Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial Identity [Movie] to be screened at the  Portland, Maine International Film Festival

Portland, Maine International Film Festival
Saturday, 2010-08-21, 12:00 – 13:30 EDT (Local Time)
Space Gallery
538 Congress Street, Portland, Maine 04101
Phone: 207.828.5600

Year: 2010
Director: Brian Chinhema
Writer: Brian Chinhema
Producer: Brian Chinhema (Abacus Production)
Running Time: 01:22:00

Multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic in America, yet there is no officially political recognition for mixed-race people. Multiracial Identity examines what it means to be multiracial in America and explores the social, political, and religious impact of the multiracial movement.

The film is produced and directed by Brian Chinhema and features commentary from noted scholars, Rainier Spencer, Naomi Zack, Aliya Saperstein, Aaron Gullickson, Susan J. Hayflick and Pastor Randall Sanford.

The Invisible Minorities: Identity Construction of Multiracial Asian Americans

San Jose State University
August 2003
136 pages

Jennifer Huyhn Thi Ahn Morrison, Lecturer AY-A of Communication Studies
San Jose State University

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Department of Communication Studies at San Jose State University in partial fulfulliment of the requriements for the degree Master of Arts.

A review of the literature found that Ethnic Studies focused on multiracial Asian American identity more than any other field. However, multiracial Asian Americans are still in need of further research because of the many different types of identity construction that may occur. From the array of literature found in Communication Studies, only a few encompass how a multiracial individual communicates her or his identity construction. Thus, in my Master’s thesis I found that the complexity of multiracial identity construction encompasses three types of communication cues in relation to familial closeness. Through the analysis of five in-depth interviews I found there to be a profound influence on how the double minority multiracial individual is raced and how she or he identifies. Therefore, after examining the construction of double minority multiracial Asian Americans, there is a greater ability to understand how a complex multiracial identity is communicated.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: THE WORLD OF MULTIRACIALITY

• Introduction
• Rationale
• Key Terms
• Ethnicity & Race
• Monoracial
• Multiracial
• Minority Group
• Majority Group
• Literature Review
• Identity
• Multiracial Identity
• Identity of Multiracial Asian Americans

CHAPTER 2: INTERVIEWS FROM THE DOMAIN OF MULTIRACIALITY

• Qualitative In-depth Interviews
• Research Questions
• Procedures
• Mode of Analysis

CHAPTER 3: SELECTIVE MONORACIAL IDENTITY

• Selective Monoracial Identity
• Familial Closeness

CHAPTER 4: THE ISSUES OF PASSING & BEING RACED

• Authenticity
• Racial Status

CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION

• Inclusion of The Invisible Minority
• SMI
• Familial Communicative Cues
• A Visual Represention of Multiracial Identity Development
• Limitations
• Implications for Future Research

REFERENCES

Read the entire thesis here.

Biracial Utahns seeking identity

Deseret News
Salt Lake City, Utah
2005-03-12

Elaine Jarvik

They’re biracial — equally Polynesian and white. But most prefer to think of themselves as Polynesian, says University of Utah graduate student Kawika Allen, who recently studied 84 Polynesian-Caucasian Utahns.

Allen, who grew up with an Hawaiian mother and a Caucasian father, presented his findings Friday at the ninth annual Pacific Islander Awareness Week at the University of Utah…

…Growing up in Utah, Allen’s Polynesian friends sometimes thought he wasn’t Polynesian enough, and he wasn’t sure if he fit in his father’s white world either. That angst later led to a master’s thesis on biracial identity among Utah’s biracial Polynesians, who now number more than 3,000.

Although previous research of other biracial Americans found that children tend to identify more with the same-sex parent, regardless of ethnicity, Allen found that among Polynesian-Caucasian Utahns, children tended to identify more with the Polynesian parent, regardless of gender.

He also found that biracial Polynesians were more likely to receive negative messages about being biracial if their fathers, rather than mothers, were Polynesian…

Read the entire article here.

Biracial Japanese American identity: An evolving process.

Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
Volume 6, Number 2, (May 2000)
pages 115-133
DOI: 10.1037/1099-9809.6.2.115

J. Fuji Collins, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Health & Wellness – Vice Chancellor
University of California, Merced

Explored the complexity of biracial identity development in Japanese Americans, focusing on how Japanese Americans perceive themselves in relation to individuals, groups, and their environment. 15 semistructured interviews with 8 men and 7 women (ages 20–40 yrs), each with 1 Japanese parent and 1 non-Asian parent were conducted. Identity development among participants varied. It was a long-term process involving changes in the individual–environment relationship, which differed in the way individual participants influenced or selected from environmental opportunities, even creating or recreating some aspects. Within a given setting, as youths, the potential for social experiences were relatively fixed and changed only gradually. As adults, there were opportunities for participants to select their own social and geographic settings, providing opportunity for change. In their new environments, participants were exposed to new contacts and role models, acquired new behavioral repertoire, and underwent role transitions. Depending on this, new and different aspects of biracial identity developed. Participants indicated it was an emotional and conflictual process to positive assertion of identity. Before reaching this, all of the participants experienced periods of confusion.

Read or purchase the article here.

Dreaming of a colour-blind S’pore

The Straits Sunday Times
2010-08-08
page 30

Edwina Shaddick, 22
British-Chinese

Edwina Shaddick, final year politics and sociology major from SMU, has a father from Swindon, England and a mother who is Chinese Singaporean. She shares how her mixed heritage has shaped her identity.

The politics and sociology major from Singapore Management University (SMU) has a father from Swindon, England, who is a Singapore permanent resident. Her mother is a Chinese Singaporean.

The eldest of three children goes to England occasionally to visit relatives and friends.

Her primary and secondary school years weres pent at Methodist Girls’ School.

She is known as a Eurasian on her identity card. She had asked for Anglo-Chinese, but it was not allowed. Her two siblings are classified as Caucasians.

Q: How has your mixed hetitage shaped your Identity?

I think being mixed is but one facet of my identity. When I was younger I used to grapple with issues of race much more, like what it meant to not look like the majority of people in Singapore, what it meant to have an English father, which culture I liked more.

But when I got older, I found other things that defined me, like my interest in sports or my sense of humour, so I placed less emphasis on something as trivial as race to define myself…

Read the entire article here.

Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain

International Journal of Population Geography
Special Issue: Geographies of Diaspora
Volume 9, Issue 4 (July/August 2003)
pages 281–294
DOI: 10.1002/ijpg.287

Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London

This paper explores geographies of diaspora for Anglo-Indians (formerly known as ‘Eurasians’) through a focus on their ‘homing desire’ in two diaspora spaces: firstly, an imperial diaspora in British India, and secondly, a decolonised diaspora in Britain after independence in 1947. Before independence, although Anglo-Indians were ‘country-born’ and domiciled in India, many imagined Britain as home and identified with British life in India even though they were largely excluded from it. Britain was often imagined as the fatherland, embodied by the memory of a British paternal ancestor, as enacted by settlement at an independent homeland for Anglo-Indians established at McCluskieganj in Bihar in 1933. By 1947, there were about 300,000 Anglo-Indians in India, but a third had migrated by the 1970s. I explore the implications not only of independence but also the British Nationality Act of 1948, which required many Anglo-Indians to prove the British origins of a paternal ancestor. The difficulties of tracing British ancestry are explored with reference to the work of the Society of Genealogists in London on behalf of Anglo-Indians in the subcontinent. Drawing on these records, as well as material from the Anglo-Indian press and interviews with women from one school who migrated after independence, I argue that ideas of Britain as home were intimately bound up with ideas of whiteness. Ideas about an Anglo-Indian diaspora existed long before decolonisation, and the migration of Anglo-Indians under the British Nationality Act led in many ways to a recolonisation of identity. Unlike studies that concentrate on ‘feminising the diaspora’, I argue that the diasporic ‘homing desire’ of Anglo-Indians invoked ideas of imperial masculinity in both imaginative and material terms.

Read or purchase the article here.

…The Korean word for a bi or multiracial person, despite the composition of their mixture, is honhyeol (in), which literally translates into impure blood. There has been a “pride” instilled in Koreans for their “ethnic homogeneity” which has resulted in “fear and distrust of outsiders” (The Economist, 2006). The connotation for Korea, which bases its national identity upon the notion of Koreans descending from one common ancestor and speaking one language, is that these offspring of interracial relationships are not Korean, because they have more than Korean blood coursing through their veins. It makes sense then that the oppositional identity of these “pure blooded” Koreans came about as a sort of resistance to the first Chinese invasion, then Japanese imperialism, and then finally Western imperialism in the form of American occupation after the Korean War. Korean nationalism was wrapped up in the idea of “consanguinity” to link “ethnic homogeneity” to a “profound sense of cultural distinctiveness and superiority.” (Kim, 2007) As these countries made their presence known, Korea began to rely on internal colonialism, which economically exploited and political excluded groups different from the dominant group, becoming a reminder there can be “colonial subjects – on the national soil.” (Gordon, 2006; Blauner 1972, p. 52) For many then, international marriages were “associated with the invasion of Korea by other countries” and were subsequently seen as “betrayals of nationalism” where the children resulting from those unions became physical reminders of that betrayal (Lee). Kim Sok-soo believes that the coupling of nationalism with ethnic homogeneity ultimately has became a “useful tool for the South Korean government when the country was embroiled in ideological turmoil. It was used as an effective tool to make its people obedient and easy to govern” (Park, 2006). The way the bodies of these bi and multiracial Koreans are, in both social and political realms, recognized, regulated, and ultimately utilized through relationships maintained by various institutions of the state is essential to a particular form of governmentality…

Washington, Myra. “More than a Metaphor: Blood as Boundary for Korean Biracial Identity” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 95th Annual Convention, Chicago Hilton & Towers, Chicago, IL, Nov 11, 2009 Online <PDF>. 2010-08-09 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p368501_index.html>

Opinion: Are you mixed up?

Malayasian Insider
2010-07-08

Praba Ganesan

JULY 8 — Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is the poster child for Malaysians with mixed parentage. Not that he epitomises multiculturalism, the misguided doctor is far from that.

He does however mirror the difficulties and challenges anyone of that situation experiences in a Malaysia averse to real diversity.

Don’t mention your mixed heritage, overemphasise your commitment to the heritage you do associate with and disassociate with all your might any connection to the heritage you are trying to lose. And marry further away from the ashamed heritage.

Not everyone behaves like that, but the themes remain.

I’m all Tamil. But my nephew and niece are not. One is a quarter Chinese and the other is half Nordic-Irish-English-and a degree of uncertainty. So my nephew goes on as a constitutional Indian though everyone thinks him Malay in school, and my niece well she goes all over the house wrecking things — in her two-year-old shoes. But her Malaysian birth certificate states her ethnicity as Australian, a nationality becomes her ethnicity according to the good people at the National Registration Department.

So what are they, and how should they grow up in Malaysia?

In Malaysia there are no halves, just wholes. This might be illogical to people outside Malaysia or anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of genealogy, but in our tropical paradise when your parents are of different ethnicities (or even mixes) you can only be of an ethnicity. Worse if one of the parents is Muslim then the other parent’s identity, past and history has to evaporate…

Read the entire article here.

A Visual and Sociological Study of the Hafus

2010-08-07 Through 2010-08-29
Tue-Thu & Sun 12:00-19:00
Fri&Sat 12:00-20:00
(Closed on Mondays and 14, 15, and 16 August )
3331 Arts Chiyoda 6-11-14 Sotokanda, Chiyoda-Ku,Tokyo, 101-0021

Natalie Maya Willer, Photographer

Marcia Yumie Lise, Researcher

The Hafu Project is a visual and sociological study & representation of the so-called “Hafu”s. This is the first public exhibition in Japan. The work provides an unfolding journey of discovery into the intricacies of what it is to be a hafu in modern day Japan as well as on a global scale in a time where culture, nationhood and identity are increasingly fluid.

View the flyer here.

Part Asian, Not Hapa

Open Salon
Thoughts from a Third Culture: on being mixed in America
2010-07-27

Mia Nakaji Monnier

My mother is Japanese from Osaka; my father, American from a small town in Western Oregon. There’s a word for people like me, used especially on the West Coast and popularized in recent years, maybe most notably by artist Kip Fulbeck:

Hapa.

From the Hawaiian phrase “hapa haole” (“half white”), the word “hapa” has come to be a label that many multiracial people with some Asian heritage incorporate into their identities, whether they wear it with pride or with ambivalence.

I don’t wear it at all.

It’s not that I think “hapa” is an offensive word, though my parents took issue with it as my brothers and I were growing up, their reason being that it means, literally, “half.” “Haafu,” the Japanese equivalent has the same literal meaning and I’ve even heard people skip over both these words entirely, going straight to “half.” As in, “You look a little Japanese. Are you half?” or “Why do you work at the Japanese American National Museum? OH, are you half?!”…

Read the entire essay here.