Mixed Race Studies

Black and Bengali

In These Times
2013-03-02

Fatima Shaik

A new book traces the hidden story of a mixed-race community.

The federal census taker comes every 10 years and, for most people in the United States, this has little consequence. But not where I lived, in New Orleans, just outside the historic district of Tremé. There, people talked to each other about whether to lie to the census taker and which lie to tell, and that conversation produced stories about who had disappeared from us and who had stayed, and what was more important: loyalty or money.

That was the mentality in Creole New Orleans from as far back as I can remember—that is, the 1950s—until recently. The lying, the disappearing, the money and lack of it had everything to do with race.

We were part of a mixed-race community of immigrants and Louisiana natives, and there was no place for us in the data tables of the census or in the mind of a black-and-white America. And yet we existed, for generations. Now, in a thoroughly researched new book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, Vivek Bald traces one vein of our lineage, from a most distant country…

…Racially, the Bengalis confounded the official categories. On documents, they appeared as “white, colored, Negro, Indian and East Indian,” Bald notes. And after their intermarriages to local women of color, their descendants still operated in all of these categories. When I was growing up, people talked on front porches and at kitchen tables about light-skinned family members who “passed” for white and were never seen again. Other people “passed” by simply going across town each day to work in banks, stores and other places where jobs were unavailable to Negroes. Bald notes that some darker-skinned Indians escaped Negro segregation by wearing turbans and calling themselves “Turks” and “Hindoos” while selling their wares, before coming home to their black families.

But the Bengalis in the mixed-race community kept few written accounts of their lives. Bald’s evidence is their footprint in business—restaurants and shops—and their occupations listed in census tables, for example, as countermen, chauffeurs, porters, firemen and subway laborers.

My grandfather became a shopkeeper and lived the rest of his life in the black community of New Orleans. People from around the world melded easily into our location. In the 19th century, Tremé was home to one of the most powerful and liberal communities of free people of color in America, rooted not only in Africa but also Europe, the Caribbean and—I recently learned from a classmate—as far away as New Zealand…

Read the entire article here.

Excursus on “Hapa”; or the Fate of Identity

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 3 (2012): Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature
11 pages

Nicole Myoshi Rabin
University of Hawai‘i, Manoa

When I was growing up the license plate on my mom’s Dodge minivan read: R3HAPAS. My mom explained to my sister, brother, and me that a Hapa was someone like us—part Asian. And, when I was a kid it made me feel special, gave me a sense of pride-in-difference, to be named in that way because in the predominately Jewish part of Los Angeles where I grew up, we were the only three Hapas I knew. In that community, it also offered me a shelter, something “identifiable” and nameable, to combat the questions about my identity. More than twenty years later, from the vantage point of a self-conscious multiracial individual and student of literature and cultural studies at the University of Hawai’i, I have come to separate myself from that license plate. Thinking back to the text of the plate, I see now that the letters—the possessive “R”—were more about my parents than they were about my siblings or me. For my parents, an interracial couple whose own parents refused to attend their wedding, Hapa was a term of empowerment, pride, creation—it embodied their (our) family. For my mother, it also symbolized a link to her memories of summers in Hawai’i. And while my brother and sister still identify as Hapa, and my family and friends identify me that way, I see that hunk of metal on my mother’s car not as my own, but as naming an identity I took on in the past, as her identity for me.

This story of the license plate summarizes some of the contradictions and tensions of the term Hapa. For many people, including my family members and me when I was younger, Hapa is, as Wei Ming Dariotis claims, “a word of power.” It gives individuals a term for a mixed race identity and access to a community of others who claim the same. But Hapa is also a term fraught with contradictions. It is a term that in some ways depends on and produces the very notions it hopes to subvert. It is this space of contradiction that I want to explore through this article. This examination of the term Hapa is crucial at this particular moment in Asian American Literature because there has been a recent rise in the number of conferences, panels, autobiographies, theoretical texts, and various other projects dealing with mixed heritage Asian Americans. May-lee Chai’s Hapa Girl: A Memoir (2007), Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian 100% Hapa (2006), Theresa Williams-Leon and Cynthia L. Nakashima’s The Sum of Our Parts (2001), and Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.’s Dissertation Mexipino: A History of Multiethnic Identity and the Formations of the Mexican and Filipino Communities of San Diego, 1900-1965 (2007) [now a published book] are just a few examples of the literary/cultural productions concentrated on mixed heritage Asian Americans. There have been panels focused on mixed heritage Asian Americans at the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Asian American Association, and American Studies Association over the past few years. And, in Spring 2012 the Transnational Mixed Asians in Between Spaces (TMABS) hosted a symposium at the University of California, Berkeley. These examples demonstrate the growing interest in the Asian American community with issues of mixed heritage. As this concern continues to manifest within our culture, especially within our literature, examinations of terms like Hapa that are used to identify mixed heritage Asian Americans becomes increasingly important…

…Not only is the (self-) recognition of Hapa, as an identity, a means of reproducing the hegemony of monoraces through language; but it also works to reproduce racial hierarchy and stabilize and limit notions of racial identity. In her discussion on the legalization of gay marriage, Judith Butler makes an interesting point about recognition. She concludes that in the matter of recognition, there exists a sort of dilemma. On the one hand, to be outside the realm of recognition is to be disenfranchised in various ways. On the other hand, to become recognized can “lead to new and invidious forms of social hierarchy,” foreclosures, and support for the extension of state power (115). Although Butler is making her point about the foreclosure of the sexual field, the definition of the family and kinship, etc., her notion of the dilemma of recognition holds lessons for multiracial activists, scholars, and other individuals in a similar pursuit. In many ways, Hapa offers recognition (perhaps not state sanctioned) that works against a sense of disenfranchisement as a marginal racial identity in a society where racial identity has come to be one of the major ways in which we are identified and participate in public life. But some scholars, like Rainier Spencer in Reproducing Race, argue that some multiracial individuals, like Hapas, in their move for (self-) recognition are moving towards a position of “honorary whiteness” (108), leading to a “new form” of social hierarchy. In this argument (a version of hybrid vigor), the identification as Hapa works to separate the multiracial individual from his/her constituent “parts” and elevate him/her to a place above the lower-caste monoracial group. Although Spencer’s term, “honorary whiteness” suggests the presumption that Hapa refers to individuals of a white-Asian racial mixture who “elevate” above the monoracial category of Asian, his argument can be extended to non-white/Asian mixes as well. Spencer suggests that taking on a multiracial identity in some ways allows an individual to separate/elevate himself/herself from the racial group that he/she considers of lower privilege—whether that is Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American—as he/she moves toward whiteness, which remains positioned at the top. In this way, the term “honorary whiteness” in relation to Hapas can encompass other variations of mixedness beyond the Asian/white dialectic. And, although Spencer argues that the racial hierarchy is firmly rooted with African Americans on the bottom, I would add that the hierarchy might actually shift in specific contexts for particular individuals. In any case, whether or not “racial” elevation is the intention of the Hapa-identifying-individual, it is a concern that should be recognized and understood so that the multiracial individual can avoid becoming complicit in a racial hierarchy that continues to privilege whiteness…

…Finally, Hapa can work to uphold notions of race and racial essentialism. Multiracial scholars, as well as other race theorists, have long argued about the social construction of race and racial identity. In many Mixed Race Studies contexts, multiracial individuals are said to depict the instability of race and racial categories because of their inability, or determination not, to fit into the monoracial categories. By creating Hapaness as an oppositional category/identity, demanding to be recognized as such, or claiming membership to such a group, Hapas are in some ways (re)stabilizing racial identity in an alternate form. Spencer argues against “the [multiracial] movement’s loud proclamations inveighing against biological race while simultaneously and quite explicitly advocating for federal recognition of a new biological racial identity” (102). He goes on to argue that the construction of a multiracial community/identity “creates new racial subjects while conforming to the preexisting U.S. racial order” (239). While not all Hapa, or other multiracial, groups are advocating for state recognition, Spencer makes an interesting point about the reliance on a biological definition of race and the dependence upon the current racial schema. Even as we consciously recognize race as a socio-historic construction, the definition of Hapa as someone of part Asian descent implies its reliance upon a certain form of biological race, or ethnicity, and its adherence to the current racial order (in this case its dependence on the racial category of Asian/Pacific Islander)…

Read the entire article here.

Am I Enough? A Multi-Race Teacher’s Experience In-Between Contested Race, Gender, Class, and Power

Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
Volume 28, Number 3, 2012
pages 128-141

Sonia Janis, Lecturer of Social Studies Education
University of Georgia

AM NOT WHITE. I am not Black. I am mixed. I am one half Polish, one quarter Russian, and one-quarter Japanese. I was born, raised, and educated in public schools in the suburbs of Chicago, and then abruptly transitioned to public schools located in north Alabama when I was an adolescent. My inquiry explores my mixed race experience of childhood, adolescence, college years, teaching and administration positions, pursuing curriculum studies, and working as a pre-service teacher educator in a predominantly White institution. My inquiry explores the spaces in-between race and place from my perspective as an educator who is multiracial and/or hapa according to the latest race-based verbiage. I search for language to portray the experience of people of mixed race such as myself and come across a long list of such words as: Afroasian, Ainoko, Ameriasian, biracial, Eurasian, Haafu, half-breed, hapa haole or hapa, griffe, melange, mestizo(a), miscegenation, mixie, mono-racial, mulatto(a), multiracial, octoroon, quadroon, spurious issue, trans-racial, and zebra (Broyard, 2007; Murphy-Shigematsu, 2001; Root, 1996a; Spencer, 1999). I find that most of these words, whether they are verbs, nouns, or adjectives, have negative connotations. I use “multiracial,” “biracial,” and “mixed race” interchangeably throughout my writing.

As I reflect on my experience as a seventh grade student, a public school administrator, and now as a pre-service teacher educator in a predominantly White institution, I explore my rememory (Morrison, 1990) of lives in two distinct regions of the United States: the Midwest and the South. Many of the stories take place in the South, a culturally distinct part of the United States with a unique history of race. This history revolves almost exclusively around the interactions between people described by the simplified racial duality of White and Black. Though other races are recognized in the South, the United States, and the rest of the world, the emphasis on the duality of Black and White relations remains poignantly more significant in the Southeastern region of the United States. These Black and White, inevitably racist, relations are still engulfed in the everyday experience of people living in the South resulting in an unexplainable and immeasurable divide. I feel abandoned in a wedge-shaped space in-between Black and White race. As I cross this divide in my social and political surroundings, I find myself back, forth, and in-between this divide, entrenched in a duality that excludes me on a daily, if not hourly, basis, sometimes by force, and other times by choice. Perpetually tying racial tensions exclusively to Black and White races is only one of the ways malpracticed multicultural education, especially in the South, has exploited a liberating theory of multiculturalism. My experiences challenging this divide, personifies how multiculturalism remains marginalized in a confining Black and White duality of the social construction of race. I constantly imagine the spaces beyond Black and White (Seller & Weis, 1997).

Into which category does my experience fit? Does my experience have a category? Is my experience in many different categories? Or is my experience in-between categories? If my experience is in-between, what categories is it in-between? One’s space in-between can be explored by, from, and through the voices of others who experience contradictory spaces regarding race, gender, sexuality, power, ethnicity, and class (e.g., Anzaldua & Keating, 2002; He, 2003, 2010). Recognizing the fluidity of lived experiences, He (2003) unfolded an inquiry into cross-cultural lives of three women living in-between two continents that tried to “make sense of ‘in-betweenness’” (p. 2). He’s (2010) exploration into in-betweenness continues as she delves into her experience as an academic with cultural, geographical, linguistic, and historical awakening in-between exiled spaces. My inquiry explores my experience in a contested space, in-between race and place, as a multiracial female residing in-between the Midwest and the South. Acknowledging lived experience in-between race and place, I hope that other educators are challenged to explore their own undefined experiences along with those of their students…

…As a multiracial educator, who is a proponent of the ideas and theories supporting multiculturalism, I feel anguished to know that I have not encountered any school that facilitates a multicultural space with an understanding of the liberating goal—cultural emancipation—as the driving force. This idealistic, but unmarked, goal of cultural emancipation is one route to problematize the social construction of race, along with its oppressive counterpart—racism. Rather than believing cultural emancipation is a possibility, my experiences reveal that schools view multicultural education as one more thing on their compliance list that they need to demonstrate evidence of completing by the end of each routine school year. Celebrating cultural signifiers, such as food, clothing, customs, and festivals, is a widely utilized practice for fulfilling this requirement (Loutzenheiser, 2003). Is accomplishing the original reasoning, “educational equity for all,” behind adding “multicultural education” to schools’ lists of compliance even considered? I imagine it is added because a stakeholder with financial and/or political power expects multiculturalism to appear on the “highly effective list” without any rationale, just as a mandate. My inquiry is intended to challenge the shallow multicultural practices by revealing how misconceptions of race and culture have disguised themselves as cultural understanding and competence. These embedded and proliferating misunderstandings influence the daily experiences of young people from all cultural backgrounds to their detriment, and ultimately to our society’s damage…

…I encountered a challenge to my beliefs about multi-race studies when I began to read Rainier Spencer’s (1999) ideas. He is boldly critical of multi-race theory, which pushed me to think critically about my own understandings of multiracialism. In his book, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, Spencer (1999) starts: “‘You’re not worried about me marrying your daughter,’ James Baldwin told a White southerner during a television debate. ‘You’re worried about me marrying your wife’s daughter. I’ve been marrying your daughter even since the days of slavery’” (p. 1). This quote re-ignites the reality of White superiority directly into one of society’s most personal, yet significantly political, spaces: marriage. Spencer does not hesitate to be confrontational about how historically oppressive and unreliable notions of multiracialism are, if we are ever to become a society without racism. He discusses how multiracial and antiracial ideologies could disrupt the U.S. racial ordering of society by asking “how can mixed-race or multiracial persons place themselves with consistency and meaning within that system?” (p. 5). The pain and frustration associated with multi-racialism remains as long as the myth of race remains. Spencer believes it is well past time to begin problematizing race categories altogether. He believes we must move away from classifications of people and promotes the ideology that we are all members of the human race…

Read the entire article here.

Sheila K. Johnson on Yokohama Yankee

Los Angeles Review of Books
2013-03-13

Sheila K. Johnson, Anthropologist, Gerontologist, and Freelance Writer

Oh, To Be Japanese!

MANY FOREIGNERS have fallen in love with Japan — its physical beauty, its culture, its people. Most of these foreigners have been men, and some have married Japanese women or taken Japanese male lovers. A few have become naturalized Japanese citizens, but this can be a difficult process unless one happens to be Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), a famous early visitor and explicator of things Japanese who was adopted into his wife’s family, or Donald Keene (born 1922), an equally famous contemporary Japanologist, who became a citizen as an act of solidarity with Japan in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami.

In his book Yokohama Yankee, Leslie Helm tells the story of his part-German, part-Japanese, part-American family from the arrival of his great-grandfather Julius Helm in Yokohama in 1869 to his own adoption of two Japanese children in 1992. Intertwined with this story he recounts the vicissitudes of Japan’s history during this time — two world wars, massive earthquakes in 1923 and 1995, and his own ambivalence about being part Japanese and yet always being regarded there as an outsider, a gaijin.   

It is important to the Helm family story to understand that, until 1987, only children born to a Japanese father and a foreign mother could become Japanese nationals. The American sociologist William Wetherall, who married a Japanese woman and had two children with her, challenged this law because he wanted his children to have Japanese citizenship. After a lengthy legal battle the law was changed by giving the mother’s rights legal status.

Wetherall insists that Japanese citizenship laws have never been racist — as early 20th century American laws denying US citizenship to “Orientals” assuredly were. He argues that Japanese laws were merely rooted in the patrilineal social structure and household registers. But, given that Japan was a virtually monoracial society and enforced the exclusion of Westerners from its shores until the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1854, being a Japanese citizen has been, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as being ethnically Japanese.

In 1869, Leslie Helm’s great-grandfather Julius arrived in Yokohama from Germany. He’d first traveled to the US and briefly tried farming in Montana before taking the transcontinental railroad to San Francisco and then a ship to Japan. Yokohama was just becoming a busy port with ships bringing machinery and manufactured goods from Europe and the US before heading back loaded with silks, tea, and porcelain. Julius Helm quickly saw an opportunity to create a stevedoring and portage company; he soon owned horses, carts, and warehouses, and became a prosperous man. By 1871, he’d sent for two of his brothers from Germany and made them partners, and in 1875 he married his Japanese housekeeper, Hiro, who bore him seven children…

Read the entire review here.

Brown Man and Fiancee Can Not Get Knot Tied

San Francisco Call
Volume 107, Number 106 (1910-03-16)
page 3, column 5
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Unfeeling Goldfield Sheriff Suggests a Hurried Departure

GOLDFIELD, Nev., March 15.—George Masaki, a Japanese gardener, and Juliette S. Schwann, both of Los Angeles, were unable to get a judge to make them man and wife here today. Masaki took out marriage license during the afternoon, but as soon as the sheriff found it out he hunted the couple up and escorted them to the railroad station, where he ordered them not to appear in Goldfield again. This action of the authorities was taken because of unpleasant publicity resulting from a recent case of miscegenation.

The couple took a train to Tonopah. The authorities in Tonopah have been warned.

Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan

Chin Music Press
March 2013
320 pages
Trade Paper ISBN: 978-0-9844576-6-3

Leslie Helm, Author, also Editor
Seattle Business Magazine

Leslie Helm’s decision to adopt Japanese children launches him on a personal journey through his family’s 140 years in Japan, beginning with his German great grandfather, who worked as a military adviser in 1870 and defied custom to marry his Japanese mistress. The family’s poignant experiences of love and war help Helm learn to embrace his Japanese and American heritage.

Yokohama Yankee is the first book to look at Japan across five generations with perspective that is both from the inside and through foreign eyes. Helm draws on his great grandfather’s unpublished memoir and a wealth of primary source material to bring his family history to life.

“I’m not half, I’m whole!”

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2013-04-27

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

“I hate the word ‘half,’ which is used to designate people like me. I always wanted to be someone who is ‘whole.’” The young man raised his eyes to the evening sky and gazed upon the rising moon. It suddenly struck me that Byron and I were like the moon. As we are called “half,” the moon we were looking at is called a “half moon.” But like the moon, “half” is an illusion; there is much more to the moon than what meets the eye and there is much more to us than what people see. Like the moon, we are not half, we are whole…

…When Half is Whole is a book of stories of the developmental journeys of people with mixed ethnic backgrounds. I gathered these stories from individuals in the United States and Asia whose lives blend Asian and American in their families, whether biological or adoptive. The themes of their lives involve balancing, connecting, and finding meaning in their roots. The stories show how they have engaged in the process of becoming not “half” this or “half” that but whole human beings. In searching for their roots, they discover connections that bring them into contact with communities and their journeys engage them in healing themselves and healing others…

Read the entire article here.

Miscegenation: Wedded Bliss Denied to Jap.

Los Angeles Daily Mirror
1910-03-16/1910-03-17

Seeks to Marry Los Angeles Woman in Nevada.

Gets License, But Finally Surrenders It.

Couple Get Cold Shoulders in Two Cities.

(By Direct Wire to the Times)

GOLDFIELD (Nev.) March 16.—[Exclusive Dispatch.] George Masaki, describing himself as a Japanese gardener, accompanied by Juliette Schwan. who admitted to 36 years, both from Los Angeles, appeared at the Courthouse this afternoon and applied to the Sheriff for permission to be married. That worthy referred them to the County Clerk for a license, which was issued after a short pause, and then the candidates for matrimonial chains made a tour of the building in an attempt to induce some of the judges to pronounce them man and wife.

Judge Stevens, who performed the first and only Asiatic marriage in Goldfield, said he would not repeat the experiment, as the feeling over his former action was so intense that he thought it would imperil his chances in the fall election when he will be a candidate for the bench.

The Sheriff sent out for the Justice of the Peace, who refused to be inveigled into the former marriage, but that officer, when he learned the object of the visit, told the waiting couple that they would have to go elsewhere.

By this time a large crowd had gathered at the Courthouse, and it began to look unpleasant for the prospective bridegroom.

Finally the under sheriff spoke to Masaki and told him it was against the law to perform marriages between whites and Japanese. Masaki was induced to surrender his license, the money was refunded and the pair were rushed into a closed carriage and taken to the depot where a Tonopah suburban train was about to pull out. They were shoved aboard as the whistle blew, and the telephone was used to advise Tonopah of the coming

Tonopah gave the couple a chilly reception as an advance canvass had been made of the town and every judicial officer and clergyman was pledged not to officiate. Masaki on his arrival trudged up town with his bride-elect a hundred paces in the rear.

The first stop was at a Chinese restaurant, where the pair took their supper, and then they adjourned to a cheap lodging-house where they rented rooms for the night.

Afro-Chinese Wedding

San Francisco Call
Volume 78, Number 147 (1895-10-25)
page 4, column 2
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

STOCKTON, Cal., Oct. 24.—Chu Gun, a local Chinese sport, was to-day married to Irene Wilson, a dashing octoroon girl. The entire population of Chinatown celebrated the affair this evening.

Becoming Mexipino: A Book Event with Rudy Guevarra Jr.

California State University, Fullerton
Langsdorf Hall 402 (Map)
Thursday, 2013-04-25, 16:00-17:30 PDT (Local Time)

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

Becoming Mexipino is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California from 1900-1965. Rudy Guevarra Jr. traces their earliest interactions under Spanish colonialism, when they did not strongly identify as Mexican or Filipino, to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century San Diego as well as in other locales throughout California and the Pacific West Coast.

This event is sponsored by the Department of African American Studies and Humanities & Social Sciences. For more information, please contact Dr. Edward Robinson.