Mixed Race Studies

Crises of Whiteness and Empire in Colonial Indochina: The Removal of Abandoned Eurasian Children From the Vietnamese Milieu, 1890–1956

Journal of Social History
Volume 43, Number 3 (Spring 2010)
pages 587-613
E-ISSN: 1527-1897 Print ISSN: 0022-4529
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.0.0304

Christina Firpo, Assistant Professor of History
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

From 1890–1956, non-governmental welfare agencies worked with the French colonial government in Indochina to remove Eurasian children, who had been abandoned by their French fathers, from their Vietnamese mothers and the Vietnamese cultural environment. In an era marked by historical exigencies, perceived threats to white prestige, and inherent challenges to the colonial patriarchy, such children were believed to be a threat to colonial security and white prestige. The racial formations of abandoned Eurasian children in colonial Indochina changed repeatedly in response to these threats. Drawing from the rhetoric of racial sciences and led by anxieties over changes colonial security, French civilians increasingly and colonial government administrators increasingly made the case that these children where white and must be removed from their Vietnamese mothers’ care, using force if necessary.

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Assessing Shifting Racial Boundaries: Racial Classification of Biracial Asian Children in the 2000 Census

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
2009-12-07
77 pages

Sara Megan McDonough

Thesis submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Sociology.

This study examined the racial identification of biracial Asian children by their parents, in a sample (n=9,513) drawn from 2000 Public Use Microdata Series Census data (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series 2009). I used competing theories of Asian assimilation to examine how characteristics of the child, the Asian parent, the non-Asian parent, and the local Asian community influenced the likelihood of a child′s being identified as Asian, non-Asian, or biracial. Findings showed that child′s, both parents′, and community characteristics significantly influenced the child′s racial classification. While the effects of greater assimilation significantly increased the likelihood of an Asian classification for third-generation children, in contrast, it decreased the likelihood of an Asian identification for first- and second-generation children. Findings showed that children with a black parent were less likely than children with a white parent to be identified as Asian instead of non-Asian. However, inconsistent with past findings, children with a Hispanic parent were more likely than those with a white parent to be identified as Asian rather than non-Asian. Exploratory analyses concerning a biracial classification indicate significant relationships with factors previously found to increase the likelihood of an Asian identification, including the effects of greater Asian assimilation and size of the local Asian community. Moreover, the relationship between parent‟s and child′s gender on the child‟s racial classification may be more complicated than previously theorized, as I found evidence of “gender-matching” which meant that boys were more likely to be identified like their fathers, and girls more like their mothers.

Read the entire thesis here.

Beyond Black and White: A film by Nisma Zaman

Women Make Movies
1994
28 minutes
Color, 16mm/DVD
Order No. W99431

Beyond Black and White is a personal exploration of the filmmaker’s bicultural heritage (Caucasian and Asian/Begali) in which she relates her experiences to those of five other women from various biracial backgrounds. In lively interviews and group discussions these women reveal how they have been influenced by images of women in American media, how racism has affected them, and how their families and environments have shaped their racial identities. Their experiences are placed within the context of history, including miscegenation laws and governmental racial classifications. Beyond Black and White is a remarkable celebration of diversity in American society.

The role of Japanese as a heritage language in constructing ethnic identity among Hapa Japanese Canadian children

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
Volume 30, Issue 1 (February 2009)
pages 1-18
DOI: 10.1080/01434630802307874

Hiroko Noro, Professor of Pacific and Asian Studies
University of Victoria, Canada

Today, Japanese Canadians are marrying outside of their ethnic community at an unprecedented rate, resulting in the creation of a newly identifiable group of ‘Japanese Canadians’ borne from these interracial unions. Members of this emergent group are increasingly being referred to both by social scientists and self-referentially as Hapa. This term, originally a Hawaiian term, is now a common and empowering tool of self-identification for people of mixed ethnic heritage. Recent sociological research argues that, while the notion of a shared Hapa identity exists, it is less rooted in individual members’ physical appearance or cultural identification and more rooted in their experiences, parental upbringing, and the locality/environment in which they grew up.

Read or purchase the article here.

Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

New York University Press
2010-03-22
320 pages, 8 illustrations
ISBN: 9780814797174

Susan Zeiger

Throughout the twentieth century, American male soldiers returned home from wars with foreign-born wives in tow, often from allied but at times from enemy nations, resulting in a new, official category of immigrant: the “allied” war bride. These brides began to appear en masse after World War I, peaked after World War II, and persisted through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. GIs also met and married former “enemy” women under conditions of postwar occupation, although at times the US government banned such unions.

In this comprehensive, complex history of war brides in 20th-century American history, Susan Zeiger uses relationships between American male soldiers and foreign women as a lens to view larger issues of sexuality, race, and gender in United States foreign relations. Entangling Alliances draws on a rich array of sources to trace how war and postwar anxieties about power and national identity have long been projected onto war brides, and how these anxieties translate into public policies, particularly immigration.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Cupid in the AEF”: U.S. Soldiers and Women abroad in World War I
• 2. “The Worst Kind of Women”: Foreign War Brides in 1920s America
• 3. GIs and Girls around the Globe: The Geopolitics of Sex and Marriage in World War II
• 4. “Good Mothers”: GI Brides after World War II
• 5. Interracialism, Pluralism, and Civil Rights: War Bride Marriage in the 1940s and 1950s
• 6. The Demise of the War Bride: Korea, Vietnam, and Beyond
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author

…One of the most important factors in the structuring of soldier marriage has been race. The state’s repression and condemnation of interracial relationships was a feature of war bride marriage for much of the century. In World War I, for instance, U.S. military and civilian authorities took a paternalistic stance toward white soldiers, determined to “protect” them from sexually promiscuous foreign women. But this attitude was reversed in the case of “colored troops,” as military officials warned allies of the sexual danger that African American servicemen allegedly posed to the white women of other nations. By World War II, racial ideology in the United States had begun to face resistance by activists of color and their white allies, who challenged racial segregation in the military and at home, as well as “oriental exclusion” in immigration policy. Yet despite the state of flux in race relations in the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. government, with the urging of the armed services, maintained its segregationist policies in soldier marriage.  These included initially excluding Asian women from the GI Brides Act and denying the marriage requests of black and white interracial couples on the grounds that “miscegenous unions” were illegal in many U.S. states. Deeply held views about racial inferiors and superiors continued to underlie American military engagement in the Cold War. The legacy of biracial relationships in the Vietnam War, as it involved Vietnamese women, American men, and their “Amerasian” children, is one further indication of the centrality of race in analyzing gender relationships in wartime and postwar periods…

Preserving Racial Identity: Population Patterns and the Application of Anti-Miscegenation Statutes to Asian Americans, 1910-1950

Berkeley Asian Law Journal
Volume 9, Number 1 (2002)
pages 1-40

Gabriel J. Chin
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law; University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy

Hrishi Karthikeyan
New York University School of Law

This essay explores the relationship between Asian American population and applicability of anti-miscegenation laws to that group in the first half of the 20th Century, testing legal scholar Gilbert Thomas Stephenson‘s theory that racial restrictions would arise whenever non-whites of any race exist in considerable numbers. Several states prohibited Asian-white intermarriage even though the Asian American numbers failed even remotely to approach those of the white population in those states. These anti-miscegenation statutes were unique in the Jim Crow regime in the degree of specificity with which they defined the racial categories subject to the restrictions, using precise terms like Japanese or Mongolians, rather than broad terms like colored. Further, the number of statutes applicable to Asians more than doubled between 1910 and 1950, even though census data shows that the proportion of Asian population was stable or declining in these states, and in any event tiny.

The proliferation of anti-Asian miscegenation laws raises important questions about the racial landscape of our country during this period. Correlating census data with the development of anti-miscegenation statutes suggests that population does have an impact on whether states would restrict Asian marriage, but in a more complex way than Stephenson proposed. In all states in which Asian-white marriage was restricted by race, so too was African American-white intermarriage; no statutes targeted Asians alone. But in virtually all states restricting African American intermarriage where there was a discernable Asian population – 1/2000th or more – Asian intermarriage was also regulated. The combination of a state’s inclination to segregate, plus a visible Asian population, reliably predicts when Asians would be covered by a statute. This suggests that in the states where racially diverse populations were seen as threats appropriately subject to legal regulation, the nature of the problems presented by the various races was the same.

Read the entire article here.

Integrating Multiple Identities: Multiracials and Asian-Americans in the United States (Review Essay)

Canadian Journal of Sociology
Volume 33, Number 2 (2008)
pages 397-403

Wendy D. Roth, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of British Columbia, Canada

Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 280pp., paper (978-0-8047-5546-7), hardcover (978-0-8047-5545-0).

Pawan Dhingra, Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 328 pp., paper (978-0-8047-5578-8), hardcover (978-0-8047-5577-1).

As the sociological literature has shifted away from a primordial view of race and ethnicity as fixed identities, research has emphasized not only their fluid and changing nature, but also how individuals maintain and negotiate multiple identities. It was not so long ago that ethnic and — especially — racial identities were seen as exclusive: a person could only have one. Today we recognize that people can identify as both White and Black, as both Chinese and Canadian, or that they can create new identities that combine yet are different from any of their constituent parts (e.g., a “Canadian-Born Chinese” identity that is neither Canadian nor Chinese).

Kimberly McClain DaCosta and Pawan Dhingra both take up the question of how people create and legitimize new identities that blend together different, and sometimes conflicting, cultures or sets of meaning. DaCosta focuses on the construction of “multiracial” as a social category and mode of identification, particularly how the family, marketing, and the state contribute to this construction. Dhingra illustrates how professional second-generation Korean-Americans and Indian-Americans in Dallas live out the hybridity they experience on both sides of their hyphen. His groups work in the mainstream economy, allowing them to balance their ethnic and American selves. DaCosta’s book is ultimately a more satisfying contribution, but both works offer valuable illustrations of how groups resist pressures to sublimate one identity into another, and thereby integrate multiple identities into a more complex whole…

Read the entire book review here.

Mixed-ethnic girls and boys as similarly powerless and powerful: embodiment of attractiveness and grotesqueness

Discourse Studies
Volume 11, Number 3 (June 2009)
pages 329-352
DOI: 10.1177/1461445609102447

Laurel D. Kamada
Tohoku University, Japan

An ongoing study examining the discursive negotiation of ethnic and gendered embodied identities of adolescent girls in Japan with Japanese and `white’ mixed-parentage is extended to also investigate and compare boys . This study draws on Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis which views women and girls as `simultaneously positioned as relatively powerless within a range of dominant discourses on gender, but as relatively powerful within alternative and competing social discourses’ (Baxter, 2003: 39). Here, this is taken further by also giving voice to boys. Furthermore, ethnic discourses are examined alongside of gender discourses. Not only girls constructed the `idealized Other’, within discourses of femininity, but boys similarly viewed their bodies against a model of idealized masculinity within discourses of masculinities. The boys revealed a feminized, narcissistic body consciousness where they struggled to resist a `discourse of foreign grotesqueness’ and instead worked to embody themselves within a positive `discourse of foreign attractiveness’, as did the girls.

 Read or purchase the article here.

American Mestizo: Filipinos and Antimiscegenation Laws in California

University of California, Davis Law Review
Volume 33, Number 44 (2000)
pages 795-835

Leti Volpp, Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley

This essay interprets the legal history of efforts to prohibit intermarriage between Filipino men and white women in the state of California in the 1920s and 30s. I do this through examining both public discourse and legal discourse, in the form of advisory opinions of the California State Attorney General and the Los Angeles County Counsel, litigation in Los Angles Superior Court and the California Court of Appeals, and state legislation.

Much scholarship examines antimiscegenation laws through the lens of presumptive heterosexuality, and gives enormous explanatory power to race in a way that ignores the role of class and gender. This paper argues that we need to examine the mutually constitutive nature of these forces in shaping antimiscegenation laws. Thus, I examine how the racial identity of Filipinos was shaped by assumptions about racialized sexuality, colonial relations between the United States and the Philippines, the importation of exploitable laborers without political rights, and the intertwining of gender and nationalism.

The question of whether Filipinos should be prohibited from marrying white women reached the California Court of Appeals in 1933 in the guise of the query as to whether Filipinos should be considered “Mongolian.” The state in 1880 and 1905 had prohibited the licensing of marriages between “Mongolians” and “white persons” and invalidated all such marriages. Subsequent legal challenges involving the right of Filipinos to marry whites betray enormous confusion as to whether Filipinos should be classified as “Mongolian,” or as a separate ethnological group, as “Malay.” This racial classification was put at issue in cases where Filipino/white couples sought to marry, and who therefore asserted that Filipinos were not “Mongolians”; in a case where a mother sought to stop her daughter’s marriage; in two cases where annulment of marriage was sought, one by a white woman, the other by a Filipino man; and in one case in which a prosecutor sought to void a marriage so a white wife could testify against her Filipino husband.

The positioning of Filipinos as “Mongolian,” or in opposition to “Mongolians” as the ethnologically different “Malay,” provides a narrative within which the contemporary identity of Filipinos is created. This history demonstrates that there is nothing natural or preordained about racial classification, and provides an example of how race is made.

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The Chinese in the Caribbean

Markus Wiener Publishers
November 2004
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN 10: 1-55876-314-7; ISBN 13: 978-1-55876-314-2
Paperback ISBN 10: 1-55876-315-5; ISBN 13: 978-1-55876-315-9

Edited by

Andrew R. Wilson, Professor
Strategy and Policy Department
United States Naval War College

The history of the Caribbean is a history of migrations. The peoples of the region came as conquerors and planters, slaves and indentured laborers from all parts of the globe. Each group contributed to the social fabric, culture, and commerce of the region. The Chinese diaspora has spread Chinese people and culture around the world, including to the Caribbean, where Chinese exist both as distinct ethnic groups within Caribbean societies and as shapers of unique Caribbean cultures.

The book describes not merely the arrival and experience of Chinese in the Caribbean but also the ways in which Chinese have adapted to and altered the region. Included are the histories of Chinese people in Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, and the British West Indies, and overcame, their slow rise to economic independence and success, their contribution to art, theater, cuisine, and literature, their roles in the region’s national revolutions, their place in post-colonial politics, and the subsequent remigrations of individuals, families, and entire communitites to North America.