Author: Steven

  • When it comes to race and ethnicity in America, it can all get very complicated depending on who is defining whom, and why. People are not always what they appear to be. People are sometimes not what they want to be. In reality, race is as much a matter of politics as biology; ethnicity as…

  • “Wait . . . they had a white baby?!?!” Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu 2012-09-01 Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu Stanford University My niece recently had a baby, a beautiful boy. The proud grandmother showed the photo of the newborn to family members and everyone oohed and aahed. One of his cousins looked at the picture and said, “Oh he’s so…

  • Tiger Mom’s Hapa Cubs Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu 2012-05-09 Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu Stanford University Are persons with one Asian parent and one non-Asian parent Asian or not Asian? Schools don’t seem to know where to place them, leaving them on their own to determine their identities. In the article, “Some Asians’ college strategy: Don’t check ‘Asian’,” some young…

  • Stonequist’s Concept of “The Marginal Man” in Langston Hughes’ Play Mulatto International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature ISSN 2200-3592 (Print), ISSN 2200-3452 (Online) Volume 1, Number 4 (September 2012) pages 125-130 Farshid Nowrouzi Roshnavand University of Tehran, Iran Rajabali Askarzadeh Torghabeh, Assistant Professor of Letters and Humanities Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran Born…

  • Race and a Political Race Everyday Sociology Blog 2012-09-28 Jonathan R. Wynn, Assistant Professor of Sociology University of Massachusetts, Amherst Dwanna L. Robertson University of Massachusetts, Amherst The Massachusetts Senate race between incumbent Scott Brown and Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren took an unexpected sharp turn this week. Shades of racialized language (reminiscent of the…

  • Playing for Malaya: A Eurasian Family and the Pacific War University of Hawai‘i Press (Distributed for the National University of Singapore Press) 2011 208 pages Paper ISBN: 978-9971-69-573-6 Rebecca Kenneison Reggie, according to his niece Wendy, ‘only told what Reggie wanted you to know.’ Reggie was my father. He had honed the technique of talking…

  • That’s How It Goes: Autobiography Of A Singapore Eurasian Select Books 2008 235 pages Paperback ISBN: 9789814022392 F. A. C. “Jock” Oehlers These memoirs by a member of one of Singapore’s leading Eurasian families offers many sidelights onto Singapore’s life in the mid-20th century. The author, then a dental student, tells of the hardships of…

  • The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia (Second Edition) University of Wisconsin Press April 2009 (First Published in 1983) 312 pages 6 x 9   14 b/w illustrations Jean Gelman Taylor, Associate Professor of History University of New South Wales In the seventeenth century, the Dutch established a trading base at the…

  • Of Susie Guillory Phipps and Chief Redbone: The Mutability of Race Newhouse News Service 1992-07-09 Jonathan Tilove Black is black and white is white, but what about Susie Guillory Phipps? Phipps looks white. She always thought she was white. So did her first and second husbands. Until, at the age of 43, she discovered she…

  • “I’m not about to have my children check more than one box only to be relegated back to the black category,” said [Susan] Graham [of Project RACE]… She left the race question blank. Jonathan Tilove, “Will new age of mixed-race identities loosen the hold of race or tie it up in tighter knots?” Newhouse News…