Mixed Race Studies

Diversity triumph in 2010 Rose of Tralee

The African Voice: Ireland’s No. 1 African Community Newspaper
2010-09-05

Zélie Asava

Dr. Zélie Asava considers the contest’s celebration of the ‘new Irish’

2010 marks the year that the Rose of Tralee was won by a woman of Irish and Indian heritage. Clare Kambamettu, a mixed-race psychologist, took the title as the London rose, making it the 2nd year a London Rose has won the competition. There have been few mixed-race Roses to date. Luzveminda O’Sullivan was the 1998 rose of Tralee (whose name is mysteriously misspelt or replaced by another on many websites listing the history of the Roses). Though O’Sullivan hails from Mayo she was the Phillippines Rose, reflecting her Irish-Filipino identity. 2004’s Philadelphia Rose, Sinead De Roiste, was the first Irish-African American contestant in the history of the Rose of Tralee.

The fact that a mixed-race Rose can now be included in the competition, and even go on to win it, as a representative of Irish women and culture, is a wonderful example of diversity working in this country. Interestingly though, Kambamettu’s heritage has not been mentioned by much of the national media, with journalists preferring to describe her as “stunning” or refer to her father’s mildly exotic name, Ravi, as a signifier of her Otherness, rather than state her as mixed-race…

Read the entire article here.

Seeking Interviewees for Research on Mixed Heritage Asian American Mothers

2013-03-17

Brian DeGuzman
San Francisco State University

I am an Asian American Studies M.A. student at San Francisco State University and I am looking for interviewees for my research on mixed heritage Asian American mothers. I am specifically looking for mixed Asian American mothers who have adult children who are at least 18 years of age or older. I would also like to interview these adult children.

I think an interesting conversation can be made about how mixed mothers raise their children, so if you have questions or would like to participate, please contact me at bdeguz@gmail.com or at my Google Voice phone number which is 415-496-5947.

The Mulatto to His Critics

Eugenical News
Volume VII (7), Number 8 (August, 1922)
page 100

Joseph S. Cotter, Jr., gives this answer to the critics of the mulatto:

“Ashamed of my race?
And of what race am I?
I am many in one.
Through my veins there flows the blood
Of Red Man, Black Man, Briton, Celt, and Scot,
In warring clash and tumultuous riot.
I welcome all,
But love the blood of the kindly race
That swarths my skin, crinkles my hair,
And puts sweet music into my soul.”

Your Morning Cry: Leonard Nimoy’s Touching 1968 Advice Column Answers Teen Biracial Girl

Jezebel
2013-03-16

Anna Breslaw, Editor

While the William Shatner era of Star Trek isn’t exactly the first thing that springs to mind as a predecessor of the “It Gets Better” anti-bullying movement, Buzzfeed’s got an excerpt from the advice pages of a 1968 teen magazine called FaVE displays Leonard Nimoy’s sensitivity to the plight of one particular young woman. What would Spock do? she asks. And damn if he doesn’t answer her perfectly.

Last month FaVE RaVEs published this letter:

Dear Mr. Spock,

I am not very good at writing letters so I will make this short. I know that you are half Vulcan and half human and you have suffered because of this. My mother is Negro and my father is white and I am told this makes me a half-breed. In some ways I am persecuted even more than the Negro. The Negroes don’t like me because I don’t look like them. The white kids don’t like me because I don’t exactly look like one of them either. I guess I’ll ever have any friends.

F.C.
Los Angeles, Calif…

Leonard became so interested in this girl’s situation, FaVE offered him this chance to tell everyone what Mr. Spock did when he faced this problem.

“As you may know, only Spock’s mother was human. His father was a Vulcan. Spock grew up among Vulcan children and, because he was different, he had to face the problem of not being accepted. This is because people, especially young people it seems, and Vulcans, too, tend to form into groups, kind of like wolf packs. They often demand that you be just like them or you will not be accepted. And the Vulcans were no different than humans are when it comes to prejudice.”…

Read the entire article here.

Eugenics in South America

Eugenical News
Volume 7, Number 3 (March, 1922)
pages 17-42

Reginald G. Harris

Ever since the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance plant and animal breeders have been occupied with conducting experiments on a large number of widely varying types of organisms. These experiments hare brought to light the method of inheritance of may unit characters (single traits). In some cases even the location of the factors or genes which influence the development of the unit characters has been graphically pictured. Among many animals, fowl, rats, mice, guineapigs. rabbits, vinegar-flies, etc., as well as among many plants, experiments have been conducted to ascertain the laws governing heredity.

There are many human traits which are governed in their inheritance by laws similar to those which have been discovered among the lower forms of life. Unfortunately these laws may be applied only in their most general sense. The fact that a unit character, vermillion eye in Drosophila, for example, is a “recessive allelomorph” of the wild type red eye, does not prove that blue eye in human individuals is the allelomorph of, or is recessive to, brown eye; it merely shows that unit characters may be allelomorphic and that one is dominant over the other. If one wished to know the relationship of various eye colors to each other in other animals than human beings he would carry on breeding experiments, and from observations  on the resulting offspring conclude in what way the several unit characters acted upon each other.

But such an experimental procedure in the case of man is obviously impracticable. The eugenicist welcomes in the absence of controlled laboratory experiments natural, more or less controlled, crosses of human races. Such crosses have no doubt been infrequent, though two notable examples are well known. One is the case of the colony of Pitcairn Island, and later of Norfolk Island. In these islands at the present time there are nearly one thousand individuals all descendants of a cross between English men and Tahiti women. The original crosses, in this case, occurred about a century ago. The second experiment occurred when a few Boers and Hottentots intermarried and continued to intermarry for some time without crossing with neighboring tribes. These two examples of human racial crossing are of unique interest to the eugenist because they afford him an opportunity of observing the resultant hybrid offspring uncontaminated with other genetic factors than those originally given by the two parent strains.

Study of eugenics in South America offers the observer a no less fascinating, though no doubt more complex situation, than those presented in the foregoing cases. The observations which I shall present at this time are the result of facts which came to my notice, and impressions which I received during a recent excursion through South America with the Cornell University Entomological Expedition of 1919-1920. For this discussion, then, the term South America will designate those countries which were visited, namely, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. In such a large number of nations, and even within the nations themselves, wide differences of race and environment may exist, hence the great danger of hasty generalization, and the need for extreme care in making and interpreting statements concerning the inhabitants of South America either present or past.

The problem of ascertaining the result of the interbreeding of the widely divergent human races in South America can not be solved by a superficial glance at the data which may be drawn from a study of European, Aboriginal, and Negro parent stock, and the resulting offspring. Given the parents and the hybrids, the effect of crossing is not at once apparent, for the parent stocks are widely variable, and the environment furnishes modifying influences the scope of which is only a subject of conjecture. But to say that there is a new people because an unusual crossing of races exists is wholly insufficient. The parent stock and resultant offspring must be carefully studied.

If sterility and the chemistry of blood are true indicators of the limits of a species, man includes but one species. Thus far crosses between even the widest morphologically divergent types have failed to produce sterility in the offspring. In this respect human beings are similar to horses, cattle, dogs, fowl, etc., where there exists a striking variety of form and color within the same species. It is generally believed that crosses between human races of extremely different physical and mental traits produce offspring which are intermediate between the two parent types, that is to say, the hybrids show that friending Inheritance has occurred. An indiscriminate crossing of human races is considered unwise, not only on account of possible great psychic differences, but more especially because of the conflict of social inheritance which often results. Every biologist is aware of the snail-like progress of organic evolution. Morphological and other physical changes in existing organisms ore infrequent. To the sociologist the importance of social inheritance as a method of rapidly bettering the human race is apparent. The eugenicist, however, is equally interested in thebiological inheritance of the individual, for he sees, in encouraging crossing and fecundity among the higher types of human beings, and discouraging mating and the production of numerous offspring in the lower groups, an opportunity for permanent racial advancement. It is natural, then, that the eugenicist should turn with keen interest to South America, where racial crossing has been taking place, practically unchecked, for four centuries.

There are in South America three widely different human races existing side by side: (1) the native peoples, all members of the Indian race: (2) the conquerors nnd early colonists of the continent, men of the white race from the Iberian peninsula; (3) representatives of the Negro race who were imported by the conquerors and colonists, especially in Brazil, as slaves. That these several races should continue to mingle with each other in none other than social and business relationships would form a sufficient basis for a study of unusual interest to the sociologist. But their juxtaposition has not been limited to social and commercial dealings. There has been an interchange of the blood of these several races.

The ease and rapidity with which interbreeding has occurred is almost unparalleled. At the outset there existed a relationship between the aborigines and the conquerors quite different from that which occurred in the northern continent. Indians and whites (Latins from Southern Europe) crossed freely during the early periods of conquest and colonization, while later Negroes, Teutonic Europeans, and Asiatics were added to the “melting pot.”…

Read the entire article here.

Being a Eurasian Australian

Yemaya: Sydney University Law Society’s annual interdisciplinary Women’s journal
Yemaya 2010 (2011-04-17)
Theme: “Intersextions”
pages 34-36

Lyn Dickens

Lyn Dickens relates her experiences of being a young Eurasian woman in Australia

Being a Eurasian Australian is a strange thing. Don’t get me wrong, my mixed-race heritage has never been a source of inner-conflict, nor have I ever had an ‘identity crisis’ about having Anglo-Celtic and Peranakan parentage. Unfortunately, I can’t say that everyone else is always so comfortable with my ethnicity.

When I was fifteen, I was at my local shopping centre when a strange man loomed into my path and demanded, “What are you?” Stunned, I avoided his bemused gaze and kept walking. What did he mean? was my initial reaction. Then I thought, with slow-mounting anger, what kind of question is that? I was not a thing—a “what” could not encompass who I was. But even in my racially naïve teenage brain, I realised that his question was about my not-quite-white appearance. It was not the first time that I had been confronted by a stranger about my racial heritage. The question “Where are you from?” was a disturbingly common occurrence during my teenage years. Funnily enough, while my Asian friends were sometimes quizzed about their origins by acquaintances, they didn’t seem to attract strangers on the street the way my sister and I did.

Were we freaks? Back then, the thought occasionally crossed my mind. It wasn’t until I reached university and actually met a few other Eurasian women that I realised they had all had similar experiences, and that these experiences would keep coming. Even today, meeting someone new all but guarantees a discussion of my race and, inevitably, everyone sees something different. At a conference recently, a woman assumed I was Chinese and when I informed her of my heritage she responded in an offended tone, “but you don’t look Eurasian”. On another occasion I was at a dinner party and the majority of the guests assumed I was half white and half ‘something’. The exact type of ‘something’ which made up this half became a topic of conversation. Was I half-Japanese, half-Singaporean, half-Burmese?

Compared to many other young, Eurasian Australian women, my experiences could have been worse. My friend Serena—twenty-nine, fun, friendly and Eurasian—went to a trendy Sydney nightclub recently. While she was dancing with a group of friends, a Caucasian man grabbed her and bit her on the shoulder. Shocked, she could only stare in amazement when he said, “You wanted that, didn’t you? Girls like you always do.”

“Girls like what?” I exclaimed, slightly scandalised, when she told me. She gave me a wry smile and shrugged.

“Girls like us”, she replied. “Eurasians”…

Read the entire essay here.

(Mixed) Racial formation in Aotearoa/New Zealand: framing biculturalism and ‘mixed race’ through categorisation

Kotuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online
Volume 7, Issue 1, (May 2012)
DOI: 10.1080/1177083X.2012.670650
pages 1-13

Zarine L. Rocha, Research Scholar
Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore

This paper explores racial formation in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the impacts of state categorisation on understandings of ‘mixed race’. Processes of racial formation have undergone significant shifts over time, from initial colonial understandings of racialised domination and hierarchy, to present-day narratives of a multicultural society within a bicultural national framework. Connecting these narratives is a constant thread of racial differentiation, framing inter-group relations within society and underpinning contemporary state and social understandings of (mixed) race. Although New Zealand maintains an innovative method of measuring ethnic (self) identification, this fluid categorisation is constrained by existing classification structures and dominant racial narratives. ‘Mixed race’ identity is thus firmly positioned within the bicultural/multicultural tension, which characterises ‘race relations’ in New Zealand. Mixed identities for the individual can be seen as reflecting the ‘mixed’ nature of the state and society, with the narrative of a bicultural nation providing a macro level depiction of personal mixedness.

Introduction

Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation (1986, 1994) provides a lucid and grounded framework to explore and analyse the politics of race and ethnicity. The term racial formation describes the complex interrelationship between social, economic and political forces, the creation of racialised categories and hierarchies, and the content and influence of racial meanings (Omi & Winant 1986:61). Placing race at the heart of social analysis, racial formation theory emphasises the centrality of race in social structures, as well as its socially constructed, politically contested and historically flexible nature. Racial categories, historically created and embedded, both dictate and reflect individual understandings of race, where micro understandings meet macro structures (Omi & Winant 1994, 2009; Winant 2000:182).

Processes of racial formation in New Zealand have undergone significant shifts across different stages of nation-building, moving from colonial understandings of racialised hierarchy, to the present-day complex narrative of a multicultural society within a bicultural national framework. Connecting these narratives over time is a constant thread of differentiation along racial and ethnic lines, framing inter-group relations and underpinning understandings of race and ‘mixed race’. Despite a shift towards conceptions of ethnicity, the country’s racialised colonial past continues to influence social policy and popular understandings of identity and belonging. This article illustrates the temporal continuities and changes in macro narratives of race and ethnicity, exploring historical processes of racial formation through colonisation and categorisation, with a focus on how ‘mixed race’ has been understood in policy and practice.

As a lingering colonial legacy, the idea of ‘race’ in New Zealand as a means to structure and understand society remains pervasive and powerful, for the state and the individual (Spoonley 1993:2). As racial narratives have shifted over time, from colonialisation and amalgamation, through assimilation, and towards biculturalism (Bozic-Vrbancic 2005:518), state, social and individual understandings of what it means to be ‘mixed race’ in the New Zealand context have also developed and changed. Although 90% of the population reports a single ethnic group (Statistics New Zealand 2009), these groups are complex and fluid, representing a multiplicity of understandings and practices. Within the contemporary overarching binary narrative (potentially illustrating a ‘mixed’ identity at the state level), individual mixed identities have been simultaneously acknowledged and ignored – recognised officially through categorisation, but practically subsumed under the broader categories of Māori, Pākehā, Asian and Pacific Peoples, which structure institutional and everyday interactions. This article traces the origins of this dissonance and complexity, looking primarily at the Māori and Pākehā populations, and changing constructions of race and ethnicity in New Zealand…

…Race, ethnicity and projects of categorisation…

…Further complicating understandings of race, the concept of ‘mixed race’ has been the subject of increasing interest over the past two decades (Parker & Song 2001; Ifekwunigwe 2004). In multicultural societies, greater numbers of individuals of mixed ancestry are identifying outside of traditional racial categories, posing a challenge to existing systems of classification, and to sociological understandings of the significance of ‘race’. Highlighting wider questions about the consequences of and motivations for identification, ‘mixed race’ identities were recognised by the American and British censuses in 2000/2001. New Zealand provides a particularly interesting contrast, highlighting policy and individual outcomes in a context where multiplicity has been formally recognised for an extended period of time. Applying racial formation theory to ‘mixed race’ illuminates new ways of understanding both racial formation processes, and what it means to be ‘mixed’. More broadly, placing ‘mixed race’ at the centre of racial formation theory, this paper illustrates the shifting and problematic concept of race in New Zealand, and the ‘crisis of racial meaning’ that is posited to occur when racial categorisation is not possible (Omi & Winant 1994:59)…

…Racial formation in New Zealand…

…New Zealand’s first national census in 1851 included only the European population, providing a clear message as to which population counted (literally) in the nation-building process. A partial census of Māori was carried out in 1857–1858, before full and regular censuses of Māori became institutionalised from 1867, with this separation in measurement continuing until 1951 (Statistics New Zealand 2004:21). This delimiting of the Māori population combined ideas of race and culture, measuring those identified as Māori, but also, interestingly, those who lived as Māori, highlighting the importance of the practice of racial identities for the state (Callister et al. 2006:5; Howard & Didham 2007:2). The application of race as practice was directed particularly at those who were classified as ‘half-castes’. After 1916, data on race was systematically collected, and those in the middle, the ‘half-caste’ population, were classified by their modes of living (Statistics New Zealand 2009:11).

In contrast to many other colonial societies, the New Zealand state closely monitored racial mixing and attempted to structure private lives through colonial policy, but never prohibited miscegenation, intertwining racial identities, gender roles and empire building (Wanhalla 2004:39, 2009:15). The Māori population were viewed as biologically ‘close’ to the European settlers, and intermarriage was seen as a viable method of social and biological assimilation, as well as of appropriation of land (Freeman 2005). Intermarriage generally occurred between Māori women and European men—initially due to the population of single European men involved in early trade, and later continuing a pattern of gendered power imbalances. Inter-racial unions, as gendered crossings of racial boundaries, represented an important point of contact between the colonisers and the colonised, and a disruption of the racial hierarchy, particularly if they produced biological evidence—the ‘half-caste’ (Grimshaw 2002:12; Wanhalla 2004:28).

‘Half-caste’ children were viewed as in-between the two populations in terms of traits and worth, and were practically included as Māori or Pākehā, depending on the cultural associations of the parents (A. Anderson 1991; Meredith 2000:11). However, despite the lack of legal prohibition, neither group viewed mixed children positively, particularly as they disrupted popular settler notions of a ‘white New Zealand’. Differential understandings of land and inheritance also highlighted how colonial ‘mixed race’ differed significantly from Māori understandings of belonging. Traditionally, measurements of ‘blood’ were not used to defined ‘Māoriness’: rather, being born with links to other Māori made an individual a grandchild of the tribe, regardless of blood percentage (Jackson 2003:62; Howard & Didham 2007).

Official understandings and measurements of ‘mixed race’ were complex and often inconsistent—based on biological understandings, but tempered by the realities of cultural practice. The concept of ‘half-caste’ both described and dictated relationships between racialised groups, acting as a means to promote certain processes of land acquisition and cultural dominance, in favour of the British settlers (Wanhalla 2004:9; Kukutai 2007:1151). By troubling the binary mode of Māori/non-Māori for the census enumerators, and often relying on subjective judgements of living conditions or skin colour rather than ‘scientific’ measures of blood, the category of ‘half-caste’ ‘continued to defy categorisation and instead occupied an ambivalent and unstable position in the national census’ (Wanhalla 2004:296–297)….

Read the entire article here.