Mixed Race Studies

Feature: Between two worlds: challenges of being mixed-race in Japan

China Daily
Xinhua News Agency
2013-11-13

TOKYO, November 13 (Xinhua) — The latest statistics from Japan’s health ministry show that one in 49 babies born in Japan today are born into families with one non-Japanese parent, giving way to a growing demographic of mixed-race nationals in Japan, known colloquially as “Hafu.”

“Hafu,” the Japanese popular phonetic expression for the English word “Half,” describes those of mixed-racial, Japanese heritage, and, more precisely, those who are half Japanese and half non-Japanese.

The phrase has been widely coined by popular media here, as those of mixed-race backgrounds born or living in Japan have made their way into the celebrity limelight and as the general socio- demographic ethnicity of Japan undergoes a shift away from its former homogeneity, and towards multiculturalism…

…”What we see on TV and in magazines regarding mixed-raced celebrities is great in terms of a seeming mainstream acceptance to this emerging demographic, by a notably homogenous society, but this doesn’t exactly paint a perfect picture of the challenges faced by mixed-race people in Japan,” Keiko Gono, a sociologist and parent of a mixed-race teenager, told Xinhua…

…For the families well-networked socially and professionally in multicultural circles and can afford the advantages Japan’s international schools can provide, raising a bicultural child is a relatively smooth process.

But for others, it can be a truly testing lifestyle, both for parents and their mixed-race children.

“I’ve lived in Japan all my life. My father is from Nigeria and my mother is Japanese,” Edwin Tanabe, a software designer for a U. S. firm in Tokyo, told Xinhua. He took his mother’s family name in elementary school as nobody could pronounce his name properly.

“It was tough at school because I was the only ‘gaijin’ ( foreigner) in the school, yet I couldn’t speak English and had no knowledge of the world, as I was born and raised in Japan, just like my peers,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

Being Black: It’s not the skin color

Philadelphia Weekly
2013-11-13

Kennedy Allen et al.

Drexel prof Yaba Blay’s striking new photo book “One Drop” explores how a wide range of different skin tones affects Americans’ personal identities. In  this PW excerpt, eight Philadelphia-area residents of mixed heritage concur: However light they may be, they’re still most certainly Black. Our own Kennedy Allen agrees…

Growing up in Mt. Airy, an ethnic and economically diverse neighborhood, instilled within me a level of acceptance and tolerance regarding my fellow man that, confoundingly, many didn’t seem to share. I was one of seven Black kids in a class of 42. Because I spoke English properly and preferred rock to rap, I was deemed “White girl” by my racial peers—a label that haunted me for what felt like eons. I knew I wasn’t White, nor did I ever have the urge to be, outside of wishing my hair would blow in the wind like some of the girls in my class. Flash-forward to my final years of high school, in a black school where I was the “light-bright girl who talks White.” Dark-skinned people still sneer at me, somehow assuming that I believe myself to be “better” than they are because of my buttered-toffee skin tone.

When all is said and done, racial or ethnic identity rests upon the individual and their experiences. I identify myself as a black woman who happens to have Irish and Cherokee lineage. What of all the others who identify as black, but appear otherwise? Scholar and activist Arturo Schomburg, whose extensive collection of books and historical records of African people’s achievements eventually became the famed Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, N.Y., identified as an Afro-Puerto Rican. (In fact, his passion for gathering all those documents was born after a grade-school teacher told him that black people had no history, heroes or accomplishments.) Would Schomburg’s experience be less valid because it fails to meet some homogenous notion of Blackness? Who has the right to determine these standards in the first place? And in an age of global interconnectedness and the instant, worldwide exchange of information and ideals, why does it still even matter?

Dr. Yaba Blay wondered some of the same things. A first-generation Ghanian-American and the co-director of Drexel’s Africana studies program, Blay has spent the past two years gathering vibrant portraits and intimate stories from nearly 60 individuals across the country in an attempt to shine some light upon questions of racial ambiguity and legitimacy. Those portraits now comprise a new book that she’s edited and published, (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race—as well as an exhibit of the same name, currently on display at the Painted Bride Art Center…

Read the entire article and eight subject profiles from the book here.

In the narrative about mixed race bodies that Allure weaves, identity is individualized, privatized and depoliticized. The mixed race subject is included in the institution of beauty, but this comes at the cost of others. Here, inclusion of the mixed race subject not only reifies the dominance of whiteness, but also further otherizes blackness. This inclusion also hinges upon racialized and gendered paradigms of bodily essentialism. While mixed people may be welcomed into the institution of beauty, it is under specific stipulations. Mixed race identity is defined as inherently different from all other racialized groups, as necessarily part-white, as socially and racially flexible, and as inherently beautiful.

Clara Younge, “Faces of the Future: Race, Beauty and the Mixed Race Beauty Myth” (2012). Macalester College Honors Projects. Paper 8. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/amst_honors/8.

The problem here isn’t that we think Richard Cohen gags at the sight of an interracial couple and their children. The problem is that Richard Cohen thinks being repulsed isn’t actually racist, but “conventional” or “culturally conservative.” Obstructing the right of black humans and white humans to form families is a central feature of American racism. If retching at the thought of that right being exercised isn’t racism, then there is no racism.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Richard Cohen in Context,” The Atlantic, (November 12, 2013). http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/richard-cohen-in-context/281426/.