Mixed Race Studies

The Mystery of Capital: Eurasian Entrepreneurs’ Socio-Cultural Strategies for Commercial Success in Early 20th-Century Hong Kong

Asian Studies Review
Volume 34, Issue 4, 2010
pages 467-487
DOI: 10.1080/10357823.2010.527919

Victor Zheng
The University of Hong Kong

Siu-Lun Wong
The University of Hong Kong

Unlike economic capital, which is visible and easy to calculate, social capital is intangible and difficult to assess. Although both types of capital are crucial in determining social relations and social behaviour, little solid research has been done on the latter. This paper attempts to use the rags-to-riches story of Sir Robert Ho Tung, a first-generation Hong Kong Eurasian entrepreneur who commenced life without traditional social/cultural capital as the illegitimate son of a Chinese woman and a Dutchman, to illustrate the processes involved in cultivating and accumulating social capital. With special reference to economic development in early colonial Hong Kong and major social transformations in the Chinese mainland, this paper also demonstrates how a group of so-called social/racial “half-caste bastards” (Eurasians) were able to form their own social networks of mutual help and protection. It also considers how they worked to consolidate, mobilise, aggrandise and transmit their social capital. In conclusion, it is argued that Eurasians in early twentieth-century Hong Kong constructed their personal networks like a web, with different interconnecting layers that functioned at different socio-economic-political levels to serve different purposes.

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The Rulers and the Ruled: the Singapore Eurasian Community Under the British and the Japanese

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
1999
DS610.25.E87 Con

John Gregory Conceicao

Mixed-race populations provide a challenging and fascinating subject for historical enquiry as they blend multiple cultures and, in the process, give rise to unique social and political forces. This thesis focuses on the Eurasians of Singapore, a distinct and disparate social group which arose from Singapore’s strategic location as an entreport that attracted Europeans from diverse backgrounds. As an ethnic group, the Eurasians were perhaps one of the earliest among the domiciled communities to look upon Singapore as their home and to develop a stake in the Colony, which had essentially been a place for travellers, transients and sojourners. This study focuses on the Eurasians and the complex relationships they forged with their two colonial overlords, the British and the Japanese, in the period prior to 1946.

Under the British the Eurasians played a ‘middleman’ role vis-a-vis other Asiatic communities and, by doing so, obtained unique privileges. However, in the 1870s a point was reached when owing to changing circumstances and attitudes, the British began to adopt a less than favourable stance towards the Eurasians. While the British needed their support for political and economic reasons in order to run the administration of the Colony, they adopted a policy that vacillated between patronage and prejudice. This left the Eurasians in a difficult position as they were staunchly pro-British yet, confused at the disinterest displayed by their patrons. Without much success, the Eurasians tried to redefine privilege to mean rights, and to have a voice in running the affairs of a place they regarded as their home.

The onset of the Japanese Occupation during the Second World War deepened the Eurasian predicament. They were singled out by the Japanese authorities for political indoctrination and subjected to measures which combined chastisement and encouragement. The Japanese forced the Eurasians to re-examine and re-orientate their ethnic identity. Without doubt, they were now encouraged to see themselves as ‘Asiatics’.

In retrospect, the Eurasians were subjected by their British and Japanese overlords to inconsistent policies which often left them confused and helpless. As a consequence, their self-definitions of identity underwent marked changes over time. Post-war developments in Singapore brought about a torrent of political changes that particularly affected the Eurasians. They emerged as a people who sometimes felt displaced and marginalised. The strengths and unique traits which the community once possessed—domicility, education and social privilege—were no longer their preserve in a nation that aimed to make egalitarianism and merit the cornerstones of its polity. This thesis argues that circumstantialism has been a dominant force in powerfully shaping the Eurasian identity. This identity was not given in a primordialist sense but was constructed from historical configurations and social circumstances, in which the relationship between the ‘Rulers’ and the ‘Ruled’ played an extraordinarily potent part.

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Supremacy by Law: The One Man One Woman Marriage Requirement and Antimiscegenation Law

Journal of Bisexuality
Volume 7, Issue 3-4, 2008
pages 145-169
DOI: 10.1080/15299710802170771

Jacqueline Battalora, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
Saint Xavier University, Orland Park, Illinois

This article is concerned with epistemology and the assertion of supremacy. Focusing on the resources deployed to make marriage restrictions logical, this article investigates their descriptive and structural underpinnings. I juxtapose support for the Defense of Marriage Act and Federal Marriage Amendment with antimiscegenation case law and examine descriptions of fact, the patterns they shape, and the underlying structure that holds them together. These laws are an arena of contestation not only over policy choices but over God and nature, and ultimately difference. I pay attention to the ways in which constructions of difference work to exclude and erase and I argue that these laws share a common structure of supremacy. Dualistic constructions of difference work to erase those whose bodies threaten the clear lines that justify exclusion by law. Those who are multiracial, where whiteness is a contributor, and those who are bisexual represent such a threat to racial marriage bans on the one hand and same sex marriage bans on the other. The formula of difference-making, erasure, and supremacy in law has important implications not only for challenging marriage restrictions today but to measure future law and policy.

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The colour line and the colour scale in the twentieth century

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Issue 7, 2012
pages 1109-1131
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.605902

Michael Banton, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
University of Bristol

Some more recent evidence supports Du Bois’ prediction that the twentieth century would prove the century of the colour line. It indicates that men have always and everywhere shown a preference for fair complexioned women as sexual partners, whereas males seeking a mate are rarely disadvantaged by a dark complexion. In the employment market in the USA, a dark complexion is a significant disadvantage for both males and females. Though there is no properly comparable evidence from other countries, there appears to be a widespread tendency for any negative valuation of darker skin colour to be incorporated into a scale of socio-economic status. In some situations a colour scale is replacing the colour line.

Du Bois’ reference to differences of colour has been largely superseded in English-speaking countries by references to differences of race. From a policy standpoint, the switch from colour to race has had both positive and negative consequences. From a sociological standpoint, it has made it more difficult to disaggregate the dimensions of social difference and to dispel the confusions engendered by ideas of racial difference.

Introduction

In the first year of the century, and then again three years later, W. E. B. Du Bois (2005:x, 10) wrote that ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line
the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and in the islands of the sea’. His prediction was only partially borne out, for the main problems of the twentieth century were the militarism that stimulated the slaughter of World War I, the dictatorships that led to World War II, the armaments race of the Cold War, the decolonization process, and the problems that the international political system could not grasp, particularly those of population growth and climate change. Colour-consciousness contributed to the fourth of these.

The expression, ‘a colour line’, was a metaphor drawing on Du Bois’ experiences in North America that was very effective for the designation of a political problem. Yet if a name chosen to designate a political problem conveys a thesis about the source, or cause, of the thing in question, it also poses an intellectual problem. In this case the expression ‘colour line’ grasped only one facet of the relations between humans of different colour…

…In the early years of the century there appeared to be a scientific justification for racial classification, even if there was no agreement upon quite which classification to employ, or for what purpose. That is no longer the case, and the educated public is now aware that there is no close correspondence between the social categories identified as races and the classes that assemble genetic similarities and dissimilarities. For example, it has been known for a long time that the social classification of persons in the USA as black or white is biologically misleading. A statistical analysis using historical census data and historical data on immigration and birth rates concluded in 1958 that twenty-one per cent of the white population had black ancestors, and that the majority of the persons with some African ancestry were classified as white (Stuckert 1958). In the aftermath of World War II, and in the international revulsion from the use made of racial doctrines by Nazi Germany, the idiom of race was used, in both international and national laws, to prohibit discrimination on grounds of race, colour, descent, and national or ethnic origin. Racial classifications have since been used in population censuses, in programmes for the promotion of  equality, and, at times, but in a different way, in medical research. The use of the word race in the law will continue, as it may in other parts of the everyday world of practical affairs…

…Though variations in skin colour can be measured objectively by use of a photospectrometer, these measures provide only approximate indications of a person’s genotype. Better indications can be taken from work in molecular anthropology. Such research has found that six genetic loci are involved in the determination of a person’s skin colour, so it is possible for a person to have a fifteen
-twenty per cent African component in his or her genotype without possessing any of the alleles that code for dark skin (Sweet 2004). This makes it easier, in a country like the USA, for a person with African ancestry to ‘pass for white’. For the same genetic reasons, African admixture amongst white Americans can increase without any significant change in skin tone. Conversely, amongst African-Americans, an amount of African admixture is directly correlated with darker skin since no selective pressure is applied; as a result, African-Americans may have a very wide range of African admixture (
>0-
100%), whereas European-Americans have a lower range (2
-20%). As there is a small overlap, it is possible that a man who identifies himself as white may have more African admixture than a man who identifies himself as black…

…This essay reviews the political problems of the twentieth century, at the same time calling attention to the intellectual problem posed by the multidimensionality of difference. Why is it that, in given circumstances, certain dimensions acquire a particular significance? This is the explanandum that has to be approached step by step. Starting from Du Bois’ prediction, it is argued here, firstly, that use of the word colour concentrates attention upon what serves as a visible sign of a social difference; secondly, that sociologists have to account for how it comes to be used as such a sign; and thirdly, that when sociologists use race as if it were a synonym for colour (as English-speaking sociologists often do) they make it more difficult to identify what has to be explained. As the essay’s title suggests, it also contends that the notion of a colour scale helps consideration of the function of colour as a social sign…

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Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’: The Difficult Identities of Post-War Black Children of GIs

Speigel Online International
2009-10-13

Stephanie Siek

Rosemarie Pena’s identity document after her adoption. “Many of us never knew we were adopted, and many of us thought we were the only one,” Pena said. Her adoptive parents changed her name to Wanda Lynn Haymon. After discovering she was adopted, she reclaimed her birth name.

For many of the now-adult children of white German women and African-American GIs, adopted by families in the United States after World War II, the search for the truth has been difficult. Online communities are helping.

Rudi Richardson knew something about what it meant to be a black man in the United States. But after being deported to Germany, the country where he was born, shortly before his 47th birthday, he had to start figuring out what it meant to be black and German—in a land he barely remembered and whose language he didn’t speak.

He started life as Udo Ackermann, born in a Bavarian women’s prison in 1955. His mother, a Jewish woman named Liesolette, was serving a prison term for prostitution. His father, whom he never met, was an African-American serviceman named George. Rudi was given up for adoption.

Like thousands of other postwar children with black GI fathers and white German mothers, Richardson was raised by an African-American military family in the US. He has spent his life trying to find where he fits in.

Born in an era when Germany was still grappling with its responsibility for the Holocaust and when the US Army had a policy of not acknowledging paternity claims brought against its soldiers stationed abroad, some of these children were put up for adoption in the United States. At the time, Germany judged itself incapable of absorbing these “brown babies”—as they have come to call themselves. In the late 1940s and 1950s, efforts were made to match them with African-American military families, many of whom were stationed around Germany at the time…

…But Cardwell, who is writing a book about his experiences, has learned that his own story is not that simple. Brought to the United States as a four-year-old and adopted by an African-American couple in Washington D.C., he was raised believing that he was a very light-skinned black man. It was not until he began trying to find his biological parents as an adult that he discovered his mother was a half-German refugee from Poland, and his father was native Hawaiian who was classified as “colored” by the military because of his skin color.

“I’ve been run out of white people’s houses: ‘Who’s this black person you’re bringing in here?’ I’ve been run out of black people’s houses: ‘Who’s this white person you’re bringing in here?'” Cardwell said of his adolescence and early adulthood. “There is no belonging, which is what brown babies sought most.”…

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The Cosmic Race in Texas: Racial Fusion, White Supremacy, and Civil Rights Politics

The Journal of American History
Volume 98, Issue 2 (September 2011)
pages 404-419
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jar338

Benjamin H. Johnson, Associate Professor of Global Studies and History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

In the early twentieth century, a number of Latin American intellectuals embraced racial fusion and predicted that it would one day undo the white supremacy represented by the United States. These ideas influenced Mexican American civil rights advocates in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s, who found the embrace of hybridity to be a realistic description of their own racial backgrounds and an effective rejoinder to Jim Crow’s emphasis on racial purity. Attacking the consensus that an aspiration for whiteness drove these civil rights claims, Benjamin H. Johnson finds deep ties between Mexican American and Mexican political cultures and concludes that borderlands histories can take a transnational approach without obscuring the influence of nation-states or denying the emancipatory potential of claims to national belonging.

“The days of the pure whites, the victors of today,” proclaimed José Vasconcelos in 1925, “are as numbered as were the days of their predecessors. Having fulfilled their destiny of mechanizing the world, they themselves have set, without knowing it, the basis for a new period: the period of the fusion and mixing of all peoples.” Vasconcelos wrote these words in Mexico as his four-year tenure as the secretary of the nation’s public education system came to a close and as his quest for an elected position (first the governorship of the state of Oaxaca and then the presidency) began. They appeared in La raza cósmica, an enormously influential work that circulated across the hemisphere. Whereas the U.S. intellectual and civil rights crusader W. E. B. Du Bois had prophesied that the color line would be the problem of the twentieth century, Vasconcelos confidently predicted its erasure. The struggles of a country such as Mexico, which had just emerged from a decade of revolution and civil war, were for Vasconcelos at the center of global dynamics, as they heralded the rise of the cosmic race of his title, first in Latin America and then across the globe.

Although Vasconcelos was not well known in the United States, where his predictions would have surely struck both the architects and victims of a particularly brutal phase of white supremacy as ludicrous, he did have a profound influence there. His ideas, and the postrevolutionary political and social order of which they were a part, provided Mexican American civil rights leaders in Texas in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly those involved with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a reflection of their own racial self-conception and a set of arguments with which to critique white supremacy.

This article examines the connections…

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Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Fourth Edition)

Westview Press
July 2011
400 pages
Trade paperback ISBN: 9780813345543

Audrey Smedley, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African American Studies
Virginia Commonwealth University

Brian D. Smedley, Vice President and Director
Health Policy Institute
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

In a sweeping work that traces the idea of race for more than three centuries, Audrey Smedley shows that “race” is a cultural invention that has been used variously and opportunistically since the eighteenth century. Race, in its origin, was not a product of science but of a folk ideology reflecting a new form of social stratification and a rationalization for inequality among the peoples of North America.

New coauthor Brian Smedley joins Audrey Smedley in updating this renowned and groundbreaking text. The fourth edition includes a compelling new chapter on the health impacts of the racial worldview, as well as a thoroughly rewritten chapter that explores the election of Barack Obama and the evolving role of race in American political history. This edition also incorporates recent findings on the human genome and the implications of genomics. Drawing on new understandings of DNA expression, the authors scrutinize the positions of contemporary race scientists who maintain that race is a valid biological concept.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Some Theoretical Considerations
• 2. Etymology of the Term “Race”
• 3. Antecedents of the Racial Worldview
• 4. The Growth of the English Ideology about Human Differences in America
• 5. The Arrival of Africans and Descent into Slavery
• 6. Comparing Slave Systems: The Significance of “Racial” Servitude
• 7. Eighteenth-Century Thought and Crystallization of the Ideology of Race
• 8. Antislavery and the Entrenchment of a Racial Worldview
• 9. The Rise of Science and Scientific Racism
• 10. Growth of The Racial Worldview in 19th Century Science
• 11. Science and the Expansion of Race Ideology Beyond the US
• 12. Twentieth-Century Developments in Race Ideology
• 13. Changing Perspectives on Human Variation in Science
• 14. Dismantling the Folk Idea of Race: The Election of Barack Obama and the Transformations of an Ideology
• 15. The Health Consequences of the Racial Worldview
• References
• Index

The Revitalization of Eurasian Identity in Singapore

Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science
Volume 25, Number 2 (1997)
pages 7-24
DOI: 10.1163/030382497X00149

Alexius Pereira

This paper accounts for the revitalization of Eurasian identity in the 1990s. The revitalization was instrumental, as Eurasians had found themselves socially marginalized, particularly since the other ethnic groups were becoming more assertive about their respective ethnic identities since the 1980s. To counter this, the Eurasians selectively constructed a set of cultural practices and outlooks which were unique to the group, but not necessarily reviving practices that were “lost”. The revitalization was therefore not a deep-seated emotional or primordial attachment to their identity; instead, it was used to improve the position of the community in Singapore.

The Anglo-Indians: A Disorganized Marginal Group

Social Forces
Volume 14, Number 2 (December 1935)
pages 263-268

Paul Frederick Cressey, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Wheaton College, Newton, Massachusetts

FOUR centuries of European contact with India have left a biological residue of many thousand people of mixed European and Indian stock. Since 1911 this group has been officially designated by the government of India as the Anglo-Indian Community. Elsewhere in Asia racial hybrids of European and Oriental stock are commonly known as Eurasians. The Anglo-Indians are by far the largest group of such hybrids in Asia.

The distribution of the Anglo-Indians accurately reflects their history. They are concentrated in those areas where the maximum European contact has occurred. In the four largest port cities, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Rangoon, live one-third of all the Anglo-Indians, while an additional one-third live in other parts of the provinces in which these cities are located. Anglo-Indians are predominantly city dwellers, and their life and problems have an urban setting. In 1931 the Anglo-Indian population of India and Burma was returned by the official census as 138,395. This represents an increase of 11.4 per cent during the preceding decade, and 12.1.9 per cent for the last fifty years. The increase in the total population of India in these same periods has been 10.1 per cent and 31.3 per cent respectively. There is a tendency for many persons of light complexion to return themselves as British, and some Indian Christians are enumerated as Anglo-Indians. The Census of India recognizes these errors and estimates the corrected total for Anglo-Indians to be approximately 165,000. In 1931 the sex ratio was 1,061 Anglo-Indian males for every 1,000 females.

Many European stocks are represented among these hybrids, including British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. The term Anglo-Indian is thus something of a misnomer, but the largest single stock is British, and the group is predominantly British in its cultural affiliations. On the Indian side the stock is almost entirely of Hindu origin, only a very few persons being of Moslem descent.   There is no…

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Interracial Marriage and Admixture in Hawaii

Biodemography and Social Biology
Volume 17, Issue 4 (1970)
pages 278-291
DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1970.9987885

Clarence E. Glick, Professor of Sociology
University of Hawaii

Michener’s phrase “the golden men of Hawaii” reflects a popular romantic interest in the blending of ethnic elements that has been going on in Hawaii for almost two centuries. More seriously, if less romantically, scholars have been analyzing interracial marriages and intermixture and attempting to trace their effects on the emergent population of Hawaii (Adams, 1937; Hormann, 1948; Lind, 1967; Cheng and Yamamura, 1957; Taeuber, 1962; Schmitt, 1965). A landmark study, Genetics of Interracial Crosses in Hawaii, published by the geneticist Newton E. Morton and his associates in 1967, has given us a valuable comparison of “mixed” and “unmixed” children bom in Hawaii, through a detailed analysis of nearly 180,000 births registered during the eleven-year period 1948-58.

Part of the focus of the present paper is upon demographic, cultural, and social factors that must have affected genetic changes in Hawaii’s population, even though some of these considerations must be somewhat impressionistic. Moreover, it is necessary to interpret the usual measures of interracial marriage and racial admixture on which studies of genetic changes in Hawaii might be based. Such an interpretation points to an even greater breakdown in traditional mating patterns and subsequent genetic recombinations than the statistical evidence indicates.

CHANGING DEFINITIONS OF “RACIAL” CATEGORIES

Hawaii is fortunate in having census data for a longer period than any other area in the Pacific. Census reports go back to 1847, but there have been many variations in the “racial” categories used as well as in the actual racial make-up of the people designated by certain categories (Schmitt, 1968). These variations reflect changing social definitions of ethnic groups in Hawaii’s population and the changing circumstances under which interracial marriage has taken place. The 1853 census, for example, used the terms “natives” and “half-natives” for groups later called “Hawaiians” and “Part-Hawaiians”. The general term “foreign population” was subdivided to differentiate Portuguese from other Europeans, Americans from Europeans, and Chinese and Filipinos as other categories of foreigners. The term “half-castes” was used from 1866 to 1890. The censuses of 1910, 1920, and 1930 attempted to differentiate between “Caucasian-Hawaiians” and “Asiatic-Hawaiians”; those of…

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