Mixed Race Studies

Obama & The Biracial Factor Book Release & Roundtable Discussion

Richard Oakes Multicultu​ral Center-SF State Student Center
1650 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco, California
2012-04-05, 16:00-18:00 PDT (Local Time)

Join book contributors, Dr. Robert Collins, Dr. Wei Ming Dariotis, Dr. Grace Yoo, Dr. Andrew Jolivétte and Cesar Chavez Research Institute Director, Dr. Belinda Reyes in a lively conversation about the 2012 Presidential election campaign and the new book, Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority.

Books will be available at the event.

“Cuffy,” “Fancy Maids,” and “One-Eyed Men”:  Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States

The American Historical Review
Volume 106, Number 5 (Decenber 2001)
pages 1619-1650 (55 paragraphs)

Edward E. Baptist, Associate Professor of History
Cornell University

In January 1834, the slave trader Isaac Franklin wrote from New Orleans to his Richmond partner and slave buyer, Rice Ballard: “The fancy girl, from Charlattsvilla [Charlottesville], will you send her out or shall I charge you $1100 for her. Say quick, I wanted to see her . . . I thought that an old Robber might be satisfied with two or three maids.” Franklin implied that his partner was holding the young woman, one of many “fancy maids” handled by the firm of Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard, for his own sexual use. Unwilling, the jest implied, to share his enslaved sex objects, Ballard was keeping the desirable Charlottesville maid in Richmond instead of passing her on to his partners so that they might take their turn of pleasure. The joke, and the desire it did not seek to disguise, was business as usual. In this case, the business was a slave-trading partnership, and systematic rape and sexual abuse of slave women were part of the normal practice of the men who ran the firm—and the normal practice of many of their planter customers as well. Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard supplied field hands and carpenters to the raw new plantations of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas in the 1830s, but they also supplied planters with many a “fancy maid.” In fact, the letter quoted went on to suggest, tongue in cheek, that such women were in such heavy demand that the firm might do better selling coerced sex retail rather than wholesale. Referring to two enslaved women, Franklin mused self-indulgently on the conversion of female labor into slavers’ money: “The old Lady and Susan could soon pay for themselves by keeping a whore house.” Yet what did Franklin indulge most? Was sexual or monetary greed the trump suit in his own decision-making? Perhaps, he continued, in the vein of aggressive sexual banter that pervades the traders’ letters, the partners would rather see the house “located and established at your place, Alexandria, or Baltimore for the Exclusive benefit of the consern&[its] agents.”

Franklin and his colleagues passionately wanted “mulatto” women, and black people generally: as bodies to rape and bodies to sell. If these men were more than mere exceptions in the society in which they lived—and I shall argue that they illustrate that society’s half-denied and half-remembered assumptions about commerce and rape—then the stakes of explaining their desires are high. What sort of society did slaveowning white men create in the antebellum U.S. South? What sorts of ideas and psychological forces cemented their devotion to the supposedly pre-modern institution of racial slavery to a deep involvement in the rapid commercial expansion that reached a peak during the 1830s?

The present essay seeks to explain the ideas about slavery, rape, and commerce embedded in and produced by the passionate desires of Franklin and his partners. For some years, historians interpreting the institutions and ideology of nineteenth-century southern slavery have focused their attentions on explaining slaveholders’ paternalist defenses of their planter institution. Like some of their sources, such histories have often explicitly or implicitly portrayed the domestic slave trade as a contradiction within an otherwise stable system. Recent works have returned the issue of that trade to the forefront, arguing that the commerce in human beings was an inescapable and essential feature of the region’s pre–Civil War society and culture. In the drop of water that is the correspondence between Franklin, Ballard, and their associates, one might perceive a need to push historians’ revisions of the slave South’s whole world further still. Indeed, these men reveal themselves as being so devoted to their picture of the slave trade as a fetishized commodification of human beings that we may need to insist on such a mystification as one of the necessary bases of the economic expansion of the pre–Civil War South. They also assert, especially through their frequent discussions of the rape of light-skinned enslaved women, or “fancy maids,” their own relentlessly sexualized vision of the trade. Finally, the traders insist in accidental testimony that sexual fetishes and commodity fetishism intertwined with such intimacy that coerced sex was the secret meaning of the commerce in human beings, while commodification swelled its actors with the power of rape. Such complexities lead one to wonder if historians might do well to reinterpret the antebellum South—a society in which the slave trade was a motor of rapid geographical and economic expansion—as a complex of inseparable fetishisms…

…The white world’s obsession with black female sexuality began, of course, long before the U.S. domestic slave trade, or even the United States itself. From the beginning of the European-African encounter, attempts to claim that black female bodies were disgusting because they did not obey European gender roles rang hollow. During the seventeenth-century rise of the plantation complex, black women became by law the sexual prey of all white men. Later, would-be patriarchs of the eighteenth century, such as Virginia’s William Byrd II, attempted to exert sexual control over black women as part of wider projects of household and self-dominion. By the nineteenth century, the belief that black women were inherently sexually aggressive, in contrast to allegedly chaste white females, increased their attractiveness to white men, even as white men publicly proclaimed their disgust with African-American women and their love for the pure and passive belle. Many encounters, rather than a single Freudian trauma of infantile sexuality, shaped the complex obsession with black women. Then the rejected black female body returned in the fixation on the fancy maid.

The rise of the domestic slave trade after 1790, as new lands opened up in the South and new demands for plantation produce—namely, cotton—arose in the Atlantic world, created a particular commercialized category of enslaved women that focused white fixations. Within the trade, light-skinned or mulatto “fancy maids” became to many white men the perfect symbols of slavery’s history, while also ensuring that being “a smooth hand with Cuff” helped make one a “one-eyed man.” To men such as the slave traders discussed here, women like the Charlottesville maid evoked a process of power and pleasure, remembered and forgotten in an ambiguous, simultaneous experience parallel to that which characterized the traders’ commodity-fetish relationship to “Cuffy.” Indeed, coercion, the trade, and the pairing of sexual imagery with women of mixed African and European ancestry were always close companions. Northern and British visitors to pre–Civil War New Orleans rarely failed to write about “yellow” women, “fancy maids,” and nearly white octoroons sold as both house servants and sexual companions in the slave trade. Some observers claimed to have knowledge of special auctions at which young, attractive, usually light-skinned women were sold at rates four to five times the price of equivalent female field laborers. Travelers and other writers constantly returned to the simultaneously offensive and exciting sight of coerced interracial sex, especially between white men and light-skinned “fancy” women…

…Yet the specific white focus on “fancy” or obviously mixed-race women relentlessly returns us to the place of history, especially its memory and its understanding, as the remembering that was present in the traders’ sexual fetishes. The exploitation of enslaved women of African and mixed African-European backgrounds was a part of plantation society long before the ideology of sentimental feminine domesticity could have ever unleashed male anxieties. And the same exploitation undoubtedly contributed, in ways not yet sufficiently investigated by cultural historians, to the ideal of the independent master. The traders’ own words remind us that “land pirates” believed that they became “one-eyed men” through the rape of women who symbolized the past, present, and future of slaveowning men. This becoming was a not-so-secret history that mixed anxiety and pleasure, attraction and control. Fancy maids, more than other enslaved women, embodied a history of rape in the pre-emancipation nineteenth-century South, one that reveals white anxieties about dependence on blacks but that allowed white men to assert and reassert their power and control.

People of mixed racial heritage, or “mulattoes,” symbolized the dependence of white men on black labor, both in the field and in the bed. Marked by their very skin color and other features as products of the white-black encounter in the South, mulatto women were obviously white and not-white, like “our white Caroline.” They were products of the long encounter between white exploiters of labor and black sources of labor, productive and reproductive. Their commodification reminded all that, in the South, every child of an enslaved mother was some form of slave laborer, an arrangement that enabled plantation slavery to function. Every enslaved man, woman, and child was a repository of reproductive capital and a source of production. The white political economy of the South would have collapsed without the legal and cultural fictions that assigned the “mulatto” and other children of African women to the created categories “black” and “enslaved.” Women like the “fair maid Martha,” and “the Yellow Girl Charlott” also, in their phenotypes, illustrated the long past of white sexual assault. “Mulatto” women thus embodied white dependency and white power, and offered men the chance to recapitulate and reexamine the past that had produced both white power and mixed-race individuals. Unwillingly, such women introduced a pornographic history, one obscene yet for that very reason more lusted-after, into the parlors, bedrooms, and above all, the markets of the elite white man’s world. They made flesh the years of white men desiring and depending on women (and men) who were supposedly less than civilized, Christian, or even human.

If the presence of “mulattoes” poorly concealed dependence, in both the past and present, on black labor, the presence of fancy maids allowed white men to remember and reassert a sort of control over both past and present. The history of rape, obvious to all, though openly spoken by few, was the remembered meaning of the fetish of the “fancy maid” in the white male mind. Assaults repeated and thus confirmed a history that had produced white men who bought and sold black women and men, and had made mulattoes as well. The historic penis, the one-eyed man, of earlier generations had in fact fathered the fancy maid—creating in the flesh a symbol of the history of coerced sexuality to which white men like the slave traders could return to at will. Like the Freudian fetishisms that do not produce neuroses, this symbolic relationship was the sexualized prose of the slave traders’ world. It worked for them…

Read or purchase the article here.

Symphony in Black and White: Krazy Kat Kontinued

The Albany Times-Union
Albany, New York
2008-11-20

Alexander Stern

Don’t Touch My Comics: The Times Union Comics Panel takes a critical look at the funny pages.

Some months ago, I wrote an appreciation of George Herriman’s classic strip, Krazy Kat; a strip frequently lauded as one of the greatest achievements in the comics medium. Omitted from that article—whether by design or by accident—was a biographical detail that has become increasingly controversial in recent years. It concerns George Herriman’s racial background. While some might argue that such considerations should be irrelevent in art, it seems particularly pertinent in this specific time and place: It seems only fitting to note—here, in the year 2008—when a man with African heritage has just been elected to the highest office in the land—that Krazy Kat (arguably the greatest American comic strip) was authored by a man with a similar background. It is significant to note, however, that while the world celebrates the election and the history of Barack Obama, the world was never told the history of George Herriman during the artist’s lifetime.

Throughout his life, Herriman’s racial and ethnic background remained shrouded in mystery. His collegues weren’t sure exactly what the olive-complexioned Herriman was. Some of his friends and fellow cartoonists began referring to Herriman as “the Greek.” ”I didn’t know what he was, so I named him the Greek,” recalls cartoonist Tad Dorgan in Jeet Heer’s essay “The Kolors of Krazy Kat,” the introduction to A Wild Warmth of Chromatic Gravy – The Complete Full-Page Krazy and Ignatz: 1935-36 (published by Fantagraphics Books in 2005). Much was also made during Herriman’s life of his devotion to hats. Dorgan again: ”Like Chaplin with his cane, [Herriman] is never without his skimmer. [Cartoonist Harry] Hirshfeld says that he sleeps in it.” Indeed, Herriman was seldom photographed bare-headed. Some of his contemporaries claimed that Herriman “had a growth on the back of his skull. He referred to it as a ‘wen’ and was embarassed to expose it in public.” On the other hand, those candid photos that exist of a hatless Herriman reveal a man with short wavy hair. Herriman himself referred to his hair as “kinky.” Was his refusal to be publicly seen without a hat part of a concious desire for Herriman to “pass” for white?…

Read the entire article here.

Krazy Kat and Racial Identity

Graphic Novels: ENGL 375TT (Spring 2009)
University of Mary Wahsington
2009-02-01

Zach Whalen, Assistant Professor of English
University of Mary Washington

After doing some research on George Herriman, the writer and artist for Krazy Kat, I discovered that there has been a lot of critical analysis applied to this comic looking specifically at racial identity. There seems to be some uncertainty as to Herriman’s ethnicity—his parents were listed as “mulatto” in the 1880 census, his own birth certificate says “colored” but his death certificate says “caucasian.” From what I can tell, Herriman was a person of mixed races, but it seems that he chose to “pass” as white for much of his life. Apparently many have speculated that he wore a hat all the time to cover up his “kinky” hair, which he thought was the only identifiably “black” physical trait that he had…

Read the entire article here.

Cup O’Doodles

The Pennsylvania Gazette
University of Pennsylvania
Volume 109, Number 6 (July/August 2011)
pages 54-57

Molly Petrilla

Artist Gwyneth Leech C’81 started drawing on  used paper cups as a distraction when she  got “antsy,” but “then it began to really take over.”  A few hundred cups later, she spent six weeks doing the same thing while sitting in a window  in New York’s Fashion District in an exhibit called Hypergraphia.

On a stormy Monday morning at the end of February, Gwyneth Leech C’81 bought a cup of Irish tea to-go (milk, no sugar) and headed to a display window in New York City’s Fashion District. She spent the next hour or two drawing swirling, plantlike patterns on that and other paper takeout cups—all of which had at one time housed her morning coffee or afternoon tea—as passersby gawked or whispered or smiled or knocked on the glass to say hello.

Then she came back the next day and did it all again, over and over until a full six weeks had passed. The doodles evolved, the drinks changed, but her canvas stayed the same: cups with a matte paper outside and waxy plastic inside. She started with about 250 pre-drawn cups strung up in the window around her and another 25 or so scattered at her feet. By the end of her window residency, she’d created another 100 cup drawings that joined the ones around her. She called the whole thing Hypergraphia, which means the overwhelming urge to write or draw.

“Partly, I wanted to see what 375 cups looks like,” she says, “but I also thought it was a nice-but-provocative way to bring people’s attention to our waste production; it made me think a lot about upcycling and recycling.”
 
An accomplished painter who has also worked with ceramics, video, and printmaking, Leech has exhibited her work around the world, including solo exhibitions in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Philadelphia, and New York City. In 2006, she began a series called Perfect Families, and since then has been painting portraits of alternative and mixed-race families she meets in New York City…

Read the entire article here in HTML or PDF format.

None of the Above

Filmakers Library (an imprint of Alexander Street Press)
1994
23 minutes

Erika Surat Andersen
University of Southern California

None of the Above is a documentary about people of mixed racial heritage based on the filmmaker’s own search for identity and community. Ms. Andersen, whose mother is (Asian) Indian and father is Danish American, explores her “own personal hangup” by finding others in the same ambiguous category. Through her journey into the multiracial world we are given an inside view of the emotional reality of what it’s like to be racially unclassifiable in a society obsessed with race.

During the course of the film we meet Leslie, a young woman of Native American, African, and European ancestry; Curtiss, whose mother is Japanese and father is African-American; and Henrietta, whose family has been mixed for at least six generations and defies all categorization. The intimacy of the interviews and the filmmaker’s openness about her own experience make this film emotionally compelling and particularly relevant in today’s multicultural society.

Seoul II Soul

Filmakers Library (an imprint of Alexander Street Press)
1999
25 minutes

Hak J. Chung

Produced at USC School of Cinema & Television Directed by Hak J. Chung

Korean American filmmaker Hak J. Chung explores his own identity by taking a close look at a very engaging family. The Yates’ household consists of the father, a black Korean war veteran, his war bride and their three grown children. This love match has endured for thirty-five years because of the couple’s intellectual and spiritual unity. When they first settled in America, they faced discrimination and misunderstanding.

We learn how their children felt growing up as mixed race kids in a home where both cultures were valued. However, it is a surprise to learn that this seemingly well-adjusted family cannot escape the pain of cultural miscommunication. The beloved eldest son is estranged from his parents because his blonde wife and his mother are at odds. His wife does not understand the nuances of her in-laws expectations. His mother is offended that his wife won’t eat kimchi and addresses her by her first name.

This candid film makes a valuable contribution to resources on multiculturalism and diversity.

A measured freedom: national unity and racial containment in Winslow Homer’s The Cotton Pickers, 1876

The Mississippi Quarterly
Spring, 2002

Susanna W. Gold, Assistant Professor of Art
Tyler School of Art, Temple University

The Cotton Pickers Winslow Homer (United States, Massachusetts, Boston, 1836-1910) United States, 1876 Oil on canvas Canvas: 24 1/16 × 38 1/8 in. (61.12 × 96.84 cm) Frame: 35 1/4 × 49 1/2 × 4 in. (89.54 × 125.73 × 10.16 cm) Acquisition made possible through (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) Museum Trustees: Robert O. Anderson, R. Stanton Avery, B. Gerald Cantor, Edward W. Carter, Justin Dart, Charles E. Ducommun, Camilla Chandler Frost, Julian Ganz, Jr., Dr. Armand Hammer, Harry Lenart, Dr. Franklin D. Murphy, Mrs. Joan Palevsky, Richard E. Sherwood, Maynard J. Toll, and Hal B. Wallis (M.77.68)

After Traveling to Virginia during the Civil War as a field illustrator for the New York journal Harper’s Weekly, Winslow Homer returned to this area toward the end of the Reconstruction period to paint primarily around Richmond and Petersburg. Having abandoned his career as illustrator to devote himself exclusively to painting, Homer sketched outdoors near the shanties in black neighborhoods and wandered among the fields to find inspiration for several images of Southern black life that included his 1876 painting, The Cotton Pickers (Fig. 1).

Depicted are two young black women in the midst of a vast, seemingly endless field abounding in ripened snowy-white cotton bursting from its hulls and awaiting harvest The pair, rendered in robust and healthy proportion, stand engulfed in thigh-high cotton plants at the front of the picture plane and are the focus of the painting as they pause from their work picking cotton. Most scholarship on The Cotton Pickers interprets the artist’s rendering of Southern blacks as sympathetic, and perceives an optimistic future for the black situation under the new political and social structures following the Civil War. Public reception of The Cotton Pickers was favorable; the painting was purchased immediately at its first exhibition at New York’s Century Association in 1877, and a subsequent exhibition review claimed that “the freshest piece of figure painting that Mr. Winslow Homer has put his name to is his latest work, the Cotton Pickers, which provoked the admiration of the artists at the latest reception.” Noted art critic George W. Sheldon acknowledged Homer’s black genre works for their “total freedom from conventionalism and mannerism, in their strong look of life and in their sensitive feeling for character,” and the New York Times praised Homer as “one of the few artists who have the boldness and originality to make something of the Negro for artistic purposes.”

Among contemporary scholars, one author notes in his 1990 study of the history of the black image in American art, that Homer’s “sensitive recording of the uniqueness of individuality” in his black genre paintings “represents a high water mark in nineteenth-century artistic expression of African-American identity.” Another analysis praises The Cotton Pickers as a work that “stands apart from paintings of its period in the degree of grace and majesty it gives to its subjects” (Quick, p. 61), and yet a third study recognizes that “these black women seem larger than life and filled with strength and confidence in their ability to chart their own destinies” (Wood and Dalton, p. 97). Indeed, Homer seems to have been consistently admired for his ability to render the Southern black laborer with empathy and respectful sobriety in a world accustomed to regarding blacks as inferior…

…Emancipation may have destroyed the master-slave relationship, but the slaveholding ideologies remained intact up through the year of the Centennial.

The exploitation inherent in the forms of free labor in the postbellum South can be seen in the imagery of The Cotton Pickers. Because the vast expanse of land appears to be part of a large farm or plantation, the two figures are most likely common wage laborers rather than the more economically advantaged sharecroppers or landowners. Had the land been tenanted under the sharecropping system or owned by the laborers, we might expect to see a much smaller parcel of land spotted with cabins, garden plots, or other family members engaged in domestic work such as tending farm animals or collecting firewood. The age and gender of the figures represent the most profitable wage employee to the planter, as women and children received only one-half to two-thirds of the wages of men, and thus proved to be economically advantageous to planters who gained a greater profit from their labor.  As both wage earners and as young women, these figures would have been doubly exploited.

Homer depicts the extensive plantation completely full of cotton, as the entire field has yet to be worked. No progress from the women’s labor is visible, although the basket and sack are full. The fact that the end of the field is nowhere in sight suggests that the work can never be completed, that these women are trapped by the boundless field of cotton. As if to underscore this vision of entrapment, the cotton plants figuratively cut off the legs of the women, so that they are unable to move and escape from their situation. Like the labor system under which they work, this combination of pictorial elements that bind the women to the field suggests hopelessness in the place of tree emancipation.

The suggestion of a fruitless future for the black American is reinforced in the faces of the two young figures. Homer endows the women with traditional Caucasian features by painting them with light skin and slender facial bone structure. By representing the figures with a combination of both prototypical black and white physical characteristics, Homer portrays them as products of sexual mingling between the races. Although interracial cohabitation had been prevalent since the Colonial era, mulattos born in the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries were often the result of sexual relations between white males of the planter class and their domestic slaves. Common almost to the point on institutionalization, wealthy Southern planters kept regular concubines and bred entire families of mixed-race children, the result being an unprecedented increase in mulatto slavery during the years 1850-60.  Based on the appearance of the two figures in Homer’s 1876 painting, their logical birth dates would fall near the height of interracial procreation, raising the distinct possibility that these women were fathered by the plantation owner.

The mixed-blood heritage of these women posed another problem in the progress of the black American. According to racial mythology advanced by the white population in response to the imagined threat to the purity of the white race, mulattos were doomed to biological eradication and could not reproduce beyond a few generations. Unable to sustain their heritage, the mulatto would be denied a place in America’s future, and the world of the powerless mixed-race individual was understood by whites to be one in which significant progressive change for the black situation could never occur.

Although Homer translates the limited progress of blacks toward a successful future in his painting by depicting the two young women as mulattos, the reality of the black situation in the Centennial decade proved quite a different situation. Precisely because many mulattos of the mid-nineteenth century were born to wealthy white fathers, they often received special treatment both within the black community and from their slaveholding relations. Planter fathers commonly provided property rights to their illegitimate mulatto children in their wills, and sometimes even granted their manumission. Protected by their masters-fathers, these children were customarily relieved from backbreaking field labor and given education and specialized training for favorable work assignments from carpentry or building and machine maintenance to dressmaking, cooking, and child care (Williamson, New People, p. 56). Respected for their highly ranking labor positions and esteemed for the valuable association with white blood, mulatto offspring of white planters generally enjoyed a privileged status on the plantation among the slaves (Williamson, After Slavery, p. 315)…

Purchase the article here.

Fearless Music: Garland Jeffreys ’65

Syracuse University Magazine
Volume 28, Number 3 (Fall/Winter 2011)

David Marc

From his ’70s hit “Wild in the Streets” to his latest album, legendary singer-songwriter Garland Jeffreys has taken on life’s big issues with his own eclectic brand of music

From the pages of The New Yorker to deep inside the blogosphere, legendary singer-songwriter Garland Jeffreys has been winning high praise for his new album, The King of In Between, released last summer on his own Luna Park label. Loved by fans and admired by colleagues for his fearless movements through rock, R&B, reggae, and whatever other styles he may need to articulate his borderless vision, Jeffreys puts his mastery of popular musical forms in the service of personal expression, a talent he shares with Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Feeling “too black to be white, too white to be black,” he occupies his own space and fills it with a gritty sweetness that is hard for likeminded souls to resist.

Growing up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, during the 1950s, Jeffreys learned a thing or two about “diversity” long before the term took on its full contemporary meaning. “I’m from a totally mixed-race family—black, white, Puerto Rican, Native American,” he says. “At the time, we were the only people of color in the Catholic church we attended every Sunday. At school, I had my close friends, but I was also often the only ‘colored’ kid in the class, and every time I met a girl I liked, I had to contend with a race issue. My music has always had a great deal to do with these experiences.” Jeffreys felt more at ease in nearby Coney Island, where beach, boardwalk, and carnival karma drew people of every background imaginable. He also enjoyed the privilege of seeing the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field. “I was just 4 years old, but I was there at the game, April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball,” he says. “Sports have always been an important part of my life, and even helped bring me to Syracuse. My father wanted me to go to Boston College. But Jim Brown [’57] went to Syracuse, and obviously I had to go to school where he went.”

Shortly after arriving on campus, Jeffreys met Lou Reed ’64, who became a lifelong friend. Although both were moving toward their careers as musicians, Reed was studying poetry and Jeffreys had his sights set on art history. “We hung out at the Orange Bar with Lou’s teacher, the poet Delmore Schwartz, and a bunch of people—I guess you’d call them ‘Beats,’” Jeffreys says. “It was a great place for me to be because race didn’t matter; it was all about hanging out and knowing each other.” Felix Cavaliere ’64, who was about to depart for the top of the pops as lead singer and keyboard man with The Young Rascals, was another friend Jeffreys first bumped into on Marshall Street…

Read the entire article here.

Vietnamese Amerasians: A Study Of Identity Construction

University of Texas, Arlington
December 2010
78 pages

Ky-Giao C. Nguyen

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Sociology

“We define who we are by defining who we are not” (Daniel 1996). What happens when we don’t know who we are not, how can we determine who we are? What if the markers of family connections, community alliances and citizenship are missing and there are no peers with whom to make comparisons? “What are you? Where are you from?” Hispanic, Filipino, sometimes even Native American rather than Asian, are ethnicities often ascribed to Vietnamese Amerasians (children of Vietnamese and American parents). Curiously, for such a personal question, the reaction from others to the response “Vietnamese Amerasian” is often rejection or disbelief. For years, Amerasians have struggled with their place in society, within the U.S. based Vietnamese-American community as well as in the larger U.S. and Vietnamese societies. The life of the Amerasian born and raised in Vietnam is an example of the identity construction and socialization of persons whose lives were marginalized times three through denial of citizenship by country, desertion by family, and rejection by community. Triple marginalization is defined for my purposes as lack of national, familial, and societal affirmation of self. This triple marginalization offers no tangible core of positively valued identity, thus forcing the Amerasian to either accept the labels assigned or forge on to create their own identity. Loss of family, lack of community, and statelessness continues to haunt Amerasians today. The quest for a place to belong, a family to come home to, and a country to acknowledge them still influences their decisions and actions, in ways both detrimental and advantageous to the preservation of an identity built without solid foundation.

This project is a historically situated, qualitative research based look into the internal and external construction of identity of the Vietnamese Amerasians born during the Vietnam War, individually and as a group. For primary data collection, I utilized my membership in a local Amerasian organization to participate in regularly scheduled group discussions. I evaluated the transcripts of organized conversations among twenty subjects participating in group discussions sponsored through a local Amerasian organization, over five months, from March 2009 through July 2009. During the course of this research, I discovered that while individual participants’ lives were lived separately, there was a commonality to the experiences that helped each come to some definition of self. The members fell into three distinct groups: those who renounce any and all claim of their heritage, becoming wholly Americanized; those who completely immerse themselves in the Vietnamese communities, living much as they did prior to arriving in the U.S.; and those who learn to fluidly move between their two cultures, picking up nuances of themselves wherever they happen to exist, rarely clinging to just one identity.

Read the entire thesis here.