Mixed Race Studies

Political considerations forced [John Leslie] Powell and [Walter Ashby] Plecker to amend their iron-clad, white-supremacy law [The Racial Integrity Act of 1924] that defined as white only a person with no trace of non-white blood. Some of the leading families of Virginia, who took pride in claiming descent from John Rolfe and Pocahontas, took umbrage at being classified as inferior non-whites. This concern led to the creation of the “Pocahontas clause” which classified as white those individuals with no other non-caucasic blood than one-sixteenth or less the blood of the American Indian. Following this amendment, the bill sailed through the legislature. Thus, once all “historically-white”, upper-class Virginians were protected, the law gained tremendous support. Racism, science, and social control interacted to mediate the law’s provisions. The law would remain in effect, unchanged, for 43 years. Throughout that time it would be enforced by vigilant county court clerks and local vital statistics registrars. As late as 1945, Plecker lobbied a lawyer to push for a conviction under the miscegenation statute: “We attach great importance to this case, and we hope that you will fight it to a finish in the effort to secure an annulment for miscegenation, not for desertion or any other cause.” Plecker sought validation of the law through strict racial classification and a mass of successful precedent-setting prosecutions.

Gregory Michael Dorr, “Principled Expediency: Eugenics, Naim v. Naim, and the Supreme Court,” The American Journal of Legal History (Volume 42, Number 2, April, 1998), 127-128.

The longstanding attempt to legislate Indigenous-Asian relations out of existence continues to cast its shadow today. Cathy Freeman is identified as Australia’s most famous Indigenous sportswoman, but she is also of Chinese descent. In the late 19th century, her great-great grandfather moved from China to northern Queensland, where he worked on sugarcane farms. In 2001 Freeman supported Beijing’s bid for the 2008 Olympic Games because of her Chinese heritage, but the English-language Australian media has entirely overlooked it. By contrast, in Chinese-language media inside and outside Australia, Freeman’s multicultural heritage is celebrated; many Chinese-Australians even hoped Freeman would win gold in the Sydney Olympics because of her Chinese descent. Is the suppression of Freeman’s heritage a sign that white Australia still wants to keep Asians and Aborigines apart?

Peta Stephenson, The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story, (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007), 2.

The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story

University of New South Wales Press
June 2007
256 pages
234 x 153mm
Paperback ISBN: 9780868408361

Peta Stephenson, Honorary Fellow
Asia Institute, University of Melbourne

An engaging account of the ways in which over hundreds of years Indigenous and Southeast Asian people across Australia have traded, intermarried and built hybrid communities. It is also a disturbing exposé of the persistent—sometimes paranoid—efforts of successive national governments to police, marginalise and outlaw these encounters.

Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Trading places
• 2. Makassan meetings
• 3. Dangerous liaisons
• 4. Colonial encounters
• 5. Paranoid nation
• 6. Invasion narratives
• 7. Where are you from?
• 8. Detoxifying Australia
• 9. Old roots, new routes
• Bibliography
• Interviews
• Index

Introduction

With a gun in hand Ah Hong, a Chinese cook and market gardener, shouted these words at the police: ‘you sleep with black women too. My woman’s got my kids.’ It was Alice Springs in the early 20th century and Ah Hong had committed the ‘crime’ of fathering three ‘mixed-race’ children. Ah Hong met Ranjika, a Western Arrernte woman, after the white man who stole her from her tribal husband abandoned her. Government officials targeted Ranjika and Ah Hong’s children for removal because they were of mixed Aboriginal-Asian descent. Reminding local officials that they also had sexual relationships with Aboriginal women. Ah Hong underlined the hypocrisy of fining or deporting Chinese and other Asian men because of their relationships with women or Aboriginal descent.

Around the same time, more than 2000 kilometres east in Queensland, another triangular relationship between Aboriginal, Chinese and white Australians was being played out. White authorities had seized Princy Carlo and her family (like many other ‘fringe-dwelling’ Aborigines) from their home country and packed them off to a government reserve more than 200 kilometres south-east. Princy Carlo was a mixed-race woman of Chinese and Wakka Wakka descent (from the Eidsvold district of southern Queensland, about 430 kilometres north-west of Brisbane). She did not yield to the assimilationist intent of government policy. Instead, she and her family established a camp they called ‘Chinatown’ at the Aboriginal settlement of Barambah (now Cherbourg).

The longstanding attempt to legislate Indigenous-Asian relations out of existence continues to cast its shadow today. Cathy Freeman is identified as Australia’s most famous Indigenous sportswoman, but she is also of Chinese descent. In the late 19th century, her great-great grandfather moved from China to northern Queensland, where he worked on sugarcane farms. In 2001 Freeman supported Beijing’s bid for the 2008 Olympic Games because of her Chinese heritage, but the English-language Australian media has entirely overlooked it. By contrast, in Chinese-language media inside and outside Australia, Freeman’s multicultural heritage is celebrated; many Chinese-Australians even hoped Freeman would win gold in the Sydney Olympics because of her Chinese descent. Is the suppression of Freeman’s heritage a sign that white Australia still wants to keep Asians and Aborigines apart?

The Outsiders Within is the story of the triangular relationship between Asians, Aborigines and white Australia. The three anecdotes just recounted are the tip of an historical iceberg. A unique and fascinating tradition of cross-cultural alliances between Indigenous and Asian Australian people exists in Australia, but it is largely unknown. In Broome, Western Australia, by the 1940s, cross-cultural unions between Indigenous and Asian people had become so commonplace that a majority of the Aboriginal population had some Asian ancestry. And, while Broome is an exceptionally multicultural society, an Indigenous-Asian heritage is a feature of most communities across northern Australia. Nor is it confined to the north: as this study shows, it stretches south to the metropolitan centres and, more recently, in the work of artists, film-makers and writers it has become part of a vigorously pursued project to understand Australia’s past and present differently. For the story we have to tell is both troubled and troubling. It obliges us to confront a legacy of discrimination, and to ask why the social, political and geographical legitimisation of Australia as a nation-state depended so profoundly on declaring Indigenous-Asian alliances illegitimate…

The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing

New York University Press
April 2013
288 pages
22 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814772492
Paper ISBN: 9780814772508

Greg Carter, Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Barack Obama’s historic presidency has re-inserted mixed race into the national conversation. While the troubled and pejorative history of racial amalgamation throughout U.S. history is a familiar story, The United States of the United Races reconsiders an understudied optimist tradition, one which has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, bring equality to all, and fulfill an American destiny. In this genealogy, Greg Carter re-envisions racial mixture as a vehicle for pride and a way for citizens to examine mixed America as a better America.

Tracing the centuries-long conversation that began with Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer in the 1780s through to the Mulitracial Movement of the 1990s and the debates surrounding racial categories on the U.S. Census in the twenty-first century, Greg Carter explores a broad range of documents and moments, unearthing a new narrative that locates hope in racial mixture. Carter traces the reception of the concept as it has evolved over the years, from and decade to decade and century to century, wherein even minor changes in individual attitudes have paved the way for major changes in public response. The United States of the United Races sweeps away an ugly element of U.S. history, replacing it with a new understanding of race in America.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Thomas Jefferson’s Challengers
• 2. Wendell Phillips, Unapologetic Abolitionist, Unreformed Amalgamationist
• 3. Plessy v. Racism
• 4. The Color Line, the Melting Pot, and the Stomach
• 5. Say It Loud, I’m One Drop and I’m Proud
• 6. The End of Race as We Know It
• 7. Praising Ambiguity, Preferring Certainty
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author

Introduction

In April 2010, the White House publicized Barack Obama’s self-identification on his U.S. census form. He marked one box “Black, African Am., or Negro,” settling one of the most prevalent issues during his 2008 presidential campaign: his racial identity. This choice resounded with the monoracial ways of thinking so prevalent throughout U.S. history. People who believed he was only black because he looked like a black person or because many others (society) believed so or because of the historical prevalence of the one-drop rule received confirmation of that belief. The mainstream media had been calling him the black president for over a year, so they received confirmation of this moniker.

Many people who had followed the adoption of multiple checking on the census found his choice surprising. Surely, as president, he would be aware of the ability to choose more than one race. To pick one alone went against everything activists wanting to reform the government’s system of racial categorization had worked for in the 1990s. Many found it surprising that the man who had called himself “the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas” would choose one race. After all, he had used this construction far more times than he had called himself black, giving the impression that he embraced his mixture along with identifying as black. That snippet, along with images of his diverse family, had been part of what endeared him to mixed-race supporters. Similarly, his campaign’s deployment of his white relatives built sympathy with white voters. Some people argued that he had failed to indicate what he “was” by choosing one race. He made the diverse backgrounds in his immediate family a footnote. But, recalling Maria P. P. Root’s “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People,” a pillar of contemporary thought on mixed race, they had to respect his prerogative. He had the right to identify himself differently than the way strangers expected him to identify.

Three lessons emerged from this episode: How one talks about oneself can be different from how one identifies from day to day. How one identifies from day to day can be different from how one fills out forms. And on a form with political repercussions, such as the census, one may choose a political statement different from both how one talks and how one identifies. Obama had always been a political creature; he never did anything for simple reasons. By the regulations, the administration could have withheld the information for seventy-two years. Instead, it became a small yet notable news piece in real time. Publicizing his participation in the census could motivate other minorities (beyond those who knew the history of multiple checking) to do so as well. More likely, he was thinking about the 2012 election. His response to the 2010 census could influence voters later on. If the number of those who would have hurt feelings over a singular answer was less than those who would find offense in a multiple answer, then a singular answer was the best to give. Even though mixed-race Americans took great pride in Obama’s ascendance, they were a small faction to satisfy.

Then why did Obama take so much care to cast himself as a young, mixed-race hope for the future? Because even though the number of people who identify as mixed race is small, they hold immense figural power for the nation as symbols of progress, equality, and utopia, themes he wanted to associate with his campaign. In other words, he piggybacked onto positive notions about racially mixed people to improve his symbolic power. At the same time, he nurtured the stable, concrete, and accessible identity that people so used to monoracial thought could embrace, not the ambiguous one that challenged everyone.

Interpretation of current events such as this can disentangle the complexities we encounter here and now. However, while historical analysis always enriches the understanding of current events, writing history about current events presents a pitfall: they are moving targets resisting our attempts to focus on them. Similarly, following figures such as Obama lures us into announcing sea changes in racial conditions. Americans of all walks like indicators of progress. But addressing racial inequality calls for more than well-wishing. As a guiding principle, we should remember to appreciate that these are stories that have no resolution, much like the story of racialization in general. The meanings of mixture, the language we use to describe it, and its cast of characters have always been in flux.

Even before colonial Virginia established the first anti-intermarriage laws in 1691, efforts to stabilize racial identity had been instrumental in securing property, defending slavery, and maintaining segregation. The study of interracial intimacy has labeled racially mixed people either pollutants to society or the last hope for their inferior parent groups. To this day, many Americans label each other monoracially, interracial marriage remains a rarity, and group identities work best when easy to comprehend. However, at the same time that many worked to make racial categorization rigid, a few have defended racial mixing as a boon for the nation. Ever since English explorer John Smith told the story of the Indian princess Pocahontas saving his life in 1608 (a founding myth of the United States), some have considered racial mixing a positive. These voices were often privileged with access to outlets. Many were men, and many were white. This study reconsiders the understudied optimist tradition that has disavowed mixing as a means to uplift a particular racial group or a means to do away with race altogether. Instead, this group of vanguards has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, to bring equality to all, and to fulfill an American destiny. Historians of race have passed over this position, but my narrative shows that contemporary fascination with racially mixed figures has historical roots in how past Americans have imagined what radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips first called “The United States of the United Races.”…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Much of South America and Mexico is today inhabited by a mongrel race white-black-red mixture, one of the most undesirable racial intermixtures known, as I can testify from my own observation of similar groups in Virginia.

W.A. Plecker, “The New Family and Race Improvement,” Virginia Department of Health: Virginia Health Bulletin, (Volume 17, Extra Number 12 (8), 1925). 17. (Source: DNA Learning Center). http://www.dnalc.org/http://www.dnalc.org/view/11280–The-New-Family-and-Race-Improvement-by-W-A-Plecker-Virginia-Health-Bulletin-vol-17-12-8-.html.

Principled Expediency: Eugenics, Naim v. Naim, and the Supreme Court

The American Journal of Legal History
Volume 42, Number 2 (April, 1998)
pages 119-159

Gregory Michael Dorr, Visiting Assistant Professor in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought
Amherst College

In March 1956, the Supreme Court refused to hear Naim v. Naim, a suit contesting the constitutionality of Virginia’s antimiscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The Court’s two per curiam decisions in this case sparked a debate surrounding Supreme Court adjudication. Did the Court act on legal “principle,” or in response to political “expediency,” in refusing to find a properly presented federal question in Naim? Examination of the available evidence shows that the court was not unanimous in avoiding Naim. Ultimately, Felix Frankfurter’s intra-court politicking preventing the Court from deciding Naim. Frankfurter convinced the brethren that avoiding Naim was possible, despite the fact that its appellate status tapped the Court’s “obligatory jurisdiction.” To understand the “principle” that undergirded Frankfurter’s “expedient” action, one must consider the background of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. Eugenical theory provided the state with a colorably rational basis for racial restrictions in Virginia’s marriage law. As counsel never directly challenged the reasonableness of the racial classifications—never challenged the eugenical precepts supporting the law—Frankfurter was able to convince his colleagues that the Court could not consider the constitutional issue in “clean cut and concrete form unclouded.” Then, following the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeal’s defiance of the Supreme Court’s remand order, Frankfurter urged that the Court could defer the case for lack of “a properly presented federal question.” In so doing, Frankfurter extended the life of miscegenation statutes eleven years—until the Court struck them down in Loving v. Virginia.

It is unlikely that Chinese sailor Ham Say Naim ever heard the word miscegenation before he jumped ship in 1942. Eleven years later Naim, still a Chinese national, sat in Judge Floyd E. Kellam’s Portsmouth, Virginia Circuit Courtroom. His wife of twenty months, Ruby Elaine Naim, a white woman, sought a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Choosing not to rule on the divorce action, Kellam granted Ruby Elaine Naim an annulment under part of the Virginia Code entitled, “An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity.” These statutes decreed interracial marriage—because of its result, miscegenation or racial intermixture—illegal and “void without decree” in Virginia. Ham Say Naim’s counsel appealed the case, through the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, to the United States Supreme Court in the October Term of 1955. In a surprising series of events, the case bounced between the Supreme Court and Virginia’s highest court. The case ended in March 1956 when the Supreme Court, in a cryptic memorandum decision, ruled, ‘The decision of the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia [reaffirming their support of Judge Kellam’s decision] leaves the case devoid of a properly presented federal question.” With this action, the United States Supreme Court effectively upheld a state’s right to restrict marriage between the races. A decade passed before the Court again considered racial classifications in marriage law. In Loving v. Virginia, another challenge to Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, the Court struck down antimiscegenation statutes, removing the last legally-enforced barrier facing Americans of color.

June 12, 1997 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Loving. As scholars commemorate Loving, it seems appropriate to reconsider Naim to understand the longevity of antimiscegenation statutes. Naim v. Naim represents more than a historical footnote to Loving: Naim reveals the complex interplay of eugenical ideology, constitutional jurisprudence, the internal politics of the Supreme Court, and the Court’s relationship to American society. Indeed, Naim illustrates that the line between “principle and expediency” in Supreme Court adjudication was less sharply defined and more hotly contested than many commentators have imagined. Both contemporary and subsequent historical treatments ascribe particular importance to Naim only in so far as its disposition appeared to reflect the Justices’ concern that any action on interracial marriage would exacerbate tensions created by the Brown decisions.

This paper, however, argues for a reassessment of Naim v. Naim‘s significance on two grounds. First, digging beneath surface impressions one sees that Naim, while sharing a kinship with other antimiscegenation cases, belongs also within the rarefied family of eugenics case law that began with Buck v. Bell and appeared to end with Skinner v. Oklahoma. Earlier antimiscegenation laws in Virginia, like many that persisted in other states, based their strictures not upon a “science” of racial improvement, but on the splenetic racism and negrophobia of the Redemption Era. Virginia eugenicists, however, promoted the Racial Integrity Act in the name of scientifically-validated social engineering. The Racial Integrity Act’s enactment as a scientific measure to preserve the state’s “health” supplied the legal justifications that upheld the statute in Naim. Eugenics provided the state with a “rational basis” for the exercise of its police power in restricting interracial marriage. Ultimately, eugenical social policy used science to garner legal imprimatur for the deep-seated southern cultural taboo against interracial sexuality.  This certification formed a bond between statutory social control and the law that proved difficult to break.

Legal debates concerning the confluence of judicial review and social policy suggest a second reason Naim should be reconsidered. Probing the records of various Supreme Court justices, it becomes apparent that their actions in disposing of Naim did not represent simply a collective dodge. Behind closed doors, the justices waged a pitched battle. Ultimately the issue was resolved not only in light of political considerations, but also as a result of the swirling jurisprudential debate over what Morton J. Horwitz terms “the central ideological question before the Supreme Court” in the twenty years after World War II: the debate between judicial activism and judicial restraint. In this intra-court battle, the personality and beliefs of Justice Felix Frankfurter take center stage. Examining the synergy between the Racial Integrity Act’s eugenical rationale and jurisprudential debates trammeling the Supreme Court helps explain why it took another eleven years to strike down antimiscegenation statutes.

This reconsideration of Naim v. Naim proceeds in four parts. First, a brief history of eugenics and the elite Virginians who integrated eugenical precepts into the legal, medical, and educational infrastructures of Virginia provides Naim‘s background. Parts II and III focus on the progress of Naim through the Portsmouth Circuit Court and the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, respectively. These sections develop the social and cultural history of Naim v. Naim, elucidating the ways in which southern sentiment regarding issues of class, race, and gender aligned with thirty year-old eugenical precepts and the law to determine the case. Special attention is given to how eugenical arguments cropped up explicitly in the statements of counsel, the state attorney general, and the opinion of the courts. Part IV takes up the battle over Naim within the United States Supreme Court, revealing the intra-court politics that decided the case. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of Naim v. Naim‘s role as precedent for the lower court decisions in Loving v. Virginia. The conclusion assesses how the Racial Integrity Act failed only when two conditions were met: 1) counsel directly challenged the “rational basis” of the eugenical underpinnings of the Racial Integrity Act; and, 2) the doctrinal/theoretical debate among the Supreme Court justices was resolved, in part as a result of Felix Frankfurter’s retirement, in favor of judicial activism for civil rights. The fulfillment of these two conditions set the stage for the recalibration of legal and cultural scales…

Read the entire article here.

Alien Citizen: Review

www.ReviewPlays.com
ALIEN CITIZEN
Asylum Lab
2013-05-13

Jose Ruiz

Elizabeth Liang steps on the solo stage to tell the world what it’s like to be a TCK (Third Culture Kid).  These are people who, as children, traveled the globe intermittently because their parents were sent to diplomatic, business or military assignments and the family had to constantly adjust to new schools, new friends, new customs and new languages.  Her father worked for a multi-national company and was sent to several different countries during her formative years.

That in itself is fodder for a fascinating story of growing up with indeterminate roots.  When the story comes from Elizabeth Liang, whose ethnic heritage spans three continents, from her paternal roots in China, to her birth roots in Central America, to her mother’s varied European background, it becomes more than just a story…

Read the entire review here.

‘War Baby’ is something to see, if you can let go

The Chicago Tribune
2013-05-08

Lori Waxman, Instructor of Art History, Theory and Criticism
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

It was the Hello Kitty tepee that did it for me.

Some exhibitions can be so challenging that it takes a particularly unexpected artwork for the viewer to finally let go and get into the swing of things. “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” currently up at the DePaul Art Museum and featuring work by a dozen-and-a-half artists, is one such show. A riotously colored digital print by Debra Yepa-Pappan featuring a purple-haired Native American woman, lifted from an iconic Edward S. Curtis photograph and set against a background of space-age tepees, one of them marked with the equally iconic and silent face of everybody’s favorite Japanese cat, is one such artwork.

Hilarious and weird and crazily of its time — i.e., now — Yepa-Pappan’s collage lifted my thoughts up and over the various stumbling blocks that “War Baby/Love Child” presents. Curated by Laura Kina, an artist and DePaul professor, and Wei Ming Dariotis, a professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University, the cogitative but overdetermined exhibition sets up a Catch-22. It wants to recognize the complex realities of a fast-growing segment of the American population — the 2.6 million who identify as Asian plus one or more other races — and to prove how far beyond stereotype those people go. And yet, two gargantuan cliches give their name to the exhibition itself.

The term “war babies” generally refers to the children of Asian or Pacific Islander women and the U.S. soldiers who were stationed in their home countries during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. “Love children” were born of the free love of a post-civil rights and flower-child era, and, as listed in the extensive exhibition catalog, their makeup includes Eurasians and Hapas (Mixed White Asians), Mixed Bloods (Mixed Asian Native Americans), Blasians (Mixed Black Asians) and Mestizaje (Mixed Latino Asians).

“War Baby/Love Child” thus finds itself in the counterintuitive position of wanting to replace its own title with a dozen less-loaded ones. Wall labels are one tool, and the ones here list an astonishing array of mixed identities as well as direct quotes from most of the artists, many of whom speak about personal experiences growing up amid racial presumption…

Read the entire article here.

Even The Rivers: A film about educating South Korea’s multiethnic generation.

April 2013

Cindy Lou Howe, Director

Matt Kelley, Producer

Uikwon Lee, Researcher

“In 10 years, even the rivers and mountains change.”
—Korean proverb

South Korea has seemingly always known dramatic change. Created after Japanese colonization and a devastating civil war, the nation became one of history’s most remarkable economic success stories. Today, many South Koreans are proud that their former “Hermit Kingdom” is a global economic and cultural powerhouse, hosting the Olympics and exporting everything from Galaxy smartphones to “Gangnam Style.”

Despite this constant change, South Korea remains one of the world’s most ethnically homogeneous societies. According to recent statistics, just two percent of South Koreans are immigrants, the bulk of whom are ethnic Koreans from China. Many Koreans cling to a “one blood” national identity that emphasizes so-called “pure” bloodlines, a notion borne of nationalist and anti-imperialist movements from the turn of the last century.

This self-concept, however, is increasingly at odds with the nation’s changing demographics. Urbanization, immigration and one of the world’s lowest fertility rates have resulted in a multi-ethnic baby boom for South Korea. According to the 2010 Census, there are over 150,000 children in the country with at least one parent of non-Korean heritage. By 2020, the government estimates there will be over 1.6 million multi-ethnic South Koreans, including half of all children living in rural areas…

For more information, click here.

HIST 574–Modern U.S. History: Miscegenation, Mixed Race, and Interracial Relationships

Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts
Summer 2013

Ulli Ryder, Lecturer of History and Africana Studies

This class will explore the conditions for and consequences of crossing racial boundaries in the United States. It will take a multidisciplinary approach, utilizing historical scholarship, literature, legal scholarship, and communication studies, along with several feature and documentary film treatments of the subject. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the ways race has been socially constructed; the connections between race and power in the U.S.; and the possibilities of a non-racist future.