Mixed Race Studies

The Role of Reflected Appraisals in Racial Identity: The Case of Multiracial Asians

Social Psychology Quarterly
Volume 67, Number 2 (June 2004)
pages 115-131
DOI: 10.1177/019027250406700201

Nikki Khanna, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

Asian Americans are one of the fastest-growing minorities in the United States and show the highest outmarriage rate; yet little research has investigated the racial identity of multiracial Asians. This study explores the racial identity of multiracial Asians in the United States, using survey data on 110 Asian-white adults, and examines the factors that shape this identity. The literature suggests a number of factors; drawing on the theoretical framework of reflected appraisals, I hypothesize that certain factors will be more important than others in this process. When respondents were asked with which race they identified more strongly, Asian or white, two factors were shown to exert the strongest influence on racial identity, namely phenotype and cultural exposure. Logistic regression and qualitative responses reveal that the racial identities of this sample of Asian-white adults are shaped largely by the reflected appraisals of others regarding their appearance and cultural knowledge.

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Asian American Racial Realities in Black and White

Lynne Rienner Publishers
June 2011
167 pages
ISBN: 978-1-935049-39-5

Bruce Calvin Hoskins, Professor of Sociology
MiraCosta College, Oceanside, California

What does it mean for an Asian American to be part white—or part black? Bruce Hoskins probes the experience of biracial Asian Americans, revealing the ways that our discourse about multiracial identities too often reinforces racial hierarchies.

Hoskins explores the everyday lives of people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage to uncover the role of our society’s white-black continuum in shaping racial identity. Mixing intimate personal stories with cutting-edge theoretical analysis, he directly confronts the notion that multiracial identity provides an easy solution for our society’s racial stratification.

Read the introduction here.

Table of Conents

• Introduction
• Internal Racial Identity
• Public Racial Identity
• The External Context of Racial Identity Formation
• Learning Racial Hierarchy
• Conclusion

The Military Camptown in Retrospect: Multiracial Korean American Subject Formation Along the Black-White Binary

Bowling Green State University
December 2007
116 pages

Perry Dal-nim Miller

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

This thesis applies theoretical approaches from the sociology of literature and Asian Americanist critique to a study of two novels by multiracial Korean American authors. I investigate themes of multiracial identity and consumption in Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, both set in the 1960’s and 1970’s gijichon or military camptown geography, recreational institutions established around U.S. military installations in the Republic of Korea. I trace the literary production of Korean American subjectivity along a socially constructed dichotomy of blackness and whiteness, examining the novels’ representations of cross-racial interactions in a camptown economy based on the militarized sexual labor of working-class Korean women. I conclude that Black-White binarisms are reproduced in the gijichon through the consumption practices of both American military personnel and Korean gijichon workers, and that retrospective fictional accounts of gijichon multiraciality signal a shift in artistic, scholarly, and popular conceptualizations of Korean American and Asian American group identities.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER II. SOCIOLOGY OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
• CHAPTER III. WRITING THE MULTIRACIAL SELF: FENKL’S MEMORIES OF MY GHOST BROTHER
• CHAPTER IV. HISTORICAL FICTIONALIZATIONS OF THE GIJICHON: KELLER’S FOX GIRL
• CHAPTER V. CONCLUSION
• WORKS CITED
• APPENDIX A. CHAPTER SYNOPSES OF MEMORIES
• APPENDIX B. CHAPTER SYNOPSES OF FOX GIRL

W.E.B. Du Bois’ oft-quoted problem for the twentieth-century was that of the color line: of racial classification and stratification policed and reproduced by the nation-state, cultural institutions, and hegemonized subjects within these institutions.1 The 2000 U.S. Census form revised racial demarcations to accommodate multiracial self-identification. By offering respondents the option of multiple selections from the categories “White, Black, Asian, some other race, American Indian, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander,” the form allowed 6.8 million of 281.4 million respondents to identify themselves as multiracial. Though multiraciality is now institutionally recognized, the individual must still choose from finite combinations of racial categories determined by the state. Given the centuries-old problem of the color line in the United States, what are the implications of the increased public presence of multiracial subjectivity? In contemporaneous fictional works by and about multiracial subjects, what correspondences exist to the state’s regulation of race and multi-race?

In the twenty-first century, the racialization of subjects in and beyond the United States continues to form the basis for structures of social and economic inequality. Omi and Winant define race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” and racial formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.” The significant body of scholarship on the social fallout of racial hierarchy continues to focus primarily on the socio-political binary constructions of blackness and whiteness. This binary is key to understanding the existing historical context for racialized cross-group interaction in the U.S. However, the centrality of the Black-White binary in academic discourses also has the unfortunate consequence of marginalizing other racial groups and actors in the present racial state. Paradigms of race that fail to consider interstices beyond this primary binary thereby compromise the underlying anti-racist project of race scholarship itself. The anti-racist project is rendered incapable of addressing the fault lines and politics of division formed among non-white ethnic groups in the United States. In addition, multiculturalist discourses tend toward triumphalist celebrations of cultural diversity in a Post Civil-Rights Era and ignore the structural and institutional-level consequences of racial difference. The elision of inter- and intra-group relations beyond Black-White functions to conserve discourses, cultural practices, and social and economic processes that maintain the centrality and dominance of whiteness. As Omi and  Winant point out,

As much as the politicians or mainstream media, academic analyses reproduce this distorted model of race [racial dichotomizing] as a largely black-white dichotomy… Too often, today as in the past, when scholars and journalists talk about race relations, they mean relations between African Americans and whites.

The 1990s witnessed increased media and academic attention to the positioning of other ethnic groups in the American racial construct. Omi and Winant suggest a new scenario of racial actors coming into prominence nationally in the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, where “Koreans, African Americans, and Chicanos [were both] victims and victimizers.” In discourses on race in the United States, the model minority is that group poised (or posed) at the threshold separating racial otherness from whiteness. Touted as the apex of economic and assimilationist success to which other minoritized groups could and should aspire, the model minority figure is ostensible evidence of an egalitarian, equal-opportunity society. At the same time, it diverts awareness from the actuality of race-class articulated stratifications that restrict opportunity to those already privileged by class and whiteness. Today Asians in the United States are positioned in that discursive liminality, i.e. the model minority position.

Complex negotiations occur among racialization, systemic, overt, and covert racial discrimination, sedimented prejudice, and conflicting tides of assimilation and the perpetuation of Asian ethnic identities. This thesis analyzes the fiction of two multiracial Korean American writers who explore cross-racial dynamics while departing from model minoritization mythologies. My primary question is how this particular construction of Asian American ethnic subjectivity, that is, the multiracial Korean American, perpetuates Black-White binarisms. In this section, I review pertinent literatures—the historical and social contexts of Asian American literature and of multiracial identity. In both Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, the Black-White binary is manifest in multiracial spaces and bodies and consumption practices. Drawing on the established significance of biography in delineating Asian American social margins, I present one understanding of the Black-White binary as a factor in multiracial Asian American subjectivity. Fenkl and Keller’s novels are fictionalized retrospective accounts of life in recreational districts or gijichon (military camptowns) around U.S. military installations in Korea during the 1960’s and 1970’s. As such, these novels demonstrate the significance of Yellow-Black-White transracial interaction and consumption in national hegemonies.

I will first explain some of the discourse around Asian American as a signifier and panethnic rubric. Espiritu characterizes Asian American panethnicity as an entity coalescing in terms of social movements and political initiatives during and after the 1960’s in an “organizational dimension;” that is, the political and social structures through which Asian American-ness itself is manifested. Historically, the panethnic Asian American movement has fallen far short of encompassing all ethnicities and class backgrounds within the Asian rubric; in addition, the movement has tended to replicate patriarchal structures extant in the larger American culture. According to Yen Le Espiritu, the rubric of “Asian American” not only encompasses a multiplicity of ethnicities, but describes “a highly contested terrain on which Asian American of different racial, cultural, and class backgrounds merge and clash over terms of inclusion.” My thesis locates the works of Fenkl and Keller, and the racially hybridized subjectivities they depict, along this terrain of contestation. Through the implication of the Black-White binary in constructions of multiracial Korean American identity, it is possible to understand the significance of existing race hierarchies on the politics of inclusion and exclusion in Asian American collective and group identities…

Read the entire thesis here.

Mixed-Race Students Wonder How Many Boxes to Check

The New York Times
2011-06-14

Susan Saulny

Jacques Steinberg

Multiracial students confess to spending sleepless nights worrying about how best to answer the race question on college applications. Some say they wonder whether their answers will be perceived as gamesmanship or a reflection of reality…

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On College Forms, a Question of Race, or Races, Can Perplex

The New York Times
2011-06-13

Susan Saulny

Jacques Steinberg

HOUSTON — At the beginning of the college application season last fall, Natasha Scott, a high school senior of mixed racial heritage in Beltsville, Md., vented about a personal dilemma on College Confidential, the go-to electronic bulletin board for anonymous conversation about admissions.

“I just realized that my race is something I have to think about,” she wrote, describing herself as having an Asian mother and a black father. “It pains me to say this, but putting down black might help my admissions chances and putting down Asian might hurt it.”

“My mother urges me to put down black to use AA” — African-American — “to get in to the colleges I’m applying to,” added Ms. Scott, who identified herself on the site as Clearbrooke. “I sort of want to do this but I’m wondering if this is morally right.”

Within minutes, a commenter had responded, “You’re black. You should own it.” Someone else agreed, “Put black!!!!!!!! Listen to your mom.”

No one advised marking Asian alone. But one commenter weighed in with advice that could just as well have come from any college across the country: “You can put both. You can put one. You’re not dishonest either way. Just put how you feel.”…

…Some scholars worry that the growth in multiracial applicants could further erode the original intent of affirmative action, which is to help disadvantaged minorities. For example, families with one black parent and one white parent are on average more affluent than families with two black parents. When choosing between two such applicants, some universities might lean toward the multiracial student because he will need less financial aid while still counting toward affirmative-action goals.

“How do we include multiracials in our view of an egalitarian society and not do it in a way that disadvantages other groups?” said Ulli K. Ryder, visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University…

A Growing Category

Rice University in Houston might, given its early history, seem an unlikely place to find admissions officers wrestling with questions of race as they size up their applicants. A private and highly selective institution, it was founded in the early 1900s by a wealthy Houston businessman as an exclusively white institution, a designation it maintained through the late 1960s.

And yet these days, white students are now only 43 percent of the student body at Rice, where an applicant’s racial identification can become an admissions game changer. This can be especially true during the “committee round” in early spring, when only a few dozen slots might remain for a freshman class expected to number about 1,000.

At that stage, a core group of five to seven bleary-eyed admissions officers will convene for debate around a rectangular laminate table strewn with coffee cups and half-eaten doughnuts as the applications of those students still under consideration are projected onto a 60-inch plasma TV screen.

For most of the nearly 14,000 who applied this year, the final decision — admit or deny — was a relatively straightforward one resolved early on, based on the admissions officers’ sampling of factors like test scores, grades, extracurricular activities and recommendations.

But there are several thousand applicants whose fate might still be in limbo by the committee round because their qualifications can seem fairly indistinguishable from one another. This is when an applicant’s race — or races — might tip the balance.

“From an academic standpoint, the qualifying records, the test scores, how many AP courses, they may all look alike,” said Chris Muñoz, vice president for enrollment at Rice since 2006. “That’s when we might go and say, ‘This kid has a Spanish surname. Let’s see what he wrote about.’ Right or wrong, it can make a difference.”…

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Defining multiracial citizens

The Boston Globe
2011-06-12

Brittany Danielson, Globe Correspondent

Evolving ideas about identity mean mixed-race people don’t have to settle for ‘other’

n a suburban Massachusetts classroom in 1985, a 7-year-old Chris Olds raised his hand to grab his teacher’s attention; he wasn’t sure which bubble to fill in for race on a standardized test.

“I don’t know what I am,’’ he told the teacher, while other students in the class laughed in the background.

Olds — who has white, black, and Native American roots — wanted to fill in more than one bubble, but was told to pick one. “The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know what I am,’’ said Olds, who is now a 33-year-old Cambridge resident. “The problem was that I knew exactly what I am, but that I wasn’t presented with an option for it.’’

Today, millions of multiracial US citizens like Olds have an option when defining their race through the census, which has helped to paint a clearer picture of one of the country’s fastest growing demographic groups. Since 2000, when people were first allowed to check more than one box when describing their races on census forms, the multiracial population has increased by about 35 percent to 9 million in 2010, representing 2.9 percent of the overall population.

How the nation defines and counts the multiracial population has evolved. Between 1850 and 1920, the census included a range of categories for individuals of black and white parentage — which included terms like “mulatto,’’ “quadroon,’’ and “octoroon’’ to describe percentages of black ancestry. That ended by 1930, when those classifications gave way to the “one drop rule,’’ which stated that any traceable minority heritage — even one drop of blood — made that person, by default, a minority…

…John Tawa, a doctoral student at University of Massachusetts Boston who teaches a course about the multiracial experience and is himself of Japanese and European heritage, said multiracial people do have some positive experiences. For example, he said they have an ability to relate in a variety of racial contexts. But multiracial US citizens also can feel marginalized by the racial groups in which they are members, can be constantly questioned about their racial identity, and can sometimes be misidentified by others, he said.

“Multiracial people get used as a marker of being in a postracial society. People say soon everyone will be the same, so we don’t need to pay attention to racism anymore,’’ Tawa said. “That kind of ideology can obscure the reality of racism today, and the challenges that multiracial people face.’’…

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