Mixed Race Studies

Mixed race of Asian and Western: Asia’s new standard of beauty

The Independent Singapore
2019-02-06

Asian celebrities with mixed race. (Photo: Screengrab from YouTube)

It seems the old adage, “Beauty is relative” is not true anymore, as what is beautiful for the Asians nowadays are those who have a mixed race—Asian and Western.

Certainly, the new standard of beauty has changed over the years. Large, double-lidded eyes, small sharp nose, narrow face, tall figure, and white skin—these Western qualities make Asians sigh and admire.

In today’s generation, those with Western features have come to represent the beauty ideal in many parts of Asia. There is a long list of mixed race celebrities, actors, models, and beauty titlists in many parts of Asia…

…The notion of “mixed races” in Asia was invented during the era of European imperialism from the early 1800s. The mix of Eastern and Western is referred to as Eurasian or Pan-Asian. As a matter of fact, these terms are relatively new, with no agreed-upon definition of either.

According to Emma Teng, the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian civilizations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, intermarriage and intermixing among ethnic groups date back to antiquity.

“After the Portuguese and other European traders arrived in China, mixed families emerged across different sites where Europeans and Chinese commonly interacted,” she said…

…Regarding mixed race as the more beautiful can result in an issue of racism. As this heightened to changing one’s perspective about beauty, there is a need to examine the notions of racialised beauty standards…

Read the entire article here.

Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking by Michael Keevak (review)

China Review International
Volume 19, Number 1, 2012
pages 103-105
DOI: 10.1353/cri.2012.0023

Paul Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 248 pages.

Becoming Yellow is a smart, erudite, intriguing, quirky, delightful, and ultimately unsatisfying book. Michael Keevak sets out to trace how, from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, the skin color of East Asians changed from white to yellow in the minds of Europeans and how all East Asians came to be viewed as members of a single Mongolian race. His larger purpose may be to comment on the broader history of European racial thinking and, perhaps, to displace whiteness and blackness from the core of that story, although he never quite articulates that intent.

Keevak traces the ideas of some familiar racial thinkers: Linneaus, Blumenbach, Buffon, Cuvier, Broca, Gobineau, and Davenport. He also gives us a taste of the ideas of a lot of writers whose racial ideas have remained hidden to all but the most diligent scholars—people such as Giovanni da Empoli, Duarte Barbosa, Juan González de Mendoza, Karl Gützlaff, François Bernier, Johann Christian Polykarp Erxleben, G. S. Mellin, James Cowles Prichard, Carl Gustav Carus, and dozens of others.

The main outlines of Keevak’s book are clear. Becoming Yellow begins with an introduction that gestures toward several topics that will be treated later in the book. There follows a chapter on how the skin and character of East Asians were perceived by European scholars and missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These are followed by an account of how Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and their eighteenth-century contemporaries arrived at yellow as the color that would stand for East Asians, and how they decided that Mongolians were the core people in East Asia. Then follows a chapter on the rise of anthropometry in the nineteenth century and the measurement of so-called Mongolians’ skull shapes, skin color, and the like. The next chapter focuses on the fascination of nineteenth-century Western medicine with Asian bodies—the so-called Mongolian eyefold, the Mongolian spot, Mongolism, and so on. The final chapter is a hodge-podge that briefly describes the turn-of-the-century Western political movement fed by fear of invasion by a “yellow peril.” It outlines the very different responses of Chinese and Japanese writers to Western ideas about Asian skin color and attempts to sum them up.

Keevak has a curious manner of pursing an argument. Despite the fairly clear overall arc of the book, each chapter is quite muddled internally. Keevak tends, early in each chapter, to refer, without explanation or context, to key ideas that he has not introduced (but, it turns out, may develop later). This approach suggests that the reader and author had already discussed the issue, so he does not have to establish or articulate its significance. The narrative in each chapter whirls around its subject, feinting here and there, rather than proceeding in a linear fashion. Keevak offers lots of esoteric details, all dutifully footnoted. He presents them by way of illustrating points, rather than as proof that his points are true. Even so, his knowledge is impressive. Then, when he comes to the major assertions in each chapter’s argument, there are no notes at all, and everything proceeds at the level of naked assertion. It is as if Keevak is displaying all his minute and intricate learning early on, so that we will believe him later, when he makes, unsupported, the key parts of his argument.

Nonetheless, many of his ideas are arresting, even if unsupported. To take just one example, Keevak concludes that “yellow began as a way of emphasizing Chinese proximity to Europeans . . . but . . . over time it had become redeployed as a term of complexional distance” (p. 34). This assertion might be true, though Keevak does not really demonstrate it, much less prove it.

Despite the shortcomings of his approach, each chapter is, nonetheless, quite delightful if one can let go of the need for linear arguments undergirded by solid supporting evidence. Keevak is so learned about odd esoterica that the reader can sit back and just enjoy the details. In each chapter Keevak presents a lovely collection—a bit like John Soane’s house on Lincoln Inn’s Fields in London—of overstuffed rooms of ephemera, all jumbled together, each of interest individually…

Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (review)

Journal of World History
Volume 23, Number 3, September 2012
pages 676-680
DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2012.0064

Magnus Fiskesjö, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Cornell University

Michael Keevak has given us a wonderful, even riveting, deep-historical account of how people in Asia (particularly East Asia) came to be seen as yellow. It surveys how Asians were described as white in most European accounts prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and only later determined to be yellow—in the new color-differentiated theories of human “races” dreamt up from the eighteenth century onward, which established white, black, red, and yellow as key identifiers.

Becoming Yellow investigates this long process in considerable detail. Keevak shows how the race-color classification evolved in the works of seminal European scholars, such as Linneaus, Linnean disciples dispatched to Asia, plus Buffon, Blumenbach, Kant, and others, who all contributed toward developing a scientific racism with color as a defining feature. He also discusses how colors retained the key role as classificatory headings even as other characteristics (eye shape, skull morphology, etc.) became important in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science. Blumenbach (who actually was not history’s worst racist!) is identified as largely responsible for naming the “Mongolian” race—a long-lived label, to which others labored to firmly attach its designated color, yellow. Keevak catalogs (chap. 3) these efforts, including such strange devices as the Color Top, originally a children’s toy, in all seriousness spun near native limbs by anthropologists and other scientists, to ascertain that East Asian skin really was yellow.

But why yellow, and why the effort? Keevak says there is no definite answer, and not even a clear beginning point for the use of yellow instead of white or other terms that were used before (some writers acknowledged seeing lighter-skinned people in the north, and brown-or dark-skinned Southerners). The choice of yellow was the result of a complex, fitful process. Keevak hints at the larger global-historical context in which the new European world-classification was produced, including the importance of transatlantic slavery (which, of course, concentrated on enslaving “black” Africans only after ambiguous seventeenth-century beginnings in which “white” Europeans were also enslaved), but he does not explore this much further. He discusses the ambiguities of India, which like East Asia also presented trouble, as a difficult anomaly. He examines and rejects (for lack of evidence) the hypothesis that European observers were inspired to use yellow for the Chinese, at least, by the apparent high status of the Chinese-language term for yellow (huang)—as, purportedly, in the mythical Yellow Emperor’s name, and in the official color of the last imperial dynasty. Instead, it was a coincidence—and later a part of the foundation for today’s Chinese acceptance of Western race theory, and for its peculiar fusion with recycled elements of the historical Chinese use of huang (chap. 5 on the reception of yellow in China, and in Japan, which was less receptive).

Most interestingly, Keevak describes (chaps. 1–2) how the original European description of the Chinese, Japanese, and others as white was abandoned in the course of a slow-in-coming realization that even though these people were both light-skinned and civilized, they would not easily give themselves up to Christianity. If they had done so, it would have confirmed what the Europeans hoped was a certain kinship: the Asian’s lightness contrasted with the darkness of the purportedly noncivilized within “Asia” as a whole in a way that closely paralleled how Europe contrasted with the darkness of its own non-Christian others, notably Africans. The scientific insight that all humans were originally dark-skinned and that lightness of skin is in part an evolutionary response to latitude, had not yet been reached; instead, the observation that many civilized Orientals had light skin, similar to Europeans, was interpreted in theological terms, where light represented good and dark was evil, as in the dark enemies of Christianity.

Here is a point of connection with anthropology’s insights about colors and cultures, not engaged by Keevak. To explain briefly: the natural color spectrum is…

Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking

Princeton University Press
2011
248 pages
6 x 9 | 7 color illus. 16 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-691-14031-5

Michael Keevak, Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages
National Taiwan University

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become “yellow” in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.

From the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb, which depicted people of varying skin tones including yellow, to the phrase “yellow peril” at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe and America, Michael Keevak follows the development of perceptions about race and human difference. He indicates that the conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped with members of the Mongolian race, they began to be considered yellow.

Demonstrating how a racial distinction took root in Europe and traveled internationally, Becoming Yellow weaves together multiple narratives to tell the complex history of a problematic term.

Read the introduction here.