Participants in the Study

Three Takeaways from Interviewing 110 “JewAsian” Couples and Kids

The ProsenPeople: Exploring the world of Jewish Literature
Jewish Book Council
2016-07-18

Helen Kiyong Kim, Associate Professor of Sociology
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

Noah Samuel Leavitt, Associate Dean of Students
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

Helen Kiyong Kim and Noah Samuel Leavitt are the coauthors of JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest Jews. With the release of their book earlier this month, the couple is guest blogging for Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

We have always acknowledged that what drew us to the research that would become the foundation of our book, JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest Jews, started from personal questions based on our own experiences and relationship. When we began our project in 2008, Helen was pregnant with our first child. We were in the throes of trying to figure out not only diapering, sleeping, and feeding a newborn but also how we would raise our child to navigate and contribute to a very complex world. We were curious how other couples— JewAsian because of racial, ethnic, and sometimes religious difference—were figuring out, in light of these types of differences, how to sustain and nurture a marriage and family.

Fast forward to the present: our son Ari (almost 8) and daughter Talia (almost 5) challenge us every day with their endless curiosity and argumentative demeanor. We often find ourselves at a loss for words in their midst, particularly when it comes to in-the-moment questions and statements about identity, whether racial, ethnic, religious, or all three. But then we remember that we talked to roughly one hundred and ten individuals whose own experiences have taught us a great deal about how to think about the challenges we experience every day in our own family.

What have we learned about our own family by writing a book about families like ours? Here are a few takeaways:…

Read the entire article here.

A Letter From Young Asian-Americans To Their Families About Black Lives Matter

Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed
National Public Radio
2016-07-27

Shereen Marisol Meraji, Reporter

Kat Chow, Digital Journalist

In the Facebook Live video streamed earlier this month by Diamond Reynolds after her fiance, Philando Castile, was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in a Minnesota suburb, Reynolds identified the man who shot Castile as “Chinese” as she narrated the scene.

It was later understood that Castile was shot by Jeronimo Yanez, who is Latino. In the meantime, Reynolds’ testimony gave Christina Xu, a 28-year-old Chinese-American ethnographer who lives in New York City, flashbacks to earlier this year, when many Asian-Americans around the country protested the prosecution and conviction of Peter Liang, the Chinese-American cop who shot and killed Akai Gurley in a dark stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project in 2014…

The protesters said Liang was being treated as a scapegoat at a time of heightened focus on police shootings of unarmed black people, pointing out that white law enforcement officials involved in several high-profile cases in recent years have not faced similar consequences.

For Xu, and other younger Asian-Americans who have shown support for the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-police brutality causes, this was disturbing. “To me, clearly justice is about getting justice for these black families,” Xu says. “Not about making sure that Asian people have the same privilege as white people.”…

Listen to the podcast here. Read the article here. Read the transcript here.

The stories of the ‘War Brides’ of Japan need to be told

International Examiner
Seattle, Washington
2016-07-21

Yayoi Lena Winfrey

One day in the early 1980s, my Japanese mother took my sister and me to an International District gift shop. A middle-aged Japanese American man working there glanced briefly towards us, before turning away apathetically. His body language seemed to indicate a reluctance to wait on us. I looked at my mother and, without the necessity of my uttering a single word, she said, “He not like me.”

Then, pointing at us, her two half-black daughters, she declared in her broken English, “He see I have you two. He know I am war bride.”

Even though I’d heard her use that phrase before, I knew it was not something she was proud to be called. As I stood there reflecting, I realized my mother meant that the Japanese American man didn’t like the fact that she had obviously married someone outside of her race, likely an American G.I. But the irony was he wasn’t living in Japan. Might not the Japanese in that country have considered him as much a traitor for living in America as he thought my mother was for marrying a non-Japanese? Or maybe it wasn’t the same if you left your home country, but married someone of the same ethnicity. I’ve often wrestled with those thoughts in the decades following that 1980s incident.

In the case of Japanese “war brides” like my mother, women who wedded American military men, they were guilty of both marrying an outsider and leaving their country. Considered disloyal by some Japanese nationals for wedding their former enemies, they were also considered disloyal by some Japanese Americans for marrying Americans that were not Japanese. It’s a complicated issue that my documentary War Brides of Japan will address. I also want to eradicate the stigma attached to the term “war bride,” often fallaciously interchangeable with “prostitute.”…

Read the entire article here.

A JewAsian July 4th

The ProsenPeople: Exploring the world of Jewish Literature
Jewish Book Council
2016-07-22

Helen Kiyong Kim, Associate Professor of Sociology
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

Noah Samuel Leavitt, Associate Dean of Students
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

Earlier this week, Helen Kiyong Kim and Noah Leavitt determined the three takeaways on raising Jewish-Asian families worth sharing from their research for their coauthored book JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest Jews. They are blogging for Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

The publication of JewAsian, coming just prior to the 4th of July holiday, provides a unique lens through which to observe the United States and try to learn about the state of our nation in 2016. Indeed, the way that young mixed-race Jews think about themselves allows us to make larger observations about our society.

On one hand, we are in the hot season of a mean-spirited presidential campaign in which race and diversity are focal points for voters’ anger and activism. On the other, on this final Independence Day during the administration of America’s first mixed-race President, the multicultural cast of Hamilton is on magazine covers and red carpet runways, challenging us to think in new ways about our nation’s founding story and current identity. Moreover, the United States Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold the University of Texas affirmative action admission plan reminds us that we cannot avoid taking race into consideration when we attempt to describe America.

Writing JewAsian helped us confront the central role that race plays for the young people at the center of our investigation. Like our nation, our mixed-race Jewish interviewees feel both the stress and the optimism of their complex identities…

Read the entire article here.

Meet Anthony Ocampo, the Professor Who Wrote a Book on Why Latinos and Filipinos are Primos

Remezcla
2016-07-12

Kevin Nadal

Anthony Ocampo

As one of the few Filipino American psychology professors in the US, it can get lonely. I am the only Filipino American professor on my campus and one of the few tenured Filipino American professors in New York City (and on the East Coast in general). When I first started writing about Filipino American issues over a decade ago, I found myself constantly fighting with scholars (especially peer reviewers) who argued that I should concentrate on issues affecting the pan-ethnic Asian American community, instead of focusing specifically on Filipino Americans. Whenever I wrote journal articles or essays, I always had to explain who Filipino Americans were – outlining colonial history, phenotypical appearances, and socioeconomic experiences in the US. I relied on interdisciplinary readings because there was so little written about Filipino Americans in social sciences. I turned to Latinx and Black American mentors, who validated my feelings of marginalization within the Asian American community. And I was fortunate to work with one Chinese American mentor who encouraged me to pursue my interests in writing about Filipino American Psychology.

While there have been several amazing Filipino American scholars who have emerged across multiple disciplines in the past ten years or so, it is still a rarity to see a Filipino American professor — in a tenure or tenure-track position — who studies issues of concern for Filipino American people. In fact, in a study that I conducted with Dr. Dina Maramba in 2010, we found that there were only 113 tenured or tenure-track Filipino American professors in social sciences, education, and humanities in all of the U.S. As a reference point, there are 45 full-time professors in my Psychology Department alone (mostly white) and 415 full-time professors on my campus with 15,000 students. So, to only have a little over 100 Filipino American full-time professors in the US across these disciplines (when there are over 4 million Filipino Americans in the US), is both disproportionate and unfortunate.

Because of all of this, I was so excited when I first learned about Dr. Anthony Ocampo and his research on deconstructing race for Filipino Americans. Dr. Ocampo is a tenure-track assistant professor of sociology at Cal Poly Pomona. His first book, The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race describes how Filipino Americans’ experiences with race and racism is influenced by social context (e.g., friendships, neighborhoods and communities, or even school environments). His research answers many of the questions that I had when I was first a student trying to understand Filipino American identity- unpacking issues related to Spanish and American colonialism, whether or not Filipinos are “Asian enough”, and whether or not Filipinos should continue to be classified under this pan-Asian umbrella…

Read the entire article here.

FACING FORWARD: A Panel Discussion on Mixed-Race/Ethnic Japanese Americans and Community

Japanese American Service Committee of Chicago
4427 N. Clark Street
Chicago, Illinois 60640
2016-07-19, 18:30-20:00 CDT (Local Time)

The Japanese American Service Committee Legacy Center Presents A “Memories of Now” Seminar Series Presentation

Co-sponsored by the Chicago Japanese American Historical Society (CJAHS) and the Japanese American Citizens League – Chicago Chapter (JACL-Chicago)

Featured Panelists:

• Jackie Keiko Denofrio
• Laura Kina
• Erik Matsunaga
• Christine Munteanu

For more information, click here.

Book Review: Loop of Jade

Never Imitate: Trying to avoid society’s pigeonholes
2016-07-11

Jackie Law

Loop of Jade, by Sarah Howe, is the author’s debut poetry collection. It includes explorations of family, history, migration and inheritance. Within each work is an inherent restlessness tinged with longing. History, fable, Chinese culture, and modern life are skilfully woven together.

“Something sets us looking for a place. Old stories tell that if we could only get there, all distances would be erased.”

Howe was born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, moving to England as a child. Her experience of living with dual roots seeps through…

Read the entire review here.

JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest Jews

University of Nebraska Press
July 2016
198 pages
6 tables, 1 appendix
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-8565-1

Helen Kiyong Kim, Associate Professor of Sociology
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

Noah Samuel Leavitt, Associate Dean of Students
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

In 2010 approximately 15 percent of all new marriages in the United States were between spouses of different racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, raising increasingly relevant questions regarding the multicultural identities of new spouses and their offspring. But while new census categories and a growing body of statistics provide data, they tell us little about the inner workings of day-to-day life for such couples and their children.

JewAsian is a qualitative examination of the intersection of race, religion, and ethnicity in the increasing number of households that are Jewish American and Asian American. Helen Kiyong Kim and Noah Samuel Leavitt’s book explores the larger social dimensions of intermarriages to explain how these particular unions reflect not only the identity of married individuals but also the communities to which they belong. Using in-depth interviews with couples and the children of Jewish American and Asian American marriages, Kim and Leavitt’s research sheds much-needed light on the everyday lives of these partnerships and how their children negotiate their own identities in the twenty-first century.