Mixed Race Studies

Being Amerasian in South Korea: Purebloodness, Multiculturalism, and Living Alongside the U.S. Military Empire

The Ohio State University
June 2012
96 pages

Yuri W. Doolan

Honors Research Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors Research Distinction in History in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University

This thesis focuses on the history of U.S. neo-colonialism in South Korea through the lens of mixed race Amerasians—a population generally regarded and understood to have been produced through the liaisons between South Korean camptown women and American military personnel. In this project, I discuss the historical and contemporary status and identity of mixed race individuals in South Korea as the country’s national ideology evolved from an embrace of purebloodedness to multiculturalism. My analysis is chronologically framed around intercountry adoption policies in the years immediately following the Korean War (formed to excise the presence of mixed race GI babies from South Korea) and state-sponsored multicultural policy initiatives beginning in 2005. I research the production of Amerasian subjectivity and identity in South Korea over the past six decades through an analysis of pureblooded constructions of Koreanness, U.S. militarism and camptowns, androcentric Nationality and Family Laws, contemporary multicultural policy formations, and the popular culture and lived experiences of Amerasians in South Korea.

I also offer a comparative analysis of a new mixed race group in South Korea called Kosian (Korean/Asian). I critique multiculturalism in South Korea, which targets this emerging Kosian demographic, arguing that multicultural policy is primarily one of assimilation rather than a recognition of cultural and racial differences. I suggest that the marginal status of mixed race Amerasians has not changed much since the Korean War and is linked to South Korea’s persistent status as a neo-colony of the United States—a history of national shame and subjugation that Amerasians have come to symbolize. Primary sources for this study include legal and government documents, popular media representations, interviews with pureblooded Koreans, as well as oral histories of Amerasians that I conducted in South Korea during the summer of 2011.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• A Note on Terminology
• Chapter One
  • Introduction
  • Pureblooded Constructions of Race
  • The G.I. Baby and Camptowns
  • Intercountry Adoption
  • Gendered Citizenship and Korean Family Law
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Two
  • Introduction
  • A “Multicultural” Era
  • White Privilege in Contemporary South Korean Society
  • Conclusion
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire thesis here.

Aliens Admitted Here!

Evening Post
Wellington, New Zealand
Volume LVI, Issue 96
1898-10-20
Page 4
Source: Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

The House cannot be congratulated on the treatment it meted out last night to the Immigration Restriction Bill, and the Premier showed a lamentable lack of power or of sincerity in allowing the debate to be shelved in the way it was. Doubtless some of the obstruction the measure experienced was prompted by the Premier’s arbitrary efforts to force Estimates through at the previous sitting. Such despotic procedure always has a bad effect upon members, and almost invariably leads to the delay of public business. Admitting this, however, we are still unable to understand the position taken up by the Opposition. It was so nearly one of factious disputation that it was calculated to play into the hand of an astute manoeuvrer like the present head of the Government. The whole point of the Bill was lost by the members who attacked it last night. In ignorance or of malice prepense they ignored for the most part the real nature of the measure, and devoted all their energies to the castigation of a more or less bogus side-issue. From the speeches of the Leader of the Opposition and some of hie followers it might have been supposed that the object of the Bill was to limit the immigration of Europeans who could not read or write. This view is an obvious distortion of the clause containing the so-called “educational test.” The history of the measure sufficiently disproves the erroneous assumption. Since the House has, as we believe, with quite inadequate reason blocked the passage of the Bill, it will be as well to give a short sketch of the events that led up to its introduction into our Parliament.

Considerable popular feeling has been displayed against the importation of Asiatics and other undesirable immigrants into the colony, and, however much one may honour the humanity of those who feel a distaste for the arbitrary exclusion of any particular race, it is undeniable that the evil effects of racial, mixing have again and again been exhibited in various parts of the world. The colour question in the United States is one of the most serious problems the American Republic has to face. South Africa is doubly troubled by native questions and Indian coolie difficulties, while, nearer home, Queensland has its Kanaka embarrassment, and in common with other parts of Northern Australia feels the danger of an influx of Japanese and Chinese. In matters of this kind the natural impulse of the generous minded is to give free access to the stranger, and to let him prove his right to settlement by his obedience to the local laws. But the hard facts of history and experience are against the sentiment. If we wish to make the future nation of New Zealand fit to hold its own in the world, we must preserve the integrity of our race. An influx of Asiatics might also at any time disorganise the labour market and throw back for years the good work done by trade combinations…

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Fathers of Conscience with Bernie D. Jones

Research at the National Archives & Beyond
Blogtalk Radio
2012-11-08, 21:00 EST (2012-11-09, 02:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Co-Host

Natonne Elaine Kemp, Co-Host

Bernie D. Jones, Associate Professor of Law
Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts

Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South

Bernice Bennett and Natonne Elaine Kemp welcome author Bernie D. Jones for an engaging discussion about her book—Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South. Jones is Associate Professor, Suffolk University Law School.  She is a graduate of the New York University Law School and the University of Virginia Department of History.

Fathers of Conscience examines high-court decisions in the antebellum South that involved wills in which white male planters bequeathed property, freedom, or both to women of color and their mixed-race children. These men, whose wills were contested by their white relatives, had used trusts and estates law to give their slave partners and children official recognition and thus circumvent the law of slavery. The will contests that followed determined whether that elevated status would be approved or denied by courts of law.

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Figuring Abjection: The Slave Mother in the Early Creole Novel

French Studies
Volume 67, Issue 1, January 2013
pages 61-75
DOI: 10.1093/fs/kns232

Maeve McCusker
School of Modern Languages
Queen’s University Belfast

While twentieth-century Caribbean literature in French has generated a substantial body of criticism, earlier writings have largely been neglected. This article begins by contextualizing the Creole novel of the 1830s in cultural and historical terms, then proceeds to analyse two novels published by Martinican authors in 1835: Outre-mer by Louis de Maynard de Queilhe and Les Créoles by Jules Levilloux. The few studies that exist of these texts tend to contrast their portrayal of the (male) mulatto; Levilloux has generally been considered the more progressive writer in this regard. However, both writers are in striking harmony in their depiction of the black mother, a figure (in both senses, as her physiognomy is central in her portrayal) who has until now been overlooked. In Outre-mer, as in Les Créoles, the elderly black mother is an abject and wretched creature, a source of phobic disgust. She has necessarily to be shown to be repulsive, filthy, and morally hideous in old age in order to counteract the fascination she provokes, and to embody a phantasized repellent to the desires of the white male.

Read or purchase the article here.

Regular screening mammography before the diagnosis of breast cancer reduces black:white breast cancer differences and modifies negative biological prognostic factors

Breast Cancer Research and Treatment
Volume 135, Number 2 (2012)
pages 549-553
DOI: 10.1007/s10549-012-2193-3

Paula Grabler
Feinberg College of Medicine
Northwestern University

Danielle Dupuy
Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Taskforce, Chicago, Illinois

Jennifer Rai
University of Michigan College of Medicine

Sean Bernstein
Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois

David Ansell
Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois

Black women present with later stage breast cancers compared to white women, and their cancers are more likely to be larger, receptor negative, and undifferentiated. This study evaluated black:white differences in the stage and biology of breast cancer among women who had a screening mammogram at one of two Chicago academic medical centers within two years of the breast cancer diagnosis (regularly screened) and compared them to the black:white differences in the stage and biology of breast cancer in women who had not received mammographic screening within two years of a breast cancer diagnosis (irregularly screened.) There were no significant black:white differences in the proportion of early breast cancers (black = 74 %; white = 69 %, p = NS) in the regularly screened population or in the irregularly screened group (black = 60 %; white = 68 %, p = NS.) The regularly screened population received significantly more mammograms (58 % ≥4 mammograms) compared to the irregularly screened population (41 % ≥4 mammograms.) Black women in the regularly screened population were less likely than irregularly screened black women to have estrogen negative breast cancers (26 vs. 36 %, p < .05), progesterone negative breast cancers (35 vs. 46 %, p < .05), and poorly differentiated breast cancers (39 vs. 53 %, p < .05.) White women in the irregularly screened population also had worse prognostic factors than white women in the regularly screened population, though these were not statistically significant. Regular mammographic screening can contribute to the narrowing of black:white differences in presentation of breast cancer.

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Michele Elam: The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium [Johnson Review]

New Books in African American Studies: Discussions with Scholars of African Americans about Their New Books
2012-10-31

Sherry Johnson, Assistant Professor of English
Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan

“What are you?” The question can often comes out of nowhere One can be going about her quotidian activities, or she might have just finished a meeting at work. “What are you?” The question is disorienting for most, but for others who are racially ambiguous it is commonplace. The ostensibly benign question suggests that it is about the person being asked. However, one might argue that it is more about the one who does the asking. In The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millenium (Stanford University Press, 2011), Michele Elam critically discusses the rise of the Mixed Race Studies. To demonstrate the new sub-genre of cultural studies in both art and academia Elam shows elements of what mixed-racedness looks like in the classroom, as well as in the public sphere here at the turn of the 21st century…

Read the entire review here. Listen to the interview (00:59:00) here.

Gender and the Neighborhood Location of Mixed-Race Couples

Demography
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-012-0158-0
Published Online: 2012-10-17

Richard Wright, Professor of Geography
Dartmouth College

Steven R. Holloway, Professor of Geography
University of Georgia

Mark Ellis, Professor of Geography
University of Washington

Gender asymmetry in mixed-race heterosexual partnerships and marriages is common. For instance, black men marry or partner with white women at a far higher rate than white men marry or partner with black women. This article asks if such gender asymmetries relate to the racial character of the neighborhoods in which households headed by mixed-race couples live. Gendered power imbalances within households generally play into decisions about where to live or where to move (i.e., men typically benefit more than women), and we find the same in mixed-race couple arrangements and residential attainment. Gender interacts with race to produce a measurable race-by-gender effect. Specifically, we report a positive relationship between the percentage white in a neighborhood and the presence of households headed by mixed-race couples with a white male partner. The opposite holds for households headed by white-blacks and white-Latinos if the female partner is white; they are drawn to predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. The results have implications for investigations of residential location attainment, neighborhood segregation analysis, and mixed-race studies.

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“Tense and Tender Ties”: a review of Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (2011)

Transition
Number 108 (2012)
pages 129-140

Kimberly DaCosta, Associate Professor of Sociology; Associate Dean of Students
New York University, Gallatin

Psychologically conflicted, confused, traitorous, tragic, and deracinated: the public vocabulary used to describe multiracial people has hardly changed since the days when state laws banned marriage between black and white. Zeroing in on interracial kinship, Kimberly DaCosta close reads Janny Scott’s biography of Barack Obama’s mother.

My father’s white, I tell them, and rural.
You don’t hate the South? they ask. You don’t hate it?
—Natasha Trethewey, “Pastoral”

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” said Cornel West in an interview published on the political blog, TruthDig in May 2011. “It’s understandable,” he continues, “As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening … Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.”

West claims to understand quite a lot about Obama, intuited from the most general facts of his upbringing in an interracial and international family context. According to West, this upbringing has directly shaped (or perhaps “distorted” is the better description from West’s point of view) his political formation, alienating him from his people (“deracination”) and thus making him ideally suited to become what West calls “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

“It is a tried and true ritual of American politics to interpret interracial intimacy and mixed race subjectivity as a sign of suspect political loyalty.”

When he made these statements, West was participating in a tried and true ritual of American politics—the one in which interracial intimacy and mixed-race subjectivity are interpreted as sign of, or explanation for, suspect or insufficient political loyalty. George W. Bush performed the ritual in 2000, successfully smearing John McCain in the South Carolina Republican primary with a whisper campaign that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock. Most recently, in a widely read and discussed New York Times opinion piece published just a few months after the West interview, Drew Westen, psychologist and self-described “scientist and strategic consultant,” explained Obama’s perceived political betrayal as a consequence of his insufficiently integrated identity. In Obama, Westen writes, we have “a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his reelection. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in Dreams from My Father appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there—the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in” (emphasis added).

These statements rely on familiar stereotypes of mixed race people—psychologically conflicted, confused, race traitors—for their impact, and evidence no more than a cursory knowledge of the details of Obama’s family life. Not that more detail about those relationships matters much to those making these kinds of political speculations. Ideologies, as Barbara Fields reminds us in the New Left Review, “are real, but it does not follow that they [need to be] scientifically accurate” in order to do their work. They work because they reflect the daily rituals that people engage in to make them seem plausible—rituals like the ones West and Westen are performing—that assert, while claiming to merely describe, the political impact of mixed-race subjectivity.

Janny Scott’s biography emerges in this moment in which the political utility of interracialism reveals itself yet again. If statements about the significance of Obama’s upbringing in his political decision-making proceed largely on the basis of supposition and innuendo,A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, published by Riverhead Press, provides some much needed context. Scott did not get to comment on this most recent controversy since the volume went to press before it occurred. Yet, her book can be read as a long (nearly 400-page) retort to those who would so blithely use interracial kinship and mixed-race subjectivity in this way…

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Learning to be different: A white mother of biracial children experiences racism

University of St. Thomas (Minnesota)
December 2004
194 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3154007
ISBN: 9780496146376

Jennifer Ann Greer Johnson

A Dissertation Submitted to the Education Faculty of the University of St. Thomas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree Doctor of Education

This qualitative autoethnographic study examines the experiences of an inner-city assistant principal in a multiracial high school who is also a Caucasian mother of biracial children of African American and Caucasian descent. The narratives throughout this study illustrate encounters with prejudice, discrimination, and racism in public and private places. The stories are analyzed through the lens of racial formation theory and Critical Race Theory. Results indicate that the identity of a mother of biracial children is complex as she straddles two cultures, that of the black and white community. An Ethnic Identity Development Model illustrates the struggles of rearing biracial children while working in an urban high school. This autoethnographic study illustrates the mother’s identity shift as she learns to be different in both worlds.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ABSTRACT
• LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES.
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1: JUMPING THE BROOM
  • A journey into difference
  • Evolution of the study
  • Autoethnography
  • Data collection and analysis
  • Validity and ethics
  • Organization of the Dissertation
• CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF LITERATURE
  • Interracial Relationships
  • Biracial Identity
  • Class Issues
  • Racial Formation Theory
  • Critical Race Theory
• CHAPTER 3: AWAKENINGS
  • Is she adopted?
  • Their father is Black.
  • Children are not supposed to be out in the sun
  • Intraracial Discrimination
  • We can only choose one
  • Would you buy a warranty on a Cadillac?
  • Another Awakening
  • Is that your child?
  • I will never be with another white woman again!
  • His mouth fell open, and he stared at my children and then at me
• CHAPTER 4: HAIR: POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF RACE
  • What is this, the next Shirley Temple?
  • Do you use this on your hair?
  • I decided that you need to do something with Jacqueline’s hair
  • Everyone stopped and stared at me
  • Shampoo and conditioner for one colored girl
  • I have to get their hair “right” in the eyes of the Black community
• CHAPTER 5: WILL MY CHILDREN HAVE A PLACE AT THE TABLE?
  • I was raised in a strict Catholic household
  • The Archbishop’s Letter
  • Racism is a sin
  • For my children’s sake, great changes need to be made
• CHAPTER 6: WILL MY CHILDREN BE LEFT BEHIND?
  • Appointment as Assistant Principal
  • “Are those your children?”
  • I circled ‘White’ even though my son does not look White
  • “She does not like you”
  • “So you’re kickin it with a black man”
  • You’re just picking on me because I am Black
  • Does anyone speak another language?
  • Mama, will you still like us even though your skin is white and mine is brown?
  • Let’s not just give people the boots, let’s give them the straps
  • Most of the International Baccalaureate students are white
• CHAPTER 7: A MOTHER’S STRUGGLE
  • “Second-Hand Racism”
  • Racism at school and the workplace
  • Rearing my children
  • Ethnic Identity Development Model
• REFERENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

• TABLE 1 Changing Racial Combinations of Interracial Marriages in Minnesota.
• TABLE 2 My Journey in a Racialized Society
• FIGURE 1 2000 Census Self-Identification Questionnaire
• FIGURE 2 Ethnic Identity Development Model (Fluid)

Purchase the dissertation here.

Race in a Bottle

Scientific American
Volume 297 (January 1, 2007)
pages 40-45

Jonathan D. Kahn, Professor of Law
Hamline University, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Drugmakers are eager to develop medicines targeted at ethnic groups, but so far they have made poor choices based on unsound science. This article focuses on the drug, BiDil – a drug that combats congestive heart failure by dilating the arteries and veins of African American patients. The author expounds that there is no solid evidence that the drug should targeted towards only one ethnic group. The author includes the history of BiDil including its inception and then its reappearance with a race-based focus.

Read the entire article here.