Mixed Race Studies

What It’s Like Being an “Other”

College Magazine
2018-06-19

Mailinh McNicholas

Mailinh McNicholas

I’ve remained on the fringes of two different and separate Anchorage, Alaska communities. I have a Caucasian father and Vietnamese mother. My high school friends often talked about my ethnicity and attempted to place me into a defined racial category. Some of my peers pegged me as an Asian immigrant, some have asked if I am Native Alaskan, and others simply asked ‘What are you?’

Unfortunately, my hopes did not match my reality. A few months into my freshman year at GW [George Washington University] I found that my college peers also cast me as “the other.” Although I’m equal parts Asian and White, to my white friends I’m Asian and to my Asian friends, I’m white. My bi-cultural heritage once again left me excluded from being included in ether community…

Read the entire article here.

Dream of the Water Children: Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific

2Leaf Press
2018-06-08
470 pages
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-940939-28-5
ePub ISBN-13: 978-1-940939-29-2

Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd

Introduction by Gerald Horne
Foreword by Velina Hasu Houston
Edited by Karen Chau

Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd’s debut, Dream of the Water Children: Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific, is a lyrical and compelling memoir about a son of an African American father and a Japanese mother who has spent a lifetime being looked upon with curiosity and suspicion by both sides of his ancestry and the rest of society. Cloyd begins his story in present-day San Francisco, reflecting back on a war-torn identity from Japan, U.S. military bases, and migration to the United States, uncovering links to hidden histories.

Dream of the Water Children tells two main stories: Cloyd’s mother and his own. It was not until the author began writing his memoir that his mother finally addressed her experiences with racism and sexism in Occupied Japan. This helped Cloyd make better sense of, and reckon with, his dislocated inheritances. Tautly written in spare, clear poetic prose, Dream of the Water Children delivers a compelling and surprising account of racial and gender interactions. It tackles larger social histories, helping to dispel some of the great narrative myths of race and culture embedded in various identities of the Pacific and its diaspora.

How I Finally Learned To Accept Both My Chinese And Jewish Identities

The Huffington Post
2018-05-22

Gen Slosberg
Guest Writer

Gen Slosberg To be mixed and a woman meant my appearance was of the foremost importance to everyone around me.

Growing up in China, I never quite understood why I didn’t fit in.

I ate Chinese food, went to Chinese school, had Chinese friends and did Chinese things. I memorized poems and Confucius passages at school and learned how to play the zither. At night, my grandma would sit next to my bed, fan away mosquitoes with her bamboo fan and sing nursery rhymes about the summer rain in Cantonese. On weekends, I would wake up early to watch my neighbor roll dumpling dough and my mom cut green onions into small pieces for the filling.

What little exposure I had to American culture was when my Jewish-American father would come home after monthslong business trips and read me Dr. Seuss. Until I was 15, my understanding of America consisted of vague memories of The Boy and The Apple Tree, summer trips to my dad’s hometown Portland, Maine, where his white relatives would look at me in wonder and express concern for my broken English.

I was, as far as I understood, Chinese. But as far as everyone else in China was concerned, I was only white, Jewish and American because of my father. For reasons incomprehensible to me at the time, I was “different” in the eyes of those in a society so emphatic about its homogeneity…

Read the entire article here.

Portrait Of: ‘The Latinos Of Asia’

Latino USA
2018-05-22

Janice Llamoca, Digital Media Editor
Futuro Media Group

When you hear of last names like Torres, Rodriguez or Santos, you might automatically think of Latin America—and you’re not completely wrong. Those surnames are common throughout Latin America, but they’re also common in the Philippines.

Because of Spanish colonization, Filipinos and Latinos also share —aside from last names— religion, food and even similarities in language. These lines become even clearer here in the United States, as Filipino-Americans grow up in a cities with large Latino populations, like Los Angeles.

Anthony Ocampo, associate professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, breaks down these similarities in his book, The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race.

Maria Hinojosa talks to Ocampo about the book, his experience growing up in Los Angeles as a Filipino-American and what his research tells us about the link between Filipinos and Latinos…

Listen to the interview (00:19:30) here.

Black-Asian Counterintimacies: Reading Sui Sin Far in Jamaica

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018
pages 197-204
DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2018.0015

Christine “Xine” Yao, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of English
University of British Columbia

In “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian,” Edith Maude Eaton, writing as Sui Sin Far, reflects on her time in Jamaica as a white-passing mixed-race woman.¹ Rumor of her Chinese ancestry provokes a white English naval officer to seek her out for sexual favors, a scenario still all too familiar to women, particularly women of color, today: a predatory conversation sheathed in friendly euphemisms. At first Far believes his visit has to do with her work as a journalist, but his repeated “silly and offensive laugh” suggests otherwise.² When she attempts to dismiss him, he laughs again, “There’s always plenty of time for good times. That’s what I am here for.”³ After commenting on her “nice little body,” he invites her to sail with him where “I will tell you all about the sweet little Chinese girls I met when we were at Hong Kong. They’re not so shy!”⁴ The officer’s framing of her presumed affective and sexual availability, and the foregrounding of his own sexual and social prerogative, are an everyday life manifestation of what Lisa Lowe names a “‘political economy’ of intimacy … a particular calculus governing the production, distribution, and possession of intimacy” predicated on empire and settler colonialism.⁵ The man’s proposition to Far is a demand for her friendliness because those other Chinese girls in Hong Kong are “not so shy.” In her rejection of his desire for intimacy, she risks the dangerous backlash that attends injured white masculinity along with broader social consequences that could impact the relative privilege of her personal and professional life in the Caribbean. Still, instead of a “friendly” relationship to whiteness, Sui Sin Far seeks alternative intimacies. In the same section of her memoir she juxtaposes this incident with musings about her position as a white-passing mixed-race Chinese woman in relation to her observations about antiblackness in the West Indies. Despite the warnings of the English who tell her to fear the “‘brown boys’ of the island,” the writer considered the mother of Asian North American literature affirms a sense of transnational solidarity between peoples of color in her affective racial identifications. “I too am of the ‘brown people’ of the earth,” she confides to her readers, prefiguring, in this assertion, the anti-colonial alliance between African and Asian nations that would be formalized in 1955 at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia.⁶

Intimacy operates, here, as a heuristic for understanding how the racialized and gendered pressures of domesticity, sentimentality, and sexuality are imbricated with the projects of empire. These exploitative relations undergird the transnational violences of settler colonialism, slavery, and indentured servitude—systems which, as Lowe argues, enable the liberal fictions of white Western individuals, who are able to claim intimacy as one of the privileges associated with the private sphere, as a property of their citizenship in modern civil society. In the shift from the late nineteenth-century threatening “Yellow Peril” to modern-day deserving “model minority,” Asian Americans, particularly those of East Asian descent, are lured by false promises of inclusion into this liberal fiction on the basis of intimate affiliation with whiteness. Among the processes of comparative racialization that emerge from transnational intimacies, Ellen Wu traces how Asian Americans were complicit in the anti-black creation of the “model minority” category in the American cultural imaginary.⁷ Nonetheless, the solidarity work of activists like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama, along with studies of earlier black-Asian cultural and political engagements by scholars like Edlie Wong and Julia H. Lee, indicates an alternative genealogy of counterintimacies that disrupts those aligned with the afterlife of imperial exploitation.⁸ In defiance of the coercive pressures made manifest through sexual violence and emotional labor, the mixed-race Asian and black women of Sui Sin Far’s fiction and nonfiction writings reorient these indices of transnational power relations away from their focus on whiteness and toward the possibility of resistance through affective connections that center peoples of color.

In Far’s rediscovered Jamaican stories and journalism…

Mixed Korean: Our Stories

Truepeny Publishing Company
2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-06959-2

Edited by: Cerrissa Kim, Katherine Kim, Soon Kim-Russell, and Mary-Kim Arnold

From the struggles of the Korean War, to the modern dilemmas faced by those who are mixed race, comes an assortment of stories that capture the essence of what it is to be a mixed Korean. With common themes of exclusion, and recollections of not looking Korean enough, black enough, white enough, or “other” enough, this powerful collection features works by award-winning authors Alexander Chee, Michael Croley, Heinz Insu Fenkl, alongside pieces composed by prominent writers, poets and scholars. Interwoven between known literary names, are the voices of newcomers with poignant memories that have never been captured before. Collectively, these stories will resonate with anyone who has ever stood on the outside of a group, longing for inclusion. They are a testament to the courage, strength and resilience of mixed people everywhere.

In the Wake of His Damage

The Rumpus
2018-05-12

Shreerekha
New York, New York

Rumpus original art by Aubrey Nolan

All the sleeping women
Are now awake and moving.
– Yosano Akiko (1911)

For all women who already know this narrative;
For all women touched by the Great Writers, named, unnamed, and some listed as letters;
For all who commune in the trauma and healing promised herein;
For all who believe in the power of radical transgressive border-crossing love;
For my Happiness, and my son and my daughter, so that you may walk differently;
For the ex with whom love remains the last transgression —

The Autobiographical

The year after I started teaching in Texas, his novel came out. Ten years after the event of our relationship, ten tortured years where we continued to communicate, a sort of communication that involved him reaching out, letting me know I made all the wrong decisions in my life, and then, asking for forgiveness and another chance, I thought I should teach his novel in my classes. The novel itself was important, won the Pulitzer, and by teaching it enough times, I thought it would do the trick. The classroom is sacral: all that goes through it turns magical and I would emerge whole. I would finally be rid of my ghost-love and I could sanitize our past through the distance offered by teaching and making a monument of his work for my students. Somehow, that plan failed.

What I do is teach, write, and think on, most often, feminist texts and theories. Such a pedagogy has not just carried me through the classrooms over the decades, but become a mooring post in life. It offers me a vision and a strategy, a way to love radically, think fearlessly, and keep renewing, as I can, the bridges between projects of feminism and social justice. Gloria Anzaldua’s vision, a vision that has carried many a woman through a dark day, has been valuable in thinking through the rubble of this event in my life. In Borderlands, Anzaldua offers a prophetic amalgam that helps women identify the productive potential of the mestiza way, the middle spaces she calls the nepantla. For women of the many elsewheres, women who continually travel and cross borders, Anzaldua’s psychic restlessness gives a fist bump of legitimacy, an anchor in the cultural collisions many of us remain mired in. Rather than a counter stance, she speaks of developing a position that is inclusive, inaugurating for us the amasamiento, a creature of both light and darkness.

I identify in a category not formalized or accepted in colonial census charts or western ways of understanding the other, as a black South Asian. I am an Indian who lays claim to the global community of black consciousness, and I reside between so many worlds of belonging and unbelonging. In racializing colorism and politicizing my own experience of antipathy witnessed toward the color of my skin, I crafted my own passport into marooned and shapeshifting black communities that gave credence to ontologies and a posteriori narratives over normative constructions of race, ethnicities, and nationalities…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond Black and White: A Reader on Contemporary Race Relations

SAGE Publishing
2017
488 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781506306940

Edited by:

Zulema Valdez, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Merced

Beyond Black and White is a new anthology of readings that reflects the complexity of racial dynamics in the contemporary United States, where the fastest-growing group is “two or more races.” Drawing on the work of both established figures in the field and early career scholars, Zulema Valdez has assembled a rich and provocative collection of pieces that illustrates the diversity of today’s American racial landscape. Where many books tend to focus primarily on majority–minority relations, Beyond Black and White offers a more nuanced picture by including pieces on multiracial/multiethnic identities, relations between and within minority communities, and the experiences of minority groups who have achieved power and status within American society.

Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• PART I. THEORIES OF RACE AND ETHNICITY
  • 1. A Critical and Comprehensive Sociological Theory of Race and Racism; Tanya Golash-Boza
  • 2. The Theory of Racial Formation; Michael Omi, Howard Winant
  • 3. Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
• PART II. THEORIES OF ASSIMILATION
  • 4. Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration; Richard Alba, Victor Nee
  • 5. Segmented Assimilation and Minority Cultures of Mobility; Kathryn M. Neckerman, Prudence Carter, Jennifer Lee
• PART III. RACE AND BIOLOGY REVISITED
  • 6. Race as Biology Is Fiction, Racism as a Social Problem Is Real: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on the Social Construction of Race; Audrey Smedley, Brian D. Smedley
  • 7. Back to the Future? The Emergence of a Geneticized Conceptualization of Race in Sociology; Reanne Frank
• PART IV. COLOR-BLIND AND OTHER RACISMS
  • 8. Unmasking Racism: Halloween Costuming and Engagement of the Racial Other; Jennifer C. Mueller, Danielle Dirks, Leslie Houts Picca
  • 9. Invisibility in the Color-Blind Era: Examining Legitimized Racism against Indigenous Peoples; Dwanna L. Robertson
• PART V. BOUNDARY MAKING AND BELONGING
  • 10. Who Are We? Producing Group Identity through Everyday Practices of Conflict and Discourse; Jennifer A. Jones
  • 11. Illegality as a Source of Solidarity and Tension in Latino Families; Leisy Abrego
  • 12. Are Second-Generation Filipinos “Becoming” Asian American or Latino? Historical Colonialism, Culture and Panethnicity; Anthony C. Ocampo
• PART VI. COLORISM
  • 13. The Persistent Problem of Colorism: Skin Tone, Status, and Inequality; Margaret Hunter
  • 14. The Case for Taking White Racism and White Colorism More Seriously; Lance Hannon, Anna DalCortivo, Kirstin Mohammed
• PART VII. EDUCATION AND SCHOOLING
  • 15. “I’m Watching Your Group”: Academic Profiling and Regulating Students Unequally; Gilda L. Ochoa
  • 16. Race, Age, and Identity Transformations in the Transition from High School to College for Black and First-Generation White Men; Amy C. Wilkins
• PART VIII. POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AND COOPERATION
  • 17. Out of the Shadows and Out of the Closet: Intersectional Mobilization and the DREAM Movement; Veronica Terriquez
  • 18. Racial Inclusion or Accommodation? Expanding Community Boundaries among Asian American Organizations; Dina G. Okamoto, Melanie Jones Gast
  • 19. The Place of Race in Conservative and Far-Right Movements; Kathleen M. Blee, Elizabeth A. Yates
• PART IX. SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND WORK
  • 20. Negotiating “The Welfare Queen” and “The Strong Black Woman”: African American Middle-Class Mothers’ Work and Family Perspectives; Dawn Marie Dow
  • 21. Nailing Race and Labor Relations: Vietnamese Nail Salons in Majority–Minority Neighborhoods; Kimberly Kay Hoang
  • 22. Becoming a (Pan)ethnic Attorney: How Asian American and Latino Law Students Manage Dual Identities; Yung-Yi Diana Pan
• PART X. HEALTH AND MENTAL HEALTH DISPARITIES
  • 23. Miles to Go before We Sleep: Racial Inequities in Health; David R. Williams
  • 24. Identity and Mental Health Status among American Indian Adolescents; Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, Tony N. Brown
  • 25. Assimilation and Emerging Health Disparities among New Generations of U.S. Children; Erin R. Hamilton, Jodi Berger Cardoso, Robert A. Hummer, Yolanda C. Padilla
• PART XI. CRIMINALIZATION, DEPORTATION, AND POLICING
  • 26. The Racialization of Crime and Punishment: Criminal Justice, Color-Blind Racism, and the Political Economy of the Prison Industrial Complex; Rose M. Brewer, Nancy A. Heitzeg
  • 27. Mass Deportation at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century; Tanya Golash-Boza
  • 28. The Hyper-Criminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration; Victor M. Rios
• PART XII. INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS AND MULTIRACIALITY
  • 29. “Nomas Cásate”/“Just Get Married”: How a Legalization Pathway Shapes Mixed-Status Relationships; Laura E. Enriquez
  • 30. I Wouldn’t, but You Can: Attitudes toward Interracial Relationships; Melissa R. Herman, Mary E. Campbell
  • 31. Love Is (Color)Blind: Asian Americans and White Institutional Space at the Elite University; Rosalind S. Chou, Kristen Lee, Simon Ho
  • 32. A Postracial Society or a Diversity Paradox? Race, Immigration, and Multiraciality in the Twenty-First Century; Jennifer Lee, Frank D. Bean
• Glossary

He searched for his Japanese birth mother. He found her — and the restaurant she had named after him.

The Washington Post
2018-05-08

Kathryn Tolbert

Bruce Hollywood with his mother, Nobue Ouchi. (Courtesy of Bruce Hollywood)

It began with a heart attack in the Pentagon parking lot in pre-dawn darkness. Air Force Col. Bruce Hollywood was on his way to work and found himself on the ground, thinking: “This is where it ends.”

Later, as he lay in the ambulance racing to Walter Reed Army Hospital, two regrets popped into his head. One was that he wouldn’t be able to help his son with his college applications. The other was that he never thanked the Japanese woman who gave birth to him, then gave him up for adoption in 1960.

Hollywood was adopted by an American couple who were stationed in Japan with the U.S. military and who could offer him a good life in America.

It took that heart attack in 2005 for Hollywood to set out to find his birth mother, something his adoptive mother, who had passed away, had repeatedly encouraged him to do. Before that, he said, he never felt something was missing. His adoption was not something he had reflected on much.

“I always knew I was adopted because I had Asian features and [my father] was an Irishman and [my mother] was a Norwegian lady,” said Hollywood, 57. “And they always told me, ‘…We picked you out special. So you’re even more special than everyone else.’”…

Read the entire article here.

My family had never seen a Kenyan: The Chinese making a new life in Africa

BBC News
2018-05-10

Rajeev Gupta
BBC World Service, Nairobi, Kenya

Xu Jing and Henry Rotich fell in love a decade ago

“We fell in love but it was very difficult at first,” Xu Jing explains from the courtyard of the Fairmont Hotel in Nairobi.

“My family didn’t know much about Africa at all. They hadn’t even seen a Kenyan before so they were very worried.”

Henry Rotich – the Kenyan in question – was just as concerned.

The pair had fallen for each other after Henry was sent to China to learn Mandarin as part of his government job.

It took him many weeks to get his language skills good enough to meet Jing’s father over a nerve-filled lunch, at which he asked for his blessing.

“Her father didn’t say much so I was really worried about what he was thinking, whether or not he even liked the food we were serving him,” Henry recalls.

Apparently his mastery of Mandarin was enough: a decade later, the couple are living in the Kenyan capital, proud parents to two children.

Jing now teaches Mandarin at the Confucius Institute based at the University of Nairobi, one of an estimated 10,000 Chinese nationals who have moved to the East African state.

Their family provides one snapshot of the growing links between Chinese and Kenyans – propelled somewhat by China’s massive investment in the country…

Read the entire article here.