Mixed Race Studies

Blending together

The Stanford Daily
Stanford University
2011-05-05

Ashley Menzies

These students are part of the growing country-wide phenomenon of individuals who identify themselves as “mixed race.” The number of people who check both the black and white boxes has increased by 134 percent to 1.8 million since the 2000 census, the first time it allowed such an option. Among American children, the multiracial population has increased nearly 50 percent to 4.2 million since 2000.

“The growth of this population is clearly a trend that will surely increase every decade into the 21st century,” wrote history professor Al Camarillo in an email to The Daily.

At Stanford, this rise in the mixed-race population may finally create a multicultural community in which mixed-race students feel they can belong.

Multiracial associations have in recent years been popping up on college campuses all around the country. These organizations aim to promote multicultural awareness and provide students with a safe environment to discuss multiracial issues. Many Stanford students were surprised that an organization for mixed-race students does not exist on campus…

…Assistant professor of English Vaughn Rasberry also observed a change in norms concerning racial identity. In Rasberry’s opinion, the increase of individuals in America identifying themselves as mixed race is not just the result of a sociological trend, but “also registers some dissatisfaction with conventional racial or ethnic categories.”…

Read the entire article here.

Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking

Princeton University Press
2011
248 pages
6 x 9 | 7 color illus. 16 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-691-14031-5

Michael Keevak, Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages
National Taiwan University

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become “yellow” in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.

From the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb, which depicted people of varying skin tones including yellow, to the phrase “yellow peril” at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe and America, Michael Keevak follows the development of perceptions about race and human difference. He indicates that the conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped with members of the Mongolian race, they began to be considered yellow.

Demonstrating how a racial distinction took root in Europe and traveled internationally, Becoming Yellow weaves together multiple narratives to tell the complex history of a problematic term.

Read the introduction here.