Mixed Race Studies

Developing critical race theory to study race and racism in China’s media: a case study of the chocolate girl’s bittersweet stardom on Go Oriental Angel

California State University, Sacramento
Summer 2011
105 pages

Siok Kwan Teoh

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in COMMUNICATION STUDIES

This study discusses the history, tenets, and evolution of Critical Race Theory (CRT), and how the theory can be developed for use in a mediated context and a Chinese context. This paper employs Lou Jing’s (a mixed-race reality show contestant in China) story as a case study while reflecting upon the role that China’s history, socio-economic influences, and politics have played in shaping the country’s contemporary outlook on racial identities and racism. The analysis shows that most CRT tenets have a multitude of uses in exploring race, racism, classism, and European and U.S. influence in Chinese society, and how power is manipulated by the government in China’s media outlets.

Table of Contents

• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. BACKGROUND OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY
  • The History of Race
  • The History of Critical Race Theory
  • The Basic Tenets of Critical Race Theory
  • Criticisms of Critical Race Theory
  • The Evolving Nature of Critical Race Theory
  • Applications of Critical Race Theory
• 3. BACKGROUND OF CHINA
  • The Racial Homogeneity Myth
  • Late Nineteenth Century and Racial Nationalism
  • Twentieth Century and the Myth of the Yellow Emperor
  • Contemporary China’s Racial Identities
  • Contemporary China and its Media Environment
  • Reality Television in China
• 4. METHOD
  • Data Collection
  • The Chocolate Girl Case Study
• 5. ANALYSIS
  • Racism is Ordinary
  • Intersectionality and Anti-Essentialism
  • The Social Construction of Race
  • Interest Convergence
  • The Use of Storytelling and Counter-Narratives
  • Whiteness
• 6. CONCLUSION
  • Future Studies
• References

Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION

China has been continually evolving over the centuries to meet a variety of challenges that shaped the nation and led it from imperial rule to communism, and to its subsequent economic development that opened its doors to the rest of the world. In the twenty-first century, more foreigners are making China their home, resulting in Chinese people marrying foreigners and giving birth to mixed race children. The data from the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau show that, from 1994 to 2008, there was an average of 3,000 mixed race marriages a year in Shanghai. Even with the increasing mixed race marriage rate, China still likes to think of itself as monocultural instead of a multicultural nation (Elegant & Jiang, 2009). A popular televised singing competition in China called Go Oriental Angel featured a mixed race African American and Chinese contestant in the 2009 season. Lou Jing was born and raised in Shanghai by her Chinese mother, and essentially identifies as Chinese. However, her appearance on a nationally televised show caused a major uproar in China and brought about international attention to China’s issues of racism and the Chinese identity. If a reality-based television star had been criticized for her/his race by audience members in the United States, scholars from different fields including communication, sociology, and ethnic studies would have studied the phenomenon. Some of those scholars might have chosen a theory that could clarify why and how the United States’ history with race could lead to the audience reacting so negatively to the reality star’s race.

Although a relatively new theory, academics and activists across the United States have employed Critical Race Theory (CRT) in legal, healthcare, education, criminal justice, and sports to examine the relationship between race, racism, and power. CRT is a specifically American theory based upon the socio-political history of the United States and mainly applied to study and change the policies that affect unequal treatments based upon race, especially in education and criminal justice issues. This thesis is a theoretical discussion on CRT, its history, implications, and the evolution of its scholarship; this theory also raises two questions about CRT: how can CRT be developed for use in a mediated context and how can it be developed for use in a Chinese context? This thesis employs the reality television program Go Oriental Angel and the story of Lou Jing as a case study to answer the two questions.

First, this thesis will briefly investigate the socio-political racial history in Europe and in the United States to explain how race was created and used to justify slavery and segregation, and the relationship between race and the global capitalistic system. It will then introduce CRT and delve into its history, concepts, and tenets, as well as the critiques, applications, and evolution of the theory. To better understand how China perceives race and what it means to be Chinese, this thesis will investigate the myth of the Yellow Emperor that helped China develop and proliferate the notion of the monocultural Han Chinese identity, and it will then briefly discuss the issues in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that shaped China’s Chinese identity. It also will examine contemporary China’s economic growth and how that growth has impacted the social and media environment of China particularly in the area of reality-based television programming. The show Go Oriental Angel and the treatment of its mixed-race contestant, Lou Jing by the show’s hosts and the Internet audience will be discussed. Based upon the literature review of CRT, China’s history, contemporary issues, and media environment, and utilizing Go Oriental Angel as a case study, this thesis will answer the questions of how CRT can be developed for use in a mediated context and how it can be developed for use in a Chinese context. Finally, this thesis will explore possible future studies of CRT that would accommodate a global perspective and a communication focus…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Choosing to be Multiracial in America: The Sociopolitical Implications of the “Check All That Apply” Approach to Race in the 2000 U.S. Census

Berkeley La Raza Law Journal
Volume 21 (2011)

Alaina R. Walker

I. INTRODUCTION

Race in America has long been a contentious subject, especially when the government has been involved. Race can mean something different to everyone, and yet, it is widely understood as having real implications and consequences. Many scholars understand that race is “a social construct[:] a social artifact, which results from a process through which social significance is attributed to some contingent attributes like skin color, and whose emergence, salience and influence can be studied and analyzed.” The government’s use of race has ranged from the horrific to the admirable, but has always been controversial. Analyzing the U.S. Census provides an interesting opportunity to discuss some of the significant roles race has played and continues to play in America. Racial data collected from the U.S. Census is currently used for the controversial purpose of furthering civil rights objectives, but some people worry that these objectives are now in danger. Due to the implementation of the “check all that apply” approach to the U.S. Census (the ability to select all races with which one identifies), critics are concerned that racial data will become convoluted and that civil rights objectives will be hindered. What is lacking from the conversation and arguably the civil rights agenda is the importance of the official recognition of multiracial identity, which the “check all that apply” approach acknowledges.

Although multiracial identity should be recognized on the U.S. Census, it is necessary to analyze how its recognition in the form of the “check all that apply”…

Read the entire article here.

Phil Wilkes Fixico to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #225-Phil Wilkes Fixico
When: Wednesday, 2011-09-14, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 16:00 CDT, 14:00 PDT)

Phil Wilkes Fixico, Seminole Maroon Descendant, Creek and Cherokee Freedmen Descendant

From “Mixed Race in the Seminole Nation,” in Ethnohistory, Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011):

This is a story of two hidden identities. It focuses on the family history of Phil Wilkes Fixico (aka Philip Vincent Wilkes and Pompey Bruner Fixico), a contemporary Seminole maroon descendant of mixed race who lives in Los Angeles. Phil is one-eighth Seminole Indian, one-quarter Seminole freedman, one-eighth Creek freedman, one-quarter Cherokee-freedman, and one-quarter African-American-white. His family history records that his paternal grandfather was the offspring of a Seminole Indian woman and a Seminole freedman, but that this “intermarriage” was kept secret from the Dawes Commission and the boy was enrolled as a “fullblood” Indian. This one union and the subsequent history of the family tell us a great deal about relations between Seminoles and freedmen in the Indian Territory and Oklahoma and about status and identity issues among individuals of mixed race within American society. With tragic irony, Phil’s parents also hid the identity of his biological father, echoing the story of his grandfather. Sensing family secrets and lies, young Phil experienced an identity crisis. Eventually discovering his father’s identity and his family history, Phil turned his life around. He has embraced his mixed-race heritage, connected with the Seminole maroon communities in Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico, and become a creative and energetic tribal historian.

Selected Articles about Phil Wilkes Fixico

• Manny Otiko, “Blacks and Native Americans have deep ties,” Our Weekly: Our Truth, Our Voice, November 18, 2010.
• Darlene Donloe, “Phil Wilkes Fixico—a True Native Son,” L.A. Watts Times, March 11, 2010.
• Kevin Mulroy, “Mixed Race in the Seminole Nation,” Ethnohistory, Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011).

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Obama’s ascent to the (still) White House is part and parcel of forty years of transition from the Jim Crow order to a new racial regime. Obama represents the sedimentation of a higher stage of the “new racism,” one described by Dylan E. Rodríguez as a “multiracial white supremacy.” In the new phase of racial regulation, the old sins—imperialism, neoliberal capitalism, and the racial order—work best in blackface.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Chats: Is Obama Black, Bi-racial, or Post-racial?” Zócalo Public Square, September 7, 2011. http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/09/07/is-obama-black-bi-racial-or-post-racial/read/chats/

Family Histories of ‘Passing’ from Black to White Documented in Book

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
2011-09-06

Katti Gray

In the summer of 1993, as American-born Daniel Sharfstein registered Blacks to cast their first ballot in race-riven South Africa, he volunteered alongside a South African woman, who professed to be as authentically African as any other Black. This, she told then college student Sharfstein, despite her family’s decades-old designation as Coloured, a mixed-race label that elevated her clan above Blacks in the old White-run government’s hierarchy of peoples.
 
Though being Coloured insulated her from brutalities apartheid reserved for the so-called purely Black, she was, physically, hard to distinguish from the Black activists who had dominated the anti-apartheid movement, said Dr. Sharfstein, now 38 and a Vanderbilt University law professor. She was dark-skinned, and wore her hair Afrocentrically-braided.
 
That her family would choose to be misclassified racially was both fascinating and bewildering, Sharfstein said. “I came home and was immediately interested in the question of whether the same thing had happened here,” said Sharfstein, who holds a law degree from Yale, and a degree in history, literature and Afro-American studies from Harvard.
 
His book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, is the outgrowth of parallels Sharfstein drew between apartheid’s racial distortions and those of his own native land.
 
With this nation’s state-by-state variations on how many drops of Black blood legally made a person Black as both a backdrop and core of the 395-page tome, Sharfstein explores the human, financial and ephemeral costs of morphing from an imposed Blackness—notwithstanding one’s light skin, aquiline facial features and straight hair—to live as White…

…Cape Cod, Mass., is where Isabel Wall Whittemore’s forebears ended up.
 
“Until I read [Sharfstein’s] book, I didn’t realize that, in my mom’s day, 1/16 [of Black blood] was considered Colored,” said Whittemore, 74, now residing in Hickory Flat, Miss., with her oldest daughter Lisa Colby. “To tell you the truth… I’ve always gone as Caucasian. I had no reason not to. I’d love to know what I should be calling myself now, but it doesn’t matter to me either way… Race isn’t important.”
 
Roughly a decade before the February 2011 release of Sharfstein’s book, a homework assignment for Colby’s daughter revealed their place on the branches of O.S.B. Wall’s family tree. “I’ve met a lot of cousins who I didn’t know,” Colby said. “I, myself, think this is great … in terms of the history. My great, great-grandfather was able to come up from being a slave to being a lawyer.”
 
Not everyone who’s learned of their ties to Wall has been so effusive. One informed Sharfstein that “he’d become more racist since learning about his descent than ever before,” Sharfstein said. “Initially, he was so intent on maintaining his White identity—and nothing makes you more ‘White’ than hating Black people. That’s my inference.”…

Read the entire article here.

I say let him [Barack Obama] do his best to run the country, like any President, and the rest of us can do him a favor by not constantly debating how black he is or isn’t. Enough already. He’s the President, for Christ’s sake. Let him do his job.

David A. Hollinger, “Chats: Is Obama Black, Bi-racial, or Post-racial?” Zócalo Public Square, September 7, 2011. http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/09/07/is-obama-black-bi-racial-or-post-racial/read/chats/