Mixed Race Studies

We Are a People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity

Temple University Press
January 2000
304 pages
7×10
5 tables 5 figures
Paper EAN: 978-1-56639-723-0; ISBN: 1-56639-723-5

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

and W. Jeffrey Burroughs, Dean of Math and Sciences and Professor of Psychology
Brigham Young University, Hawaii

As the twentieth century closes, ethnicity stands out as a powerful force for binding people together in a sense of shared origins and worldview. But this emphasis on a people’s uniqueness can also develop into a distorted rationale for insularity, inter-ethnic animosity, or, as we have seen in this century, armed conflict. Ethnic identity clearly holds very real consequences for individuals and peoples, yet there is not much agreement on what exactly it is or how it is formed.

The growing recognition that ethnicity is not fixed and inherent, but elastic and constructed, fuels the essays in this collection. Regarding identity as a dynamic, on-going, formative and transformative process, We Are a People considers narrative—the creation and maintenance of a common story—as the keystone in building a sense of peoplehood. Myths of origin, triumph over adversity, migration, and so forth, chart a group’s history, while continual additions to the larger narrative stress moving into the future as a people.

Still, there is more to our stories as individuals and groups. Most of us are aware that we take on different roles and project different aspects of ourselves depending on the situation. Some individuals who have inherited multiple group affiliations from their families view themselves not as this or that but all at once. So too with ethnic groups. The so-called hyphenated Americans are not the only people in the world to recognize or embrace their plurality. This relatively recent acknowledgment of multiplicity has potentially wide implications, destabilizing the limited (and limiting) categories inscribed in, for example, public policy and discourse on race relations.

We Are a People is a path-breaking volume, boldly illustrating how ethnic identity works in the real world.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. We are a People – Paul Spickard and W. Jeffrey Burroughs

Part I: The Indeterminacy of Ethnic Categories: The Problem and A Solution
2. Multiple Ethnicities and Identity Choices in the United States – Mary C. Waters
3. That’s the Story of Our Life – Stephen Cornell

Part II: Construction of Ethnic Narratives: Migrant Ethnicities
4. Black Immigrants in the United States – Violet M. Johnson
5. The Children of Samoan Migrants in New Zealand – Cluny Macpherson and La’avasa Macpherson

Part III: Ethnicities of Dominated Indigenous Peoples
6. Narrating to the Center of Power in the Marshall Islands – Phillip H. McArthur
7. Discovered Identities and American-Indian Supratribalism – Stephen Cornell
8. Racialist Responses to Black Athletic Achievement – Patrick B. Miller
9. I’m Not a Chileno! Rapa Nui Identity – Max E. Stanton and Andrés Edmunds P.

Part IV: Emerging Multiethnic Narratives
10. Multiracial Identity in Brazil and the U.S. – G. Reginald Daniel
11. Mixed Laughter – Darby Li Po Price
12. Punjabi Mexican American Experiences of Multiethnicity –  Darby Li Po Price

Part V: Theoretical Reflections
13. Rethinking Racial Identity Development – Maria P. P. Root
14. The Continuing Significance of Race – Lori Pierce
15. What Are the Functions of Ethnic Identity? – Cookie White Stephan and Walter G. Stephan
16. Ethnicity, Multiplicity, and Narrative – W. Jeffrey Burroughs and Paul Spickard

Read an excerpt of chapter 1 here.

Essayist and Poet Paisley Rekdal to Read From Works at Ithaca College

Ithaca College
Clark Lounge, Egbert Hall
2010-10-05, 19:30 (Local Time)

ITHACA, NY — Essayist and poet Paisley Rekdal will give a free public reading from her works on Tuesday, Oct. 5, at Ithaca College. Her presentation, part of the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series, will be held at 7:30 p.m. in Clark Lounge, Egbert Hall.

The daughter of a Chinese-American mother and an American father of Norwegian heritage, Rekdal is the author of “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee,” a collection of personal essays in which she confronts the difficulty of negotiating her biracial identity. She has also published three collections of poetry and will have a hybrid photo-text memoir that combines poems, nonfiction and fiction with photography, coming out from Tupelo Press in 2011.

Rekdal currently teaches at the University of Utah. She has been honored for her writing with a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, a Pushcart Prize, National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright fellowships, the University of Georgia Press’s Contemporary Poetry Series Award and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review.

For more information, click here.

The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In

Vintage an Imprint of Penguin Random House
2000
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-70855-8 (0-375-70855-3)
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-307-42908-7 (0-307-42908-3)

Paisley Rekdal, Distinguished Professor of English and Asian Studies
University of Utah

When you come from a mixed race background as Paisley Rekdal does — her mother is Chinese American and her father is Norwegian– thorny issues of identity politics, and interracial desire are never far from the surface. Here in this hypnotic blend of personal essay and travelogue, Rekdal journeys throughout Asia to explore her place in a world where one’s “appearance is the deciding factor of one’s ethnicity.”

In her soul-searching voyage, she teaches English in South Korea where her native colleagues call her a “hermaphrodite,” and is dismissed by her host family in Japan as an American despite her assertion of being half-Chinese. A visit to Taipei with her mother, who doesn’t know the dialect, leads to the bitter realization that they are only tourists, which makes her further question her identity. Written with remarkable insight and clarity, Rekdal a poet whose fierce lyricism is apparent on every page, demonstrates that the shifting frames of identity can be as tricky as they are exhilarating.

Diverse Identities in Interracial Relationships: A Multiethnic Interpretation of “Mississippi Masala” and “The Wedding Banquet”

Xchanges
Volume 4, Number 1 (September 2004)

Lan Dong, Assistant Professor of English
University of Illinois, Springfield

In their introduction to the collection Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam point out “much of the work on race within the United States has tended to emphasize a discussion of particular ethnicities. There has not been much engagement with the interrelations among such communities, nor with how the multicultural debates cross various national borders” (Shohat and Stam 3). In the past decade, nevertheless, discussions of ethnicity and identity among U.S. critics frequently note the prominent multiethnic and interethnic relations among racial groups [1].

In this paper, I build upon theories of multiethnicity and interethnicity in my examination of heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity within the body we label “Asian diaspora.” In particular, my argument is focused on the realization and construction of the diverse identities of Asian diaspora living in contemporary America in the context of interracial relationships. I choose to analyze Mississippi Masala (1991) directed by Mira Nair and The Wedding Banquet 喜宴(1993) directed by Ang Lee since interracial romance in both films functions as the primary plot. The struggle for love and individuality is intertwined with the protagonists’ complicated identities by way of negotiation between personal, familial, communal, and social concerns. I use this film analysis to suggest the intersection of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationalism in Asian diaspora’s pursuit of their reconstructed, rather than prescribed, identities…

Read the entire article here.

Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium: RACE

University of Rhode Island
Tuesday evenings, 19:00 ET (Local Time); (23:00Z through November; 00:00Z on Wednesday after November 9).
2010-09-14 through 2010-12-07
Edwards Auditorium, URI Kingston Campus

A series of public programs at the University of Rhode Island presented by the URI Honors Program

Join us! The public is invited to attend this series of free events.

Perceptions about race shape everyday experiences, public policies, opportunities for individual achievement, and relations across racial and ethnic lines. In this colloquium we will explore key issues of race, showing how race still matters.

You will be able to watch the Colloquium live by clicking here or watching below. This link will only work in real time, while the presentation is going on.

Note: the live feed is only active during live events.

Includes noted scholars (Times and dates below are in UTC.  Please read carefully!):

2010-10-05, 23:00Z
Race, Identity, and Medical Genomics in the Obama Age
Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

2010-10-12, 23:00Z
The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in Contemporary America
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

2010-11-31, 00:00Z
How Black Women’s Stories Complicate Race and Gender Politics
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies
Princeton University

For more information, click here.

HAFU: a film about the experiences of mixed-race people living in Japan

Hafu Film Sneak Preview in Kyoto
Institut Franco-Japonais du Kansai, Kyoto, Japan
Saturday, 2010-10-23. 19:30 – 22:00 (Local Time)

Filmmakers

Lara Perez Takagi
and
Megumi Nishikura

David Yano (29). David was born in a small village in Ghana, to a Ghanaian mother and a Japanese father. His father, an architect, was in Ghana to build the Noguchi Hideo Memorial when he met David’s mother. After spending 6 years in Ghana, they moved to Tokyo. However due to difficulty of adjusting to their new life in Japan, his parents filed for divorce when he was 10. The next 8 years were spent in an orphanage school in Japan with his two brothers. There he discovered his greatest passion: music and performance. He started modeling when he was a university student and now works as a multitalented TV presenter. Due to his dark complexion, David is regarded by default as a gaijin (foreigner) when people meet him for the first time. However, having spent much of his life in Japan, he feels he acts and identifies as Japanese more than anything else. Despite this claim David, has returned to Ghana once a year since the age of 20. Seeing the dramatic difference between the two countries, David felt the call to use his talents to benefit the people of Ghana. He has set an ambitious goal of raising $30,000 over the course of 8 months in order to build kindergarten back in Ghana. Audiences will watch him as he organizes various fundraisers and events has he struggles to attain his goal.

With an ever increasing movement of people between places in this transnational age, there is a mounting number of mixed-race people in Japan, some visible others not. “Hafu” is the unfolding journey of discovery into the intricacies of mixed-race Japanese and their multicultural experience in modern day Japan. The film follows the lives of five “hafus”—the Japanese term for people who are half-Japanese—and by virtue of the fact that living in Japan, they are forced to explore what it means to be multiracial and multicultural in a nation that once proudly proclaimed itself as the mono-ethnic nation. For some of these hafus Japan is the only home they know, for some living in Japan is an entirely new experience, and others are caught somewhere between two different worlds.

For more information, click here.

Being between: can multiracial Americans form a cohesive anti-racist movement beyond identity politics and Tiger Woods chic?

ColorLines: Race, Culture, Action
2003-06-22

Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Assistant Professor Anthropology & Women Studies
University of Washington

So much of being mixed race these days seems about having to explain, always answering “What are you?” for others and for one’s self. And I’m tired of it. This variation of identity politics confronts the annoying question, but then gets hung up on the self in a way that hinders the collaborations necessary for fighting racism in all its mutating forms. In my mind, the problem of how to move from individual experience to collective action defines the current struggle of the multiracial movement.

I grew up in St. Louis, where race was mostly black and white, and where it seemed clear enough in schoolyard politics that I had slanted eyes and was neither. In St. Louis, the police arrived at our burglarized house and questioned my mother about the Hong Kong gang connections they assumed she had used to rip off her own husband, whom they assumed she had married in a bid for a nice white slice of American pie. Never mind that my mother was born and raised in Indiana or that my father hails from working class Ontario. Being mixed race means you elicit fears of loss all around (of status for whites and culture for people of color) and accusations—sometimes justified—that multiracial identity is just about passing.

When I moved to California, I discovered the labels had shifted on me. An Asian American woman took one look at my face, and said, “You’re hapa haole, aren’t you.” Ignorant of her terms, I snapped back, “I don’t think so.” I soon learned, however, that hapa, from hapa haole or half-white in Hawaiian, was my mixed race category between categories of race in America. Two syllables dismissed me from belonging to the Asian America I had always imagined from my St. Louis schoolyard. I started to look at myself differently. I began a quest to become a real hapa, whatever that might be, not just one who was passing. But, passing for what? I’ve been Chicana in the eyes of Missourians, white in San Francisco Chinatown, and a Uighur minority on the streets of Beijing, where I landed after years of learning Chinese to prove myself to my own Chinese American family.

Multiracial identity, being between, challenges the biological essence of race and exposes it as a construction designed to create social hierarchy. But progressives find themselves resisting those who naively claim that the existence of multiracial people effectively ends racist thinking. A character in Afroasian playwright Velina Hasu Houston’s 1988 play Broken English declares that she lives in a “no passing zone.” She suggests a space of possibility for mixed folks to embrace composite identities as part of an inter-ethnic, anti-racism struggle…

Read the entire article here.

Equally Multiracial? A Study of Asian/Whites and Black/Whites

American Sociological Association Annual Meeting
Hilton Atlanta and Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Atlanta, Georgia
2010-08-13
19 pages

Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl
University of Virginia

In a study with 28 individuals with either Asian/White or Black/White descent I find that all the participants prefer some variation of a multiracial identity. However, when investigating how class and gender intersect with race to affect one’s racial identity, I find that Asian/Whites have more positive experiences of their multiracial identity than Black/Whites. This discrepancy is largely due to persistent stereotypical and racist depictions of Blacks and of Asians.

…The Asian/White women in this study spoke of their mixed race identity with pride and ownership, which was often connected to beauty ideals. Their “exotic” look got them attention, most often to White men. One woman, Nancy, 29 years old and a graduate student is often asked “what are you?” When I asked her if that question bothered her, she said:

Uh, honestly I don‘t take offense. I think its kinda cool cause I have people stop me on the streets sometimes or in the elevator or something or when I go to work and meeting new people and they‘ll say,—I‘m sorry, I have to ask you, “what are you?” I always find it intriguing that people can look at me and be like she stands out—she‘s unique. I‘ve been told that I‘m beautiful, that I‘m exotic because I stand out. I actually don‘t mind, I love people questioning.

This woman repeatedly noted that she liked being seen as pretty and that her mixed-race identity did not lead to uncomfortable situations or discrimination. Instead, it was a positive experience for her. All of the Asian/White women noted having predominantly or all White partners (as well as White friends), revealing, I argue that their beauty is acceptable by the standards of the dominant White society. None of them remarked on having problems with dating or finding a partner; in fact one Asian/White woman, Kelly, 22 years old, and an artist, actually remarked that she often found men that have an “Asian fetish” men that were particularly attracted to the cultures and physical looks associated with Asian. This woman also noted that she enjoyed being “ethnically ambiguous” and that others were attracted to this feature; she notes:

I actually kind of take pride in being biracial because it… I kind of get a lot of attention as a result and I think being one or the other doesn‘t give you as much as attention, is that weird? I‘m so conceited. No, I‘m not saying that I love attention all the time but it does, it‘s more gratifying to say that you‘re biracial than to say that you‘re one, it makes you more special.

In this case, she clearly receives positive attention from being biracial and from appearing mixed race. She is attractive both because she is Asian and because she is “ethnically ambiguous” her identity serves her overall in a positive capacity.

In contrast to those of Asian/White descent, women of Black/White descent spoke to more distressing experiences related to their gender. In their case, although their biraciality likewise lent to a more unique look, it also was a point of contention when developing potential friendships with Black women, when having mostly all White friends, and when navigating relationships with men. Many of the women commented on how interactions with other Black women were problematic, teasing about skin color and hair texture were common experiences. Ashley, 24 years old, and a senior in college, noted that she continues to feel some animosity from Black women. In this passage she talks about how she goes to a bar that is often frequented by Black women, she says:

Again, love the music so I‘m going to keep going there but it was like, the Black girls were like, and I get there is this hair thing in the Black community so it‘s like my hair is always a dead give away for them to want to not like me or something like that… then I would assume that… Black people are kind of like ―oh, she‘s the mixed girl, she thinks she‘s better than us…

Read the entire paper here.

CCIE presents Cedar & Bamboo – Film Première and Panel Discussion

University of British Columbia, Point Grey Campus
UBC First Nations Longhouse
Thursday, 2010-10-14, 12:00-14:30 (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE).

There are numerous First Nations in what is now British Columbia and Chinese people arrived on BC’s shores many generations ago. Since then, Indigenous and Chinese people have interacted and forged relationships. Set in Vancouver and other locations in BC, Cedar and Bamboo opens with a survey of the lives of early Chinese immigrants and concentrates on addressing the more recent history of highly complex and troubled issues of interracial relationships and marriages, multiracial identity and identification, alienation and belonging. Its central focus is on the lives of four people of mixed Indigenous and Chinese ancestry and their formation of strong and meaningful identity in spite of the difficulty of reconciling divergent identities, racist laws, the complexities of familial and ethnic acceptance and/or rejection and personal identification with and alienation from Canada and Canadianness, China and Chineseness and First Nations and Indigenous identity. Lil’wat elder Judy Joe reflects on being “abandoned” by her Indigenous mother, being sent to her father’s village in China at age five, being ill treated there as a foreigner and returning to Canada as a teenager to a Vancouver from which she felt completely alienated. Musqueam elder Howard Grant, whose Chinese father worked in the market gardens near his Musqueam mother’s family, reflects on his experiences with both cultures and his principal identification as aboriginal. Siblings Jordie and Hannah Yow, now in their 20s, reflect on growing up “Canadian” in Kamloops with knowledge of being quite multiracial and multiethnic but with virtually no information about either their Chinese grandfather or their Secwempec grandmother.

As a bonus- 1788: A History of Chinese and First Nations Relations in British Columbia, 10 minutes of academic commentary from Professors Henry Yu and Jean Barman of the University of British Columbia and Harley Wylie of Nuu-chah-nulth ancestry on the intersecting histories of First Nations and Chinese people in British Columbia.

For more information, click here.

“A Fascinating Interracial Experiment Station”: Remapping the Orient-Occident Divide in Hawai’i

American Studies
Volume 49, Number 3/4, Fall/Winter 2008
pages 87-109
E-ISSN: 2153-6856
Print ISSN: 0026-3079

Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, Assistant Professor of Comparative American Studies and History
Oberlin College

Rick Baldoz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology
Oberlin College

Introduction

During the 1920s and 1930s, American intellectuals on the U.S. continent often described Hawai’i as a “racial frontier,” a meeting ground between East and West where “unorthodox” social relations between Native Hawaiians, Asians, and Caucasians had taken root. The frontier metaphor evoked two very different images, the “racial paradise” and the “racial nightmare,” and in both characterizations, Asians figured prominently. In 1930, of the islands’ civilian population of nearly 350,000, about 236,000 or 68 percent were classified as Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, or Korean.  Political, religious, and educational leaders in Hawai’i were the main propagators of the racial paradise image, which expressed optimism in the ability of Caucasians and Asians to live together, while also celebrating the presence of Portuguese, Spanish, Puerto Ricans, Native Hawaiians, and an array of mixed-race groups.  They touted the assimilative powers of American institutions and promoted Hawai’i as a model of colonial progress to audiences on the U.S. mainland. David Crawford, the president of the University of Hawai’i,  summarized this view during a 1929 visit to Los Angeles where he spoke before a group called the Advertising Club. Hawai’i society, explained Crawford, was “demonstrating the possibility of the meeting of Orient and Occident on terms of friendship that practically eliminate race prejudice.”

This celebration of interracial harmony and cultural assimilation contrasted with views advanced by West Coast nativists who portrayed Hawai’i and its preponderance of Asians in the population as a cautionary example of the pitfalls of American expansionism. During debates in the early 1920s over renewing the Alien Land Law in California, anti-Japanese agitators cited Hawai’i as a failed experiment where the color line had been irretrievably breached by a vanguard force of…

Read or purchase the article here.