Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Another example of the challenges associated with the use of population descriptors can be found in the frequent use of the terms European, African, and Asian. These continental terms are tremendously broad in scope. At the Tokyo meeting, for example, it was noted that even among the Japanese researchers, there was no unitary understanding of what populations should be considered “Asian.”

More importantly, these terms can, in some contexts, be interpreted as referring to white, black, and Asian, the three classic, and socially constructed “races.” There continues to be a great deal of academic work that highlights the degree to which these broad “racial” categories are, in reality, social constructs. Although we should not overlook the correlation between “race” and socio-economic inequality involving factors such as health care and medical care, such discussion has usually arisen within the context of some North American and European societies. However, outside of these societies, the divergence between samples and population descriptors is also problematic. When the actual samples in the name of “European”, “African”, and “Asian” are taken from certain limited groups, without taking into account significant diversity within each region, it is unlikely that such broad terms have any scientific meaning, at least from the perspective of genetics on the global level. Moreover, the research results may be taken as supporting the classic “racial” categories, with any discovered “differences” misinterpreted as genetically determined “racial differences.”

The importance of the distinction between race and ethnicity cannot be overemphasized as the latter pays close attention to (presumably) shared cultural factors such as language, diet, and religion. When considering the contribution of environmental as well as genetic factors to diversity within each continental region, the scientific validity of the use of such broad terms to describe samples becomes even more questionable.

Yasuko Takezawa, et. al., “Human genetic research, race, ethnicity and the labeling of populations: recommendations based on an interdisciplinary workshop in Japan,” BMC Medical Ethics, (Volume 15, Issue 1, December 2014). p2-3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6939-15-33.

An Interview with Celeste Ng, Author of Everything I Never Told You

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2015-09-07 01:02Z by Steven

An Interview with Celeste Ng, Author of Everything I Never Told You

The Toast
2015-09-02

Nicole S. Chung, Managing Editor

Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the ALA’s Alex Award, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Massachusetts Book Award.

Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize. Celeste and I first connected on Twitter after I read her book, and she graciously agreed to chat with me about the novel, her writing routine, being part of and writing about interracial families, how to address issues of race and representation without being pigeonholed, writing outside one’s own culture, what she’s working on now, and much more!…

…Apart from being caught up in the story and the beautifully drawn characters, your book was important to me personally because I’ve always been part of an interracial family — first through adoption and now through marriage as well. I so rarely read stories or see portrayals of families that look anything like mine. Why did you decide to make the family in your novel an interracial one, with biracial children? Was that always the plan for this story?

In the very early stages of the novel — when I was no more than about 15 or 20 pages in — I didn’t really think about the races of the characters at all. If anything, I thought of them as white because that’s so often the default mode for our culture. Then one of my advisors, Eileen Pollack, asked me about the characters’ ethnicity, and I started to realize that this was a racially mixed family: that tied into many of the issues they had to face and the concerns and misunderstandings they had with each other and with outsiders…

Read the entire interview here.

Tags: Celeste Ng, Nicole Chung, Nicole S. Chung, The Toast

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Mixed Race Studies

An Interview with Celeste Ng, Author of Everything I Never Told You

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