Mixed Race Studies

Mixed: The many faces of the multiracial experience.

The Stream
Al Jazeera English
2016-01-20

Femi Oke, Host

“What are you?” is an often used opening question that doesn’t always have a short and simple answer. For people with more than one racial background, identity is a lot more than one word; it’s a sentence, a paragraph or a lived experience. As we become a more and more mixed race population world over, racial identity is also becoming more fluid. On the next Stream we’ll speak to biracial and multiracial people about their mixed race journey.

Joining this conversation:

David Shams, Blogger and Freelance Journalist

Julie Matthews, Associate Professor
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Naomi Kissiedu-Green and Matthew Green, Authors of Surprise Baby: The Colourful Life!
Australia

Maya McManus, Social Media Consultant

Watch the episode (00:44:04) here.

“We’ve sexualised or pornographied mixed race. It’s a very narrow line between exoticisation and sexualisation, fetishisms—where you turn all non-white people into people who exist simply into your own pleasure.

She said that “a person who is half white is more “palatable” and acceptable in society – an idea, she believed, is steeped in racism and prevalent since colonisation.

“Colonialism has circulated the idea that white is best. White is at the top of a kind of hierarchy of humanity… If you believe there is a hierarchy of races, which is what racism is about, a little bit of white is more palatable,”—Dr. Julie Matthews

Lin Taylor, “How far have we come in our acceptance of mixed race people?,” Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), November 14, 2014. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/11/10/how-far-have-we-come-our-acceptance-mixed-race-people.

How far have we come in our acceptance of mixed race people?

Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)
Crows Nest, New South Wales, Australia
2014-11-14

Lin Taylor

What was once a shameful taboo with a deep, dark racist history is now the face of the modern world. But how far have we really come in our acceptance of mixed race people?

Estelle Griepink is not a celebrity.

But more often than not, the 22-year-old will get stopped on the streets of Indonesia and Malaysia, with passers-by eager to take her photo.

“I lived in Indonesia for a couple of months and I was stopped by people who wanted to take photos of me – and with me – quite frequently,” she said. “It’s happened in Malaysia, where my family lives, too.”

Her appeal? The fact that she is half Malaysian and half Dutch.

“I know this happens to people who are white too – blonde hair, blue eyes – but I felt there was something kind of creepy doing it to me as they would go on about how amazing it was that I was half Asian, half white.

“At the end of the day my ethnicity is completely out of my control, so I hardly think it is something to be congratulated on or celebrated for… like you’re a collector’s item.”

But with their mysterious, racially ambiguous ‘look’ and exotic heritage, it’s not hard to see why mixed race people like Griepink are so in demand…

…Racial hierarchy, racism and the ‘one-drop rule’

Dr Julie Matthews, an educator and sociologist at the University of Adelaide, believed the sexualisation and preference for mixed race people is inherently racist.

“We’ve sexualised or pornographied mixed race. It’s a very narrow line between exoticisation and sexualisation, fetishisms – where you turn all non-white people into people who exist simply into your own pleasure.”

She said that a person who is half white is more “palatable” and acceptable in society – an idea, she believed, is steeped in racism and prevalent since colonisation.

“Colonialism has circulated the idea that white is best. White is at the top of a kind of hierarchy of humanity… If you believe there is a hierarchy of races, which is what racism is about, a little bit of white is more palatable,” said Dr Matthews, 58, who is half Japanese and half English.

“You can get rid of the fear, and horror and the anger of race by adding a bit of whiteness.”

A pertinent example of this was the treatment of half-Aboriginal children and the Stolen Generation. Between the late 1800s and the 1970s, the Australian government forcibly removed Aboriginal children with a white parent from their community, placing them in non-Indigenous foster homes or state-run institutions. It was hoped that mixed race children would ‘assimiliate’ into white Australian society and cut ties with their black ancestry.

Sociologist Professor Reginald Daniel from the University of California added that across all racial groups, blackness is the one identity that is the most complicated.

“When it comes to blackness, there is one frontier that is the most complicated,” he told SBS. “There is no ambiguity about who’s black no matter what you look like, no matter what your ancestry because of the ‘one drop rule’ way back to, at least informally, in slavery, and then formally in law.”

A term mainly used in the US, the one-drop rule is the idea that even ‘one drop’ of blackness in your ancestry precludes you from being truly white, and therefore ‘lower’ on the racial hierarchy (with whiteness being at the top of the scale).

“There was a time when [an interracial] couple would have been – in parts of the United States – lynched by the [Ku Klux] Klan. Those kinds of attitudes had very serious consequences in terms of physical harm. And that does still happen. There are numerous hate crimes directed at interracial couples and mixed race people. And that pattern has not gone. It’s a reflection of that deep long racist history,” said Professor Daniel, whose own multiracial identity includes African, European, Asian, Arab, and Native American origins.

As a result of such entrenched racism, Professor Daniel said identifying as a multiracial person was often “fraught with conflict”, especially if the individual had a black ancestor.

“There was not a lot of mixed race people in the past in terms of identity – even if they existed they didn’t embrace that identity. So it was an identity that was fraught with a lot of conflict, in a sense that, well, how do you form an identity that’s so totally different from everything and everyone around you?”

It’s a sentiment that Tony Ryder, 25, knows all too well.

With an Italian father and an Aboriginal mother, Ryder told SBS he grew up hiding his Noongar and Yamatji ancestry because of the racism he endured in his hometown of Perth.

“Everyone’s experience is different I suppose, but for me, you know, you get called b**ng, c**n, every name under the sun… Where I went to high school, being Aboriginal isn’t celebrated – you just get made fun of.”

But when Mr Ryder did start embracing his Aboriginal heritage, he said he struggled to find acceptance within the community because of his lighter skin.

“People need to start realising that Indigenous people don’t all look the same…We are a diverse people just like any other race. Years and years of genocide and forced assimilation does not mean that we are all going to be black-skinned and living in the desert.”…

Read the entire article here.

The presence of Eurasian images in fashion representations and their absence from finance representations draw attention to the historical origins, cultural trajectories and ambivalence of meaning associated with ‘raced’ and sexed representations. Although the inclusion of Asian and Eurasian women may be intended to offset their previous absence and secure a wider multicultural appeal, they inadvertently replay processes of racialisation and sexualization. This is because they incite desires for, and identifications with, White/Western/Anglo identities authorised by essentialist and quasi-biological discourses of racialisation and sexualization.

Julie Matthews, “Deconstructing the Visual: The Diasporic Hybridity of Asian and Eurasian Female Images,” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, Issue 8, October 2002.

Deconstructing the Visual: The Diasporic Hybridity of Asian and Eurasian Female Images

Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context
Australian National University
Issue 8, October 2002
45 paragraphs
ISSN 1440 9151

Julie Matthews, Associate Professor and Director of Research Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia

Introduction

Being long accustomed to the absence of images resembling myself in magazines and on TV, I find the few images I do encounter quite fascinating. Commenting on the absence of media images and representations of Asian women, Catherine Padmore notes that pale-skinned, wide-eyed Eurasian features are more likely to appear than Asian faces. As she arguesof the three hundred images appearing on the cover of the Australian publication Cleo since its inception in 1972, ‘under ten did not fit the Caucasian stereotype of wide-eyes, pale skin, and (surprisingly often) blonde hair’. My analysis of Asian and Eurasian female images is interested in the small but growing number of stylish young Eurasian and Asian fashion models appearing in Australian magazines and catalogues and Asian-female images associated with finance. The latter category links Asian women to commerce, computing and technology in a globally interconnected world. Interestingly, these images rarely feature Eurasian women.

The presence of Eurasian images in fashion representations and their absence from finance representations draw attention to the historical origins, cultural trajectories and ambivalence of meaning associated with ‘raced’ and sexed representations. Although the inclusion of Asian and Eurasian women may be intended to offset their previous absence and secure a wider multicultural appeal, they inadvertently replay processes of racialisation and sexualization. This is because they incite desires for, and identifications with, White/Western/Anglo identities authorised by essentialist and quasi-biological discourses of racialisation and sexualization.

The situation is further complicated by the diasporic hybridity of Asian and Eurasian female images. Distinguishing fashion from finance images highlights the ways these are worked out through various forms of colonialism, patriarchy, orientalism and commodification. Fashion representations commodify traditional stereotypes of Asian women and hyper-feminise Asian and Eurasian women. They model desirable ideals of youthful sexualised femininity and offer a rebuke to those who fail to meet these standards in a White/Western/Anglo-dominated global market. Finance representations take their cue from contemporary social and economic conditions where Asian ‘Tiger’ economies have come to stand for development potential and high-tech economic success under global capitalism. In these images Eurasian women are absent because Asian women more effectively represent the desirable ideals of commerce and information technology and ‘gently’ rebuke those who fail to succeed under these terms and conditions.

This paper is organised into two sections. The first section analyses Asian and Eurasian images and the latter section uses insights from this analysis to challenge current cultural studies understandings of hybridity and diaspora. This paper is not intended to provide a comprehensive semiotic analysis of media representations. Rather, it undertakes a deconstructive analysis of various images I have recently encountered. Deconstruction challenges the apparent and obvious ‘facts’ of a representation or image. It acknowledges that representations and readings are an effect of standpoint, belief and value, and support multiple and often contradictory understandings. A deconstructive analysis of visual representations highlights the interaction of images with one another as well as accentuating associations that operate beyond the text and beyond the intentions of image producers. The deconstruction of visual representations undertaken here focuses on shared and dissimilar trajectories of mobility and hybridity and the fissures and breaks in authoritative and universalising explanations and theories. Visual images work a terrain of identity and identification that defy the demarcation of primary structural or systemic forms of subordination and clear-cut lines of resistance desired by Floya Anthias. They thereby enable us to trace the contours of new forms of subjugation and struggle.

The second section of this paper explores conventional cultural studies’ understandings of diaspora and hybridity though a gender analysis which highlights the interconnected significance of economic, political, historical and contemporary conditions. My analysis of Asian and Eurasian images highlights ambivalent processes of collaboration and contestation that are an effect of diasporic hybridity and the commodification of ‘racialised’ and sexualised images. This focus illuminates how representations, intended to offset the absence of minority women in the media and thus achieve inclusion or wider multicultural appeal, may have unintended effects. New representations may be politically generative and challenge established orders but they may also incite desires for, and identifications with, White/Western/Anglo identities authorised by essentialist and quasi-biological discourses—they risk inadvertently replaying traditional processes of racialisation and sexualisation.

I use the term ‘Eurasian’ to refer to images evoking Anglo, European and Asian ‘racial’ and cultural iconography. Unlike the term ‘Asian’, which has ‘racial’ and cultural connotations, the term ‘Eurasian’ is mainly used as a ‘racial’ category to denote people of mixed European and Asian descent. I extend the category here to encompass ‘racial’ and cultural connotations including: a) those of identifiably ‘mixed race’ heritage; b) the transposition of ‘Asian’ signs and symbols into predominantly Anglo-European settings; and c) the transposition of ‘Anglo-European’ signs and symbols into ‘Asian’ settings. A focus on Eurasian and Asian female images in these terms illuminates the diasporic hybridity of visual forms. I argue that diaspora theory need not contain itself to accounts of dislocation, relocation and disembodied longings for exilic roots, but may facilitate new understandings of the role of images, signs and symbols in the achievement of collaboration and contestation…

Read the entire article here.

Eurasian Persuasions: Mixed Race, Performativity and Cosmopolitanism

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (February 2007)
pages 41-54
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082921

Julie Matthews, Associate Professor
School of Education
University of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Eurasians are ‘in’. We are the poster children of globalisation. In Asia, and increasingly in the West, mixed-race Eurasian models charm us with their cosmopolitan chic. Terms previously used to demarcate impure outsiders such as Eurasian mixed-race, hybridity, mestiza, hapa, haafu, Euro-Asian and Anglo-Asian have recently been given an affirmative spin. This essay argues that the appeal, allure and persuasions of Eurasian/mixed-race are as much an effect of its commodified production as a cosmopolitan figure with automatic racial, cultural and national border crossing attributes, as its capacity and potential to claim for itself a location and space of visibility. Framed as a performative, the visual aesthetics and cosmopolitan attributes of Eurasian/mixed-race are explored in relation to postcolonial practices of racialisation and sexualisation under globalisation. Factors evoked in the constitution of Eurasian/mixed race delimit rather than preclude its promise of an expansive transnational/transcultural cosmopolitan future.

Read or purchase the article here.