Mixed Race Studies

The Myth of Asian American Identity

The New York Times Magazine
2021-10-05

Jay Caspian Kang

We’re the fastest-growing demographic group in the U.S. But when it comes to the nation’s racial and ethnic divisions, where do we fit in?

During the first days of the Trump administration, when my attention was split between the endless scroll of news on my phone and my infant daughter, who was born five days before the inauguration, I often found myself staring at her eyes, still puffy and swollen from her birth. My wife is half Brooklyn Jew, half Newport WASP, and throughout her pregnancy, I assumed that our child would look more like her than like me. When our daughter was born with a full head of dark hair and almond-shaped eyes, the nurses all commented on how much she looked like her father, which, I admit, felt a bit unsettling, not because of any racial shame but because it has always been difficult for me to see myself in anyone or anything other than myself. But now, while my wife slept at night, I would stand over our daughter’s bassinet, compare her face at one week with photos of myself at that delicate, lumpen age and worry about what it might mean to have an Asian-looking baby in this America rather than one who could either pass or, at the very least, walk around with the confidence of some of the half-Asian kids I had met — tall, beautiful, with strange names and a hard edge to their intelligence.

These pitiful thoughts quickly passed — for better or worse, my talent for cultivating creeping doubts is only surpassed by an even greater talent for chopping them right above the root. The worries were replaced by the normalizing chores of young fatherhood. But sometimes during her naps, I would play the “Goldberg Variations” on our living-room speakers and try to imagine the contours of her life to come…

My daughter spent her first two years in a prewar apartment building with dusty sconces and cracked marble steps in the lobby. The hallways had terrible light because the windows had been painted over with what in a less enlightened time might have been called a “flesh tone” color. Such cosmetic problems will improve with the arrival of more people like us — the shared spaces will begin to look like the building’s gut-renovated apartments, with their soapstone countertops, recessed light fixtures, the Sub-Zero refrigerators bought as an investment for the inevitable sale four to six years down the road.

At the time, it seemed like the other markers of her upper-middle-class life — grape leaves from the Middle Eastern grocery Sahadi’s, the Japanese bridges of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, weekends at her grandparents’ home in Newport — would keep pace with the changes in the building. If she enrolled at St. Ann’s or Dalton or P.S. 321, in nearby Park Slope, she would join other half-Asian and half-white children at New York City’s wealthiest schools…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Americans could represent America’s future, some say

The Washington Post
2021-10-08

Silvia Foster-Frau, Multiculturalism reporter
Ted Mellnik
Adrián Blanco, Graphics reporter

Steve Majors, in Takoma Park, Md., who is half-Black and half-White, grew up in an all-Black household but is often perceived as White. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

While still a relatively small part of the population, more Americans than ever identify as multiracial, according to the census

Tony Luna was once again being asked to choose one of his racial identities over the other.

He firmly believed in the anti-racism training his workplace was offering. But the instructor told him he had to pick a group for the program — either the one for White people, or the one for people of color.

Luna is biracial, Filipino and White, a combination that defined his upbringing and sense of self. He has always felt he was either both identities, equally — or in some settings, not fully one or the other.

Multiracial populations increased faster than any single race across the U.S. in the last census. Gains were highest in major metro areas, but the number of people identifying as multiracial also tripled in non-metro areas. Source: 2020 Census

“I felt like it was a false choice, because you’re saying which one are you more comfortable with, your mom or your dad?” Luna, 49, said. “Identity can be based on how people see you, but that can be wrong for mixed people. It’s really based on how you identify, what your experiences are — so many variables go into that.”

More than 33 million Americans — about 1 in 10 — identify as being of two or more races, a number that grew by nearly 25 million people in the past decade, according to the 2020 Census. Multiracial people span all different combinations of races and ethnicities and make up the fastest-growing demographic in the country.

In some cities, the growth is stark. Almost 1.4 million more people each in Los Angeles and New York identified as multiracial in the 2020 Census compared with a decade ago, according to a Washington Post analysis. In Miami, nearly 1.6 million more did so…

Read the entire article here.

Bilal Kawazoe’s film ‘Whole’ tackles the experience of being mixed race in Japan

The Japan Times
2021-09-30

Mark Schilling, Film Critic

In Bilal Kawazoe’s ‘Whole,’ Usman Kawazoe (left) and Kai Sandy (right) play two biracial men who bond over coming to terms with their identity while living in Japan.

In Japanese, the word “hāfu” — a colloquial term for people who are half-Japanese — is a label that some accept, but others reject, preferring such terms as “daburu” (double) or “mikkusu” (mix).

So seeing the title of Bilal Kawazoe’s new film “Whole,” which tells the story of two biracial men of radically different backgrounds in Kobe who become friends, my first thought was that Kawazoe, who is of Japanese and Pakistani parentage, had come up with yet another alternative to the hāfu label.

Not so, as he explains in a video call. The title instead refers to the characters’ quests to become “whole” in terms of their identity. Kawazoe says his brother, Usman, came to him with the idea of “making a film based on the identity crises and the experiences of mixed people in Japan.”

“We did a lot of research and realized there wasn’t really a narrative film (on that theme),” he continues. Instead, they found films that were “quite stereotypical or just one-sided.”

“So we kind of felt this sense of responsibility to make an honest film on this whole mixed-race experience,” he says…

Read the entire review here.

Recalling and Reimagining Vietnam: A Conversation with Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith

World Literature Today
2019-08-12

Mary E. Adams, Associate Professor of English
University of Louisiana, Monroe

Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, and raised in California. His first book, The Land Baron’s Sun: The Story of Lý Loc and His Seven Wives, won the 2015 Indie Book Award for best poetry collection. His other works include The Land South of the Clouds and The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. He earned an MFA from McNeese State University and has taught creative writing at Louisiana Tech University since 1999.

Mary E. Adams: Your first book, The Land Baron’s Sun: The Story of Lý Loc and His Seven Wives, focuses on your grandfather’s life, loves, and, ultimately, his years of hard labor in a reeducation camp. Why did you need to tell his story?

Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith: I learned by the age of thirty just how much of his life was kept from me, the hardships he had to go through. Lý Loc was once rich, powerful, and all of that was gone after the fall of Saigon. You’re looking at a man who owned so much land, who had seven houses, seven wives, twenty-seven children, who was a major commander for the South Vietnamese army. To have to write a letter to my mom in America begging for money is a lowly place to be. All of the sudden, out of your twenty-seven children, you have one in America who works at a sweatshop making dresses, blouses, and slacks for fifty cents per item stitched, and you’re asking her for money in order to eat, in order to be clothed. That’s the thing I had to deal with growing up, knowing he lived the rest of his life as a poor person…

Read the entire interview here.

Phil Wang: I wouldn’t be a comic if I weren’t mixed-race

BBC News
2021-09-11

Helen Bushby, Entertainment and arts reporter

Phil Wang says the face of “every Eurasian person I’ve ever seen sings with loneliness”

Phil Wang, the stand-up comic you may recall for his viral video spoofing a Tom Hiddleston advert, has been baring his soul, or at least some of it, in his new book Sidesplitter.

Wang, 31, whose TV duties include Live at the Apollo, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and Taskmaster, insists it’s not a memoir, as his life doesn’t merit one.

“I haven’t escaped a gulag or revolutionised an industry,” he explains, adding memoirs are a “saturated market” anyway.

What he really talks about in his book of essays is the impact of being mixed-race, of being “from two worlds at once”.

But although it has its serious moments, Sidesplitter is eloquently laced with laughs and bittersweet observations…

Read the entire article here.

Tracing roots of the Chinese Jamaican diaspora

gal-dem
2021-09-04

Nandina Hislop

via author

With over 50,000 Chinese-Jamaicans residing on the Caribbean island, how did such a unique community form?

When my maternal great-grandfather Baker Chung-Yu migrated from Hong Kong to Jamaica over a hundred years ago, he probably didn’t expect that a few generations later, there would be over 50,000 Chinese-Jamaicans residing in the land of wood and water. He arrived as a businessman in the 1920s, after Hong Kong was snatched by the British Empire in 1842, seeking financial comfort for his future. This move allowed him to meet my Afro and Indo-Jamaican great-grandmother May Ranger and unknowingly spark the beginning of a growing Chinese-Jamaican family that would live to continuously explain our unusual heritage.

Growing up, I didn’t fully grasp the meaning of what it meant to be a Chinese immigrant in Jamaica. I am fourth generation Chinese, mixed in heritage and Black in racial identity. Born in Jamaica, raised in the Turks and Caicos Islands, and now living in the UK, my hop-scotching residential reality had meant I was isolated from most of my extended family, a significant portion being those of Chinese descent. Now that I’m older, I crave details about my Chinese ancestry and am now exploring a cavernous story rooted in struggle and resilience that I never knew existed…

Read the entire article here.

AMST 3407 – Racial Borders and American Cinema

University of Virginia
Department of American Studies
Fall 2021

This class explores how re-occurring images of racial and ethnic minorities such as African Americans, Jews, Asians, Native Americans and Latino/as are represented in film and shows visual images of racial interactions and boundaries of human relations that tackle topics such as immigration, inter-racial relationships and racial passing.

For more information, click here.

Between Heritage and Hate

palabra
2021-05-25

Alejandra Arevalo

Photo from the archive of Fabiana Chiu-Rinaldi.

For Latino Asians, waves of Coronavirus-fueled hate and violence present a seemingly unending threat. They’re also reminders of a strong, but complicated heritage

Ahki Hasegawa is glad the COVID-19 pandemic has everyone wearing masks, and not just to protect against the virus.

“The only Asian part about me is my face,” the 34-year-old nurse told palabra. “So if I were to just slap on some sunglasses, and then wear my mask, there’s no way anybody would assume that I’m Asian at all.”

As an American citizen of Mexican and Japanese descent, Hasegawa said she trembled when she ran into a recent “White Lives Matter” rally in Huntington Beach, California, while walking her dog. “I’m glad I have a dog. And I haven’t been going out unless I’m with the dog. I don’t own a gun, but I definitely thought about it for self defense.”

Hasegawa is part of an often-overlooked community of Latinos of Asian heritage who have endured the waves of anti-Asian hate spreading across the United States.

Believing the Latino community to be a homogenous group is an almost routine mistake in American society. The image of a light-skinned mestizo floods the media as the only face of Latinidad. But it bears repeating: Latino is an ethnicity that stems from many combinations of races…

Read the entire article here.

The Boundaries of Mixedness: A Global Perspective

Routledge
2020-10-12
164 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780367522926
eBook ISBN: 9781003057338

Edited by:

Erica Chito Childs, Professor of Sociology
Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

The Boundaries of Mixedness tackles the burgeoning field of critical mixed race studies, bringing together research that spans five continents and more than ten countries. Research on mixedness is growing, yet there is still much debate over what exactly mixed race means, and whether it is a useful term. Despite a growing focus on and celebration of mixedness globally, particularly in the media, societies around the world are grappling with how and why crossing socially constructed boundaries of race, ethnicity and other markers of difference matter when considering those who date, marry, raise families, or navigate their identities across these boundaries. What we find collectively through the ten studies in this book is that in every context there is a hierarchy of mixedness, both in terms of intimacy and identity. This hierarchy of intimacy renders certain groups as more or less marriable, socially constructed around race, ethnicity, caste, religion, skin color and/or region. Relatedly, there is also a hierarchy of identities where certain races, languages, ethnicities and religions are privileged and valued differently. These differences emerge out of particular local histories and contemporary contexts yet there are also global realities that transcend place and space.

The Boundaries of Mixedness is a significant new contribution to mixed race studies for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology, History and Public Policy.

Table of Contents

• 1. Critical Mixed Race in Global Perspective: An Introduction / Erica Chito Childs
• Hierarchies of Mixing: Navigations and Negotiations
  • 2. An Unwanted Weed: Children of Cross-region Unions Confront Intergenerational Stigma of Caste, Ethnicity and Religion / Reena Kukreja
  • 3. Mixed Race Families in South Africa: Naming and Claiming a Location / Heather Dalmage
  • 4. Negotiating the (Non)Negotiable: Connecting ‘Mixed-Race’ Identities to ‘Mixed-Race’ Families / Mengxi Pang
• Hierarchies of Mixedness: Choices and Challenges
  • 5. Linguistic Cultural Capital Among Descendants of Mixed Couples in Catalonia, Spain: Realities and Inequalities / Dan Rodriguez-Garcia
  • 6. ‘There is Nothing Wrong with Being a Mulatto’: Structural Discrimination and Racialized Belonging in Denmark / Mira Skadegaard
  • 7. Exceptionalism with Non-Validation: The Social Inconsistencies of Being Mixed Race in Australia / Stephanie Guy
• Mixed Matters Through a Wider Lens
  • 8. Recognising Selves in Others: Situating Dougla Manoeuverability as Shared Mixed-Race Ontology / Susan Barratt and Aleah Ranjitsingh
  • 9. What’s Love Got To Do With It? Emotional Authority and State Regulation of Interracial/National Couples in Ireland / Rebecca King-O’Riain
  • 10. Re-viewing Race and Mixedness: Mixed Race in Asia and the Pacific / Zarine Rocha

Seeking Participants for Study on Asian and White Multiracial Individuals

2021-08-29

Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Sociology
Manhattanville College. Purchase, New York

I am an associate professor at Manhattanville College conducting a study on how Asian and White multiracials feel about recent events related to anti-Asian discrimination.

I am looking for people to participate in a brief 28 question survey. The survey is completely anonymous (unless you choose to partake in a follow-up interview).

If you are interested in participating, please read for more details.

To participate in the study, you must meet the following requirements.

1. You are between the ages of 18-30
2. One of your biological parents is White and one of your biological parents is Asian.
3. You currently or formerly identify as biracial/multiracial

Your participation in this study would be greatly appreciated. You may choose to end your participation in the study at any point without penalty.

Please take the survey here. By selecting the embedded link you are consenting to participate in the survey study

Your participation is voluntary.

If you have questions or are interested in participating, please contact me at hvsp@mville.edu.

Thanks very much,

Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl