Mixed Race Studies

Hidden Hapa

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-04-06

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

“Hey, what are you doing over there with the Hapa?”

Kathy and I looked over and there were three of our Japanese American friends at another table smiling at us, one with a mischievous grin. Sandy had jokingly pointed out that I was a mixed blood amidst a group of full bloods. Kathy and I smiled back at them and returned to our conversation.
 
But Kathy suddenly surprised me by saying, “Actually, I’m kind of mixed too; my mother is from Okinawa; like an interracial marriage to Japanese.” I looked over at my friends and remembered that one of them had told me his father was Chinese. Hey, that makes three of us and only two of them!
 
I recalled this incident when I read yesterday in the New York Times that while Asian Americans still have one of the highest interracial marriage rates in the country, Asian Americans are marrying other Asian Americans more often than in recent years. The article reported that many of these couples are of different ethnicities, such as Chinese-Indian and Filipino-Vietnamese. This means that mixed Asian Americans will continue to increase, and that many of them will not be apparently ethnically mixed. Of course, these individuals exist now and the diversity among any ethnically defined subgroup of Asian Americans is far greater than assumed. Little is know about their experience, and I think they are generally not regarded as Hapa and may not consider themselves to be Hapa. But as for others, such as black Asians, who now feel excluded from Hapa circles, a space to express mixed ancestries may be appreciated. Developing these welcome spaces is a challenge facing Asian American communities…

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More male and mixed-race health visitors wanted

Nursing Times
Harborough, Leicestershire, United Kingdom
2012-08-16

Steve Ford, Deputy News Editor

The Department of Health says it is seeking to attract more men and people from mixed ethnic backgrounds into health visiting, as part of the national recruitment drive.

The overwhelming majority of health visitors are white, female and approaching retirement, according to a DH equality analysis of the health visiting workforce in England. 

The research, published this week, is intended to inform the government’s ongoing Health Visitor Implementation Plan. The national strategy was published in February 2011 and set the aim of boosting the health visitor workforce by an extra 4,200 by 2015.

As of September 2010, there were 9,995 female health visitors and only 101 males, meaning “approximately 99% of health visitors” were women, the DH analysis said…

…“We are working with marketing colleagues to encourage nurses from mixed ethnic backgrounds to join the health visitor workforce,” the report said…

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When Half Is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities

Stanford University Press
September 2012
248 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780804775175
Paper ISBN: 9780804775182

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

“I listen and gather people’s stories. Then I write with the hope to communicate something to people, that they gain something of value by reading these stories. I tell myself that this is something that isn’t going to be done unless I do it, just because of who I am. It’s a way of making my mark, to leave something behind—not that I’m planning on going anywhere, right now.”

So begins Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu in this touching, introspective, and insightful exploration of mixed race Asian American experiences. The son of an Irish American father and Japanese mother, Murphy-Shigematsu has devoted his life to understanding himself as a product of his diverse roots. Across twelve chapters, his reflections are interspersed among profiles of others of biracial and mixed ethnicity and accounts of their journeys to answer a seemingly simple question: Who am I?

Here we meet Margo, the daughter of a Japanese woman and a black American serviceman, who found how others viewed and treated her, both in Japan and the United States, in conflict with her evolving understanding of herself. Born in Australia and raised in San Francisco, Wei Ming struggled with making sense of her Chinese and American heritage, which was further complicated when she began to realize she was bisexual. Rudy, the son of Mexican and Filipino parents, is a former gang member and hip hop artist who redirected his passion for performance into his current career as a professor of Asian Pacific American Studies. Other chapters address issues such as mixed race invisibility, being a transracial adoptee, hapa identity, beauty culture and authenticity testing, and more.

With its attention on people who have been regarded as “half” this or “half” that throughout their lives, these stories make vivid the process of becoming whole.

Contents

• Prologue
• 1. Flowers Amidst the Ashes
• 2. We Must Go On
• 3. For the Community
• 4. English, I Dont Know!
• 5. Bi Bi Girl
• 6. I Am Your Illusion, Your Reality Your Future
• 7. Grits and Sushi
• 8. I Cut across Borders as If They Have No Meaning
• 9. Victims No More
• 10. American Girl in Asia
• 11. Found in Translation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Recommended Readings
• About the Author

Eurasians: Celebrating Survival

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (2007)
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082988
pages 129-141

Christine Choo
University of Western Australia

The search for my Asian ancestors and my discoveries in archives, the crumbling pages, the eroding ink, the disappearance of the word, are a metaphor for the simultaneous emergence of the will to recover memories and the slow fading away of the material traces of memory. Eurasians of Malaysia and Singapore once epitomised the blurring of boundaries between cultures and societies in colonial and immediate post-colonial periods. In exploring their cultural and social heritage in the archives and by networking with the Eurasian diaspora on the internet, individuals shape and reaffirm their identities on new and old frontiers. This paper presents Eurasians and their experiences as transcultural or in the middle ground – the space where new ways of being are developed and lived in a cross-cultural environment. It explores how the definition of Eurasian is changing in the context of contemporary globalised society.

Who is Eurasian?

This essay is a personal reflection on the position of Eurasians as “in-betweeners” and the changes experienced by the Eurasian communities of Malaysia from historically, geographically and socially grounded minority communities to imagined communities of a diaspora with families linked by the internet. Paradoxically, in the expanded globalised context of our contemporary world where cross-cultural intermarriage or partnering is common, historic Eurasian communities like those in Malaysia are fading away through intermarriage and migration. Many Eurasian extended families connect and discover their common heritage and family links through the internet. In another reality, unrelated individuals across the world with Asian-European heritage rely on the imagined communities created by the internet to help them gain a sense of identity and community…

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A Further Discussion of the Variability of Family Strains in the Negro-White Population of New York City

Journal of the American Statistical Association
Volume 20, Issue 151 (1925)
pages 380-389
DOI: 10.1080/01621459.1925.10503502

Melville J. Herskovits

A paper read at the meeting of Section H., American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Washington , D.C., January 2, 1925.

In an investigation of the variability of a population, there are a number of sub-variabilities which can be studied, all of which must be taken into consideration when a study of the general variability of a population in a given trait is to be made. Thus, there is, besides the individual variability, that of the individuals themselves from day to day. In the case of growing children, this is an important factor, and is generally recognized where child-data are being worked with. But even with adults, there is the change which occurs with the day’s activity, particularly in such matters as height, or weight. Again, a population is not made up of isolated individuals, but is composed of family lines, and the variability of these is important, as well as the variation within the families. Although great attention is usually paid to the differing variabilities of populations taken as a whole, these others have usually been overlooked.

The present paper is concerned with variations within the family strains, and between these strains, in the Negro-White population of New York City. The measurements were taken at Public School 89, Manhattan, a school the pupils of which are about 98 per cent Negro. The amount of mixture which has gone into the racial composition of this population, is, of course, an unknown quantity, but there is strong reason to believe that an estimate of 15 to 20 per cent pure Negro would be high. In other words, the population is almost entirely mixed. By measuring the variability of family strains an indication may be had of the amount of mixture, and, at the same time, a measure of the variability within these family lines. The statistical procedure needed for such analysis was given by Boas in a paper published some time ago. The writer also has prepared a paper dealing with the…

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Barack Obama as the Great Man: Communicative Constructions of Racial Transcendence in White-Male Elite Discourses

Communication Monographs
Volume 78, Issue 4 (2011)
pages 535-556
DOI: 10.1080/03637751.2011.618140

Christopher B. Brown, Assistant Professor of Communications
Minnesota State University, Mankato

This study examined responses on the potential impact of Barack Obama’s presidency from 16 semi-structured interviews with White males in leadership positions in various organizations across the United States. While numerous studies examine the circulating racial discourses on Obama, few studies explore how he is represented in first-hand accounts from those in the public, specifically from White-male elites. This study examined interview discourses from White-male elites to reveal how they imagine race through Obama. In positioning Obama among the pantheon of great-man leaders, this study showed how dominant racial ideologies get legitimatized and reworked when members of the dominant group desire to construct racial meanings onto a popular Black leader.

I will never forget the morning after it was announced that Barack Obama would become the first African-American President of the United States. That morning, I got onto the bus and sat near a few people who were discussing the election results. As usual, I was the only African American on the bus; after all, the city of Albuquerque has a minuscule Black population. As I sat down, a Caucasian man, who was engaged in the conversation with two other passengers, immediately turned to me and congratulated me on the election. I looked at him quizzically, but replied, “I appreciate it.” At that point another man, apparently Latino, turned to me and said, “See brother, you don’t have much to worry about anymore.” I replied ambivalently, “I guess everything is all good now!” He ardently insisted, “Yeah brother, there are going to be a few changes; don’t you think so?” I shrugged and sheepishly replied, “I guess it looks that way.” The night of the announcement, I too felt proud, but I doubted that Obama’s election would extract the systematic and oppressive circumstances of a racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist society. Sensing that I was not sharing their enthusiasm, the passengers turned away from me and continued with their discussion.

During this time, I was conducting interviews with White males in leadership positions in their organizations to understand how they characterize leadership and heroism. In talking about leaders in US history, they all extolled the valor and foresight of the forefathers in creating a vision for what would eventually become the basic virtues of the US democracy. Some even praised the heroic acts of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy for galvanizing movements in circumstances where their viewpoints were considered unpopular in the mainstream. While my initial interest was to understand how these men construct leadership, I was quite surprised to hear how candidly they spoke to the leadership potential of Barack Obama. Like the passengers on the bus, these men embraced Obama as someone with the potential to alter the course of history, because he represented a healthy vision of future race relations in the United States. It is at this point that I began to ponder how the intersection of my racial and gender identity with that of the bus riders and these leaders gave rise to reflections verifying that racism has little to do with the politics of race in the United States.

The present study examines how and why race enters into the discussion of masculinized leadership when discourses of racial transcendence are appropriated by White-male elites in a cross-race interview context. Specifically, I analyze the rhetorical tactics (see Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) that these White-male elites employ when positioning Obama among the pantheon of great men in history. In this essay, I defined White-male elites as those who self-identified as White; who work in high profile positions such as chief executive officer, president, or partner in law firm; and who are US citizens. Unlike most people of color and White women, White-male elites fit the description of people who occupy spaces in which they can reside in various privileged locations: White, male, nominally heterosexual, affluent relative to economic status, and privileged relative to educational status. Scholarship rarely documents White-male elites’ constructions of race (though see Feagin & O’Brien, 2003). In fact, scholarly research on race and communication provides considerably more attention to the views of ordinary White people like college students (Bonilla-Silva & Forman, 2000; Jackson & Crawley, 2003; Jackson & Heckman, 2002; Martin, Krizek, Nakayama, & Bradford, 1996; Moon, 1999). In that regard, I contend that communication scholars must pay close attention to White-male elite expressions on race and ethnicity, given the relative power and privilege that comes with their linguistic and rhetorical styles, and given that institutional spaces are organized around their cultural repertories.

In commenting on studies of race and communication, Allen (2007) asserted that communication theorists often “neglect to delve into race in critical, substantive ways” (p. 259). I heed Allen’s concern and show how ideological discourses of race manifest in White-male elites’ constructions of Obama. This requires considering the implications for valorizing discourses of great-man leadership through discursive constructions of Obama. As Jennings (1960) and Wrightsman (1977) have noted in their critique of the great-man theory, a sudden act by a great man could alter the fate of the nation as great men maintain the appropriate traits for a particular point in history. It is my contention that these White-male elites embrace Obama as a great man leader to suggest haphazardly that it is better to speak of racism in the past tense. As we will see, critical work on race not only examines racial discourse and its manifestations, but also investigates its imaginative (or ideological) dimensions (Leonardo, 2005) how these White-male elites imagine race through Obama to suit their own ideological purposes…

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Kelly Holmes is not fully British, says BNP MEP Andrew Brons

The Telegraph
2009-06-13

Patrick Sawer

Andrew Brons, the BNP’s first MEP, sparked outrage on Saturday after he said double Olympic gold medal winner Dame Kelly Holmes cannot be regarded as fully British.

Mr Brons, who became the first member of the British National Party to be elected to the European Parliament, has said that the athlete’s mixed race heritage means she is “only partially from this country”.

The BNP – which bars blacks or Asians from joining – rejects the notion of a multicultural society and refuses to consider black and ethnic minorities to be British, even if they or their parents were born here.

But until now it has been careful not to single out noted ethnic minority celebrities for fear of provoking a public backlash.

His comments have provoked anger from politicians and sporting bodies.

Liberal Democrat MP Ed Davey said: “This type of comment reveals the ugly face of the BNP which they try to hide from voters yet is at the heart of their extremism.”…

…Mr Brons, who began his political life as a member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, said he rejected the notion that Black or Asian members of the community could be British, even if they were born here.
 
He said: “I don’t accept the term Black British or Asian British. Britons are the indigenous peoples of these isles.”
 
Asked about someone like Dame Kelly, who was born in Kent of a white English mother and Jamaican father, and served for several years in the Army before becoming one of this country’s most successful athletes, he said: “Kelly Holmes is only partially from this country, even if she is an integrated member of the community.”
 
Mr Brons, 61, went on to reject the idea that black footballers, such as Emile Heskey and Jermain Defoe, who represented England against Andorra last Wednesday, could be regarded as British.
 
He said: “They are British citizens – which is a legal concept – but not British by identity. That’s not a pejorative description, it is just stating a fact about their racial identity.”…

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American Indians in Chicago struggle to preserve identity, culture and history

Chicago Tribune
2012-08-13

Dahleen Glanton, Reporter

Recession, social service funding cuts hinder efforts

Susan Kelly Power was 17 when she boarded a train to Chicago, a place that seemed a world away from the Indian reservation she grew up on in North and South Dakota.

In the 70 years since she left her family’s home on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, Power has carved out a distinctive place for herself in Chicago’s youthful American Indian community. The oldest Native American in Chicago, she is the memory keeper in a community where history is sacred.

From the controversial Battle of Fort Dearborn, which marks its 200th anniversary this week, to Chief Illiniwek, the University of Illinois mascot who was forced into retirement five years ago, activists such as Power have made it their mission to set the historical record straight. While the Battle of Fort Dearborn is considered a pivotal part of the city’s history, American Indians living in Chicago have become, for the most part, an invisible population that is struggling.

With few financial resources and no political muscle, the community of about 49,000 American Indians in the Chicago area has struggled to find a voice in a region where they are outnumbered by almost every ethnic group. Once tucked away in Uptown and now scattered throughout the city and suburbs, they could virtually go unnoticed if not for a small but vocal group of elders who refuse to back down from a good fight…

…Wiese said the economic condition of American Indians is more dire than the 2010 census indicates, largely because she believes the figures are skewed. The census form allows anyone to identify themselves as American Indian, whether they have official tribal papers or not, she said. Without those who identified themselves as mixed race, the number of American Indians in Chicago would be cut in half, to just over 13,337, the census shows.

East Indians, whites, African-Americans and Hispanics who do not have tribal documentation are identifying themselves as Native American, Wiese said, driving up the economic status of Indians to artificial levels. Meanwhile, an equal number of tribal-recognized Indians, who like many poor people living with multiple families in a residence, were not counted in the census, she said.

“We call them ‘box checkers,’ the thousands of people who say they are American Indian” but don’t have legal status, said Wiese, whose agency provides educational services for children and adults. “It hurts us when the demographics look higher than they are.”…

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Intermarriage of Races is Urged by Sociologist

Chicago Tribune
1909-08-18
page 11
Source: The Mead Project, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

Prof. William I. Thomas Predicts the Disappearance of Color Line in Prejudices of Civilized Peoples.
 
Disappearances of the racial “color lines” was predicted yesterday by Prof. William I. Thomas of the University of Chicago in a lecture in Kent theater on “Race Prejudice.”
 
“Race prejudice will grow less as race relationships become closer and as we travel more,” he said. “Already whites and Japs intermarry. There is no reason why intermarriage of races should not continue along these and other lines. The reason we marry Japs is that they are on a level with us — in many ways, at least. Their civilization and culture and ours are much alike.
 
“The questions of the future are not to be bound up in the tint of the skin by by the degree of development of the different races and occupations. The differences to be found in fair Scandinavians and dark Italians are duplicated in the case of whites and blacks.
 
“What we call the white race is the most mixed race of all. It has negro blood in it. The infusion of Indian blood into Americans has resulted in one of the finest strains possible.

“The signs of race prejudice are to be found in their extreme degree in our attitudes toward negroes. But, disagreeable as some of their traits are to us, our manners and features are even more shocking to negroes in Africa. They despise white people because our skins recall such things as ghosts, death, disease, and white mice. The time is coming when we shall not be separated as we now are by color.”

A Response to Ben Pitcher’s “Obama and the Politics of Blackness: Antiracism in the ‘post-black’ Conjuncture” [Rickey Hill]

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 12, Issue 4 (2010) (Post-Racial Politics and Its Discontents)
pages pages 347-350
DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2010.526058

Rickey Hill, Professor of Social Science
Mississippi Valley State University, Itta Bena, Mississippi

There is no “post-Black conjuncture.” Neither are we, in the United States, living in a post-racial moment. The coming of Barack Hussein Obama as the first Black person to be elected president of the United States has not signaled the end of racial domination as practice or racism as ideology. Racial domination continues to structure the lives of Black people and other nonwhite people in American society. Racism remains the active ideology that rationalizes institutional life and pervades the public and private spheres of interactions and reactions between people of color and the dominant white group. To be sure, Black people and other nonwhite people also suffer because the vast majority of them occupy the lower rungs of the economic ladder. However, while class is a determinant to economic wherewithal and access, race remains the dominant contradiction in the great socioeconomic divide.

Despite racial domination, and because of it. Blackness strives as a concrete cultural, psychological, political, and social force. Contrary to Pitcher’s thinking, “Obama’s claim on Blackness” is not “delimited by his not having been born to the descendants of slaves.” Obama’s claim on Blackness is instead enhanced because…

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