Mixed Race Studies

Race and a Political Race

Everyday Sociology Blog
2012-09-28

Jonathan R. Wynn, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Dwanna L. Robertson
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The Massachusetts Senate race between incumbent Scott Brown and Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren took an unexpected sharp turn this week. Shades of racialized language (reminiscent of the 2008 Presidential campaign) seeped in. This actually started in April, when Brown’s staffers uncovered that Warren claimed she was a minority, implicating her as committing ethnic fraud because she lacked proof of a Native American ancestry.
 
During their first political debate, Brown went straight at this issue in a prepared remark, saying, “Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color—And as you can see, she’s not.” With this statement, Brown contends he can identify Native Americans—and other people of color—just by looking at them.

It would be humorous—Did she accidentally forget to braid her hair and wear her moccasins?—if it didn’t have serious undertones cutting at the heart of race and politics in the U.S.. Brown suggests Warren received special consideration for claiming she was part Cherokee. “When you are a U.S. Senator,” he stated, “you have to pass a test and that’s one of character and honesty and truthfulness. I believe and others believe she’s failed that test.” But did Warren fail the test?…

..Back to Brown’s assertion idea that our eyes can tell us a person’s race. Sociologist Mary Campbell has been working on misclassification of race based upon skin tone, finding not only that American Indians experience a high level of misidentification, but that in the process they also experience higher levels of psychological distress…

There is, however, a real challenge when it comes to speaking of how indigenous folk look. It is not just that it’s a bad idea to think facial features are satisfactory markers of race. It is that the emphasis on perception also indicates a complete misunderstanding of U.S. History: People who claim First Nation Heritage are of a mixed ethnic background due to generations of attempted racial extermination, cultural oppression, and a breaking of tribal links to land and community…

Read the entire article here.

Playing for Malaya: A Eurasian Family and the Pacific War

University of Hawai‘i Press (Distributed for the National University of Singapore Press)
2011
208 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-9971-69-573-6

Rebecca Kenneison

Reggie, according to his niece Wendy, ‘only told what Reggie wanted you to know.’ Reggie was my father. He had honed the technique of talking with apparent openness and using that talk as a decoy duck: while you were listening to it quack around the pond, you weren’t noticing all the others hiding in the reeds. What follows includes tales that Reggie told repeatedly but, on the whole, it’s about what Reggie didn’t tell me.

So begins a stunning personal account of a Eurasian family living in Malaya. Reggie was the author’s father, and one of the many gaps in his account of his family was that his mother was Eurasian. When Rebecca Kenneison discovered this omission after his death, she set out to learn more about her extended family on the other side of the world.

Set in the 1930s and 1940s, this book recounts the experiences of an extended Eurasian family during the invasion and occupation of Malaya by the Japanese. Colonial society considered Eurasians insufficiently European to be treated as British, but during the Pacific War they seemed all too European to the Japanese, who subjected the Eurasian community to discrimination and worse. Because many Eurasians, including members of the Kenneison family, supported the Allied cause, their wartime experiences are an extraordinary account of tragedy, heroism and endurance, presented here with great eloquence and clarity.

That’s How It Goes: Autobiography Of A Singapore Eurasian

Select Books
2008
235 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9789814022392

F. A. C. “Jock” Oehlers

These memoirs by a member of one of Singapore’s leading Eurasian families offers many sidelights onto Singapore’s life in the mid-20th century. The author, then a dental student, tells of the hardships of his life with a young family at the Japanese-enforced agricultural settlement for Eurasians at Bahau, Negri Sembilan. He tells of his career as an oral surgeon at the University and in private practice, his involvement with the development of the Singapore Kennel Club until his 1990 retirement to Perth, West Australia. With black-and-white photographs.

The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia (Second Edition)

University of Wisconsin Press
April 2009 (First Published in 1983)
312 pages
6 x 9  
14 b/w illustrations

Jean Gelman Taylor, Associate Professor of History
University of New South Wales

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch established a trading base at the Indonesian site of Jacarta. What began as a minor colonial outpost under the name Batavia would become, over the next three centuries, the flourishing economic and political nucleus of the Dutch Asian Empire. In this pioneering study, Jean Gelman Taylor offers a comprehensive analysis of Batavia’s extraordinary social world—its marriage patterns, religious and social organizations, economic interests, and sexual roles. With an emphasis on the urban ruling elite, she argues that Europeans and Asians alike were profoundly altered by their merging, resulting in a distinctive hybrid, Indo-Dutch culture.

Original in its focus on gender and use of varied sources—travelers’ accounts, newspapers, legal codes, genealogical data, photograph albums, paintings, and ceramics—The Social World of Batavia, first published in 1983, forged new paths in the study of colonial society. In this second edition, Gelman offers a new preface as well as an additional chapter tracing the development of these themes by a new generation of scholars.

Of Susie Guillory Phipps and Chief Redbone: The Mutability of Race

Newhouse News Service
1992-07-09

Jonathan Tilove

Black is black and white is white, but what about Susie Guillory Phipps?

Phipps looks white. She always thought she was white. So did her first and second husbands. Until, at the age of 43, she discovered she was 3/32nds black and therefore legally black according to the state of Louisiana.

And what about the Ramapough Mountain People of New Jersey? They have long been described as a predominantly black people of mixed race. But they consider themselves Indians and are asking the federal government for official recognition as a tribe, status that could entitle them to a casino gambling franchise 30 miles from Manhattan.

When it comes to race and ethnicity in America, it can all get very complicated depending on who is defining whom, and why. People are not always what they appear to be. People are sometimes not what they want to be. In reality, race is as much a matter of politics as biology; ethnicity as much an expression of fashion as fate. It can be transient, changing from time to time and place to place.

Sylvia Yu Gonzalez, 22, is a Mexican-Korean-American. She spent her early years in the barrio in Phoenix but when she was 12 moved to San Diego where she attended mostly white schools. On the advice of a guidance counselor, she identified herself on school forms as Mexican-American for future affirmative action purposes. But by the time she headed off to Berkeley for college, “I pretty much perceived myself as white.”.

Berkeley, the citadel of multiculturalism, was less forgiving. Gonzalez found that in their lust for diversity, people insisted she identify herself racially, and that white obviously wouldn’t wash. “It was really painful to me.”

Gonzalez says she turned against her white friends but didn’t want to choose between being Mexican or Korean, reluctant to give up either. Instead she chose the company of blacks and American Indians. But a couple of years ago she found out about the Multicultural Interracial Student Coalition at Berkeley, an organization of mixed-race students of all descriptions. She had finally found a place “where I could bring all of myself.” She now identifies herself as multiracial…

…It is with blacks that any fluid notions of race and ethnicity run splat into a wall. It is the iron law of American race relations– the so-called one-drop rule. Anyone with any known African black ancestry (therefore theoretically having at least one drop of African black blood) is black.

Period. And the rule has an implicit corollary, according to sociologist F. James Davis: “It’s better to be anything than black.”

Davis, the author of Who Is Black?, says the one-drop rule is the effective standard, whether by statute or case law, in every state of the union except Hawaii, where being mixed-race is the rule rather than the exception.

But this stark line between black and white cannot undo some rather basic genetic facts of life. Physical anthropologists have estimated that about a quarter of the genes of American blacks come from white ancestors and up to 5 percent of the genes of the white population are from African ancestors…

Read the entire article here.

“I’m not about to have my children check more than one box only to be relegated back to the black category,” said [Susan] Graham [of Project RACE]… She left the race question blank.

Jonathan Tilove, “Will new age of mixed-race identities loosen the hold of race or tie it up in tighter knots?” Newhouse News Service, (April 20, 2000). http://jonathantilove.com/mixed-race/