Mixed Race Studies

Halving the Bones: A film by Ruth Ozeki

Women Make Movies
1995
70 minutes
Color/BW, DVD

Ruth Ozeki, Filmmaker, Novelist, and Zen Buddhist Priest

Skeletons in the closet? Halving the Bones delivers a surprising twist to this tale. This cleverly-constructed film tells the story of Ruth, a half-Japanese filmmaker living in New York, who has inherited a can of bones that she keeps on a shelf in her closet. The bones are half of the remains of her dead Japanese grandmother, which she is supposed to deliver to her estranged mother. A narrative and visual web of family stories, home movies and documentary footage, Halving the Bones provides a spirited exploration of the meaning of family, history and memory, cultural identity and what it means to have been named after Babe Ruth!

AWARDS, FESTIVALS, & SCREENINGS

• Sundance Film Festival
• International Documentary Association Award Nomination
• Sydney & Melbourne Film Festivals
• Margaret Mead Film Festival
• San Francisco Asian American Film Festival
• Montreal World Film Festival

South Korea’s multiculturalism

Al Jazeera
The Stream
2013-05-21

How is the nation dealing with its growing diversity?

A multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society is an emerging reality that is leading to a lot of racial and social discord in South Korea. Faced with an aging population and an influx of migrant wives, many are clinging to their “one-blood” ethnically homogenous national identity. Today the government is scrambling to focus a sound multicultural vision for the country. How are South Koreans adapting to their rapidly changing population?

In this episode of The Stream, we speak to:

Cindy Lou Howe, Director
“Even the Rivers”

Gregory Diggs-Yang, President,
The Mack Foundation

Also on Google Hangout: Yoo Eun Lee, Sajin Kwok, and Sarah Shaw.

Read the story and watch the video here.

The Story of Fort Mosé

Freedom Road Productions
2013

Derek Hankerson, Director

Francisco Menendez (played by James Bullock)

This is the story of Fort Mosé and Francisco Menendez in St. Augustine, Florida.

DePaul Art Minute – War Baby/Love Child exhibition

DePaul Newsroom
DePaul Art Museum
2013-05-16

DePaul University Associate Professor Laura Kina discusses how art featured in the “War Baby/Love Child” exhibit helps to tell the story of mixed race Asian Americans and the complexities of their mixed-heritage identities, in the third installment of the DePaul Art Minute, which provides a forum for DePaul professors to relate their expertise to artwork at the DePaul Art Museum.

Dr. Ralina Joseph and Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial

I Mix What I Like
2013-01-11

Jared A. Ball, Host and Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

This is part one of our discussion with Dr. Ralina Joseph about her book, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial.

Watch the video interview here.

Parallel Adele

Third World Newsreel
2008
Color
16 minutes
USA
English

Adele Pham, Director/Producer

Two half Vietnamese documentary filmmakers, both named Adele, weave a shared narrative of mixed Asian (hapa) experiences through interviews with 7 other mixed race subjects. History, memory, and anecdotes on multiracial ethnicity are represented through archival images, super 8 film, verité, and interview.

Screenings

• Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, 2009
• San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, 2009
• Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, 2008
• Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival, 2008
• Slant: Bold Asian American Images, 2008

Even The Rivers: A film about educating South Korea’s multiethnic generation.

April 2013

Cindy Lou Howe, Director

Matt Kelley, Producer

Uikwon Lee, Researcher

“In 10 years, even the rivers and mountains change.”
—Korean proverb

South Korea has seemingly always known dramatic change. Created after Japanese colonization and a devastating civil war, the nation became one of history’s most remarkable economic success stories. Today, many South Koreans are proud that their former “Hermit Kingdom” is a global economic and cultural powerhouse, hosting the Olympics and exporting everything from Galaxy smartphones to “Gangnam Style.”

Despite this constant change, South Korea remains one of the world’s most ethnically homogeneous societies. According to recent statistics, just two percent of South Koreans are immigrants, the bulk of whom are ethnic Koreans from China. Many Koreans cling to a “one blood” national identity that emphasizes so-called “pure” bloodlines, a notion borne of nationalist and anti-imperialist movements from the turn of the last century.

This self-concept, however, is increasingly at odds with the nation’s changing demographics. Urbanization, immigration and one of the world’s lowest fertility rates have resulted in a multi-ethnic baby boom for South Korea. According to the 2010 Census, there are over 150,000 children in the country with at least one parent of non-Korean heritage. By 2020, the government estimates there will be over 1.6 million multi-ethnic South Koreans, including half of all children living in rural areas…

For more information, click here.

State of Race 2013: Presentation on the Demographics of Race

The Aspen Institute
Washington, D.C.
2013-04-24

Presenter:

Paul Taylor, Executive Vice-President and Director of Social and Demographic Trends Project
Pew Research Center

Hafu: The Mixed-Race Experience in Japan

Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival
29th Edition
2013-05-02 through 2013-05-12

2012
87 minutes
Directed by: Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi
English, Japanese

Screening: Wednesday, 2013-05-08, 19:30 PDT (Local Time): National Center for the Preservation of Democracy

HAFU is more than a mere documentary about mixed race Japanese, or so called Hafu. The film seeks to break with the “one nation, one culture, one race” paradigm which has shaped much of contemporary Japan’s self-image, and makes a compelling argument for the hybrid reality of Japanese identity today. At the same time, Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi, both Hafu themselves, render visible the hardship of those subjects who do not comfortably fit into common categories of belonging, and offer them a platform to be heard. What happens if my looks do not match my nationality, or if my language does not reflect my home country? Who defines the compatibility of subjects and their identities in the first place?

Most of the featured protagonists grew up in Japan, but cannot escape the role of the foreigner. As a Venezuelan citizen, Ed has to renew his visa every few years, despite being raised by his Japanese mother in Japan. Every time again, he is confronted with his identification as an outsider to Japanese society and the prospect of being expelled from the country he identifies both as home and hostile. Fusae is part of that same community of “foreigners within.” Part Korean and part Japanese, she appears with a strong sense of belonging at first, “I was born in Kobe, so this is where I want to work and pay taxes.” After a while, however, Fusae allows a deeper look into the traumatic experience of being mixed race in Japan and the tears she sheds reveal the inner turmoil that defines the lives of many other Hafus: of David, born to a Japanese father and Ghanaian mother, who surprised the other kids with the fact that his blood was not green, but red as theirs; of Sophia, who grew up in Australia ashamed of her bento box lunch and secretly wishing to be blond like her class mates. What all of the here depicted Hafus share, is the longing to belong. Not just to be acknowledged, as Ed puts it, but to be understood and accepted.

—Feng-Mei Heberer

For more information, click here.

TEDxNorthwesternU – Rick Kittles – The Biology of Race in the Absence of Biological Races

TEDxTalks
2011-01-25

Rick Kittles, Professor of Medicine
University of Illinois, Chicago
College of Medicine

Defining “race” continues to be a nemesis. Knowledge from human genetic research is increasingly challenging the notion that race and biology are inextricably linked, engendering tremendous ramifications for human relations, identity and public health. It has become fashionable for geneticists and anthropologists to declare that race is a social construction. However, there is little practical value to this belief since few in the public believe and act on it. Thus race is mainly a social concept which in the US has been based on skin color and ancestry. Yet biomedical studies continue to examine black/ white differences. Kittles discusses why using race in biomedical studies is problematic using examples from U.S. groups which transcend “racial” boundaries and bear the burden of health disparities.

Rick Kittles, PhD, received a BS in biology from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1989 and a PhD in biological sciences from George Washington University in 1998. He then helped establish the National Human Genome Center at Howard University. Currently, Kittles is an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), as well as the associate director of the UIC Cancer Center.

Kittles is well known for his research of prostate cancer and health disparities among African Americans. He has also been at the forefront of the development of ancestry-informative genetic markers, and how genetic ancestry can be used to map genes for common traits and disease. His work on tracing the genetic ancestry of African Americans has brought light to many issues, new and old, which relate to race, ancestry, identity, and group membership.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.