Mixed Race Studies

In Strangers’ Glances at Family, Tensions Linger

The New York Times
2011-10-13

Susan Saulny

TOMS RIVER, N.J. — “How come she’s so white and you’re so dark?”

The question tore through Heather Greenwood as she was about to check out at a store here one afternoon this summer. Her brown hands were pushing the shopping cart that held her babbling toddler, Noelle, all platinum curls, fair skin and ice-blue eyes.

The woman behind Mrs. Greenwood, who was white, asked once she realized, by the way they were talking, that they were mother and child. “It’s just not possible,” she charged indignantly. “You’re so…dark!”

It was not the first time someone had demanded an explanation from Mrs. Greenwood about her biological daughter, but it was among the more aggressive. Shaken almost to tears, she wanted to flee, to shield her little one from this kind of talk. But after quickly paying the cashier, she managed a reply. “How come?” she said. “Because that’s the way God made us.”

The Greenwood family tree, emblematic of a growing number of American bloodlines, has roots on many continents. Its mix of races — by marriage, adoption and other close relationships — can be challenging to track, sometimes confusing even for the family itself…

…Jenifer L. Bratter, an associate sociology professor at Rice University who has studied multiracialism, said that as long as race continued to affect where people live, how much money they make and how they are treated, then multiracial families would be met with double-takes. “Unless we solve those issues of inequality in other areas, interracial families are going to be questioned about why they’d cross that line,” she said.

According to Census data, interracial couples have a slightly higher divorce rate than same-race couples — perhaps, sociologists say, because of the heightened stress in their lives as they buck enduring norms. And children in mixed families face the challenge of navigating questions about their identities…

…Once, on a beach chair at a resort in Florida years ago, a white woman sunning herself next to Mrs. Dragan bemoaned the fact that black children were running around the pool. “Isn’t it awful?” Mrs. Dragan recalled the woman confiding to her.

Within minutes, Mrs. Dragan, ever feisty despite her reserved appearance, had her brood by her side. “I’d like to introduce you to my children,” she told the woman. Awkward silence ensued…

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The Marginalization of Afro-Asians in East Asia: Globalization and the Creation of Subculture and Hybrid Identity

Global Tides: Pepperdine Journal of International Studies
Volume 5 (2011)
15 pages
Pepperdine University, Malibu, California

Sierra Reicheneker

This article explores the topic of children born of biracial couplings in East Asia. The offspring of such unique unions face severe discrimination and marginalization. The status and future of this minority is especially salient in primarily homogenous states, such as Korea, Japan, and China, where racism varies from social stigma to institutionalized policies. The article will show that they have yet to create a cohesive group identity; they remain vulnerable to negative self-image and socially imposed isolation. In such nations, progress in equality for Afro-Asians will require key Afro-Asian leaders and public figures taking a stand against prejudices, as well as international pressure, and an increase in the number of biracial people due to globalization, in addition to the growing interconnectedness through New Media. Through these actions a hybrid identity and group mentality will form for the Afro-Asians of East Asia.

“All things are possible until they are proved impossible – and even the impossible may only be so as of now.” – Pearl S. Buck

The growing presence of an Afro-Asian population in Asia, particularly in Korea, Japan and China, has recently come to light in the global media. The homogenous nature of these countries exposes its biracial citizens to psychological marginalization. Despite the frequent trend within marginalized groups to create solidarity through a viable counter-culture, the Afro-Asian populations have not done so. However, with the increase in globalization, leading to larger numbers of biracial people born in these states, as well as their ability to connect through the Internet, this small minority will begin to form a group identity. This is furthered by icon-status Afro-Asians leading the way and acting as beacons of aspiration for all Afro-Asians. In addition, with the help of the international community in applying pressure on governments to change racist policies, an Afro-Asian subculture and hybrid identity is likely to emerge.

A Brief History

The first Afro-Asians were the product of American G.I.s during World War II. Starting in 1946, with the occupation of Okinawa and later mainland Japan, as well as the temporary military government of South Korea, Amerasian—including Afro-Asian—children became a visible reality in East Asia. The products of both prostitution and legally binding marriages, these children were largely regarded as illegitimate. When the military presence returned to America, the distinction between the two was, for all practical purposes, null. As the American military departed, any previous preferential treatment for biracial people ended, and was replaced with a backlash due to the return of ethnically-based national pride.

Korea has the largest Afro-Asian population in the Far East, due to increased interracial relationships during the Korean War (1950-1953). Once again, children were the product of both legitimate marriages and prostitution. After the war, the United States Congress passed acts to allow for immigration of biracial children, including the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987. The Korean government strongly supported the emigration of Amerasian children to the United States, considering it a “cost-effective way of dealing with social welfare problems,” as they viewed the children, particularly those from Black fathers, as “institutional burdens.”However, American military men looking to bring their Asian families to the states were heavily discouraged from doing so by their superiors; Marines in particular were threatened with court martial. Despite overwhelming support and willing adoptee families in the United States, the majority of Amerasian children remained in Korea. A staggering amount of mothers abandoned their babies, especially Afro-Asian offspring, either to be raised by distant, maternal relatives or to be sent to orphanages—though this is not the case for all of the Amerasian Koreans.

In China, the Afro-Asian people group is a newer phenomenon. They first began to appear beginning with African-American and African students coming to study in China, first in the city of Beijing and later in other larges cities, such as Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. Prominent Afro-Chinese have recently been featured in international news, helping to bring to light the growing Afro-Asian population in China and in East Asia, as a whole…

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Institutional Barriers, Marginality, and Adaptation Among the American-Japanese Mixed Bloods in Japan

The Journal of Asian Studies
Volume 42, Number 3 (1983)
pages 519-544
DOI: 10.2307/2055516

William R. Burkhardt, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Ohio University

Guided by the perspective of marginality theory, the author examines the problems that have faced the mixed-blood progeny of Japanese women and American military servicemen who were reared in father-absent homes and institutions in Japan. The group has experienced discrimination according to racial, class, and family background characteristics and has encountered barriers in the areas of education, employment, marriage, and citizenship or legal status. Although culturally Japanese, mixed bloods are often stereotyped by Japanese as cultural oddities or aliens. Black Japanese have been especially victimized by discrimination and negative stereotypes. Although most American-Japanese have accepted their marginal situation with a fate-orientation common among Japanese, some have responded maladaptively with deviant patterns of aggressive or self-destructive behavior. Others have sought emigration, and a few may have “passed” into Japanese society. The author places these findings in the context of existing research on the Burakumin and Korean minorities in Japan, Korean Amerasians, and Eurasians in East and South Asia.

This study examines the extent to which the American-Japanese or Amerasian mixed-blood group in Japan has been in a marginal situation relative to the larger society. This is accomplished by an historical sketch of the problems faced by mixed bloods in Japan; an examination of specific institutional areas in which opportunities have been blocked and marginality has resulted; and a discussion of three types of adaptations to marginal status, which is based on a review of some case examples of mixed bloods. The research is grounded on unstructured interviews with eight American-Japanese mixed bloods, interviews with several Japanese who have had professional or personally intimate relationships with Amerasians, and a review of the existing literature, including the translation of biographical materials published in Japanese.

The focus of the research is on father-absent Amerasians who have spent at least their childhood and adolescence in Japan. As the Japanese government has never officially identified Amerasians as a distinct racial or societal group, there is no accurate way to estimate their total number, which, according to various sources, probably ranges between ten and sixty thousand. The research will not be concerned with mixed-blood children who were adopted at an early age,  usually by families of American military servicemen, or with the several thousand progeny of Japanese women who married U.S. military personnel or civilians and have a family and cultural life that is characteristically American…

Savage Half-Breed, French Canadian or White US Citizen? Louis Riel and US Perceptions of Nation and Civilisation

National Identities
Volume 7, Issue 4, 2005
pages 369-388
DOI: 10.1080/14608940500334390

Lauren L. Basson, Assistant Professor of Politics and Government
Ben-Gurion University, Israel

Louis Riel was the late nineteenth-century leader of the Métis, an indigenous, North American people of mixed descent. His political protests challenged conventional notions of Canadian identity and earned him a prestigious place in Canadian national history. His challenges to US national identity, however, have been almost totally overlooked. This article examines how the responses of US press members and policy makers to Riel’s politics and racial status reflected and contributed to changing understandings of what it meant to be a member of the US nation and of civilisation more broadly. It suggests that ascriptive criteria such as race, ethnicity, religion and language were central aspects of US national identity.

Introduction

In the spring of 1885, a violent conflict erupted in Canada, garnering front-page headlines in North American newspapers for months. Louis Riel, leader of the Métis, a people of indigenous and European descent, had launched his second militant protest against the Canadian government’s violation of Métis land rights. Riel a charismatic, bi-national political activist not only redefined the Canadian political landscape; he also challenged conventional notions of what it meant to he American and a member of the civilised world. Kiel’s multiracial. Métis identity and political goals compelled US press members and policy makers to re-examine their assumptions about the meanings of US nationhood and civilisation.

In the late nineteenth century, many US journalists, politicians and other citizens expressed a world view that resembled a series of concentric circles defining the boundaries of (heir nation and civilisation. According to this worldview, the inner…

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In/visible Sight: The Mixed-Descent Families of Southern New Zealand

Bridget Williams Books also Athabasca University Press
June 2009
220 pages
ISBN: 978-1-877242-43-4

Angela Wanhalla, Lecturer in History
University of Otago, New Zealand

Angela Wanhalla starts her story with the mixed-descent community at Maitapapa, Taieri, where her great-grandparents, John Brown and Mabel Smith, were born. As the book took shape, a community emerged from the records, re-casting history and identity in the present.

Drawing on the experiences of mixed-descent families, In/visible Sight examines the early history of cross-cultural encounter and colonisation in southern New Zealand. There Ngäi Tahu engaged with the European newcomers on a sustained scale from the 1820s, encountering systematic settlement from the 1840s and fighting land alienation from the 1850s. The evolving social world was one framed by marriage, kinship networks and cultural practices – a world in which inter-racial intimacy played a formative role.

In exploring this history through a particular group of family networks, In/visible Sight offers new insights into New Zealand’s colonial past. Marriage as a fundamental social institution in the nineteenth century takes on a different shape when seen through the lens of cross-cultural encounters. The book also outlines some of the contours and ambiguities involved in living as mixed descent in colonial New Zealand.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.

Download the entire book here (9.13 MB).

• Front Matter
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Maps of Key Locations
• Chapter 1. Intimate Histories
• Chapter 2. Pátahi’s Story
• Chapter 3. Interracial Families and Communities
• Chapter 4. Boundary Crossings
• Chapter 5. Fears and Anxieties
• Chapter 6. Racial Categories and Lived Identities
• Chapter 7. Migration Stories
• Chapter 8. In/visible Sight
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index

Defending Home and Hearth: Walter White Recalls the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot

Web Source: History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web
Walter White, A Man Called White
1948; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969
pages 5–12

Walter White (1893-1955)

The riots that broke out between 1898 and 1906 were part of a pattern of anti-black violence that included several hundred lynchings each year. One of the most savage race riots in these years erupted in Atlanta on September 22, 1906 after vague reports of African Americans harassing white women. Over five days at least ten black people were killed while Atlanta’s police did nothing to protect black citizens, going so far as to confiscate guns from black Atlantans while allowing whites to remain armed. In this selection from his memoirs, Walter White, the future head of the NAACP recalled how, at age 13, he and his father defended their home from white rioters.

The unseasonably oppressive heat of an Indian summer day hung like a steaming blanket over Atlanta. My sisters and I had casually commented upon the unusual quietness. It seemed to stay Mother’s volubility and reduced Father, who was more taciturn, to monosyllables. But, as I remember it, no other sense of impending trouble impinged upon our consciousness.

I had read the inflammatory headlines in the Atlanta News and the more restrained ones in the Atlanta Constitution which reported alleged rapes and other crimes committed by Negroes. But these were so standard and familiar that they made—as I look back on it now—little impression. The stories were more frequent, however, and consisted of eight-column streamers instead of the usual two or four-column ones.

Father was a mail collector. His tour of duty was from three to eleven P.M. He made his rounds in a little cart into which one climbed from a step in the rear. I used to drive the cart for him from two until seven, leaving him at the point nearest our home on Houston Street, to return home either for study or sleep. That day Father decided that I should not go with him. I appealed to Mother, who thought it might be all right, provided Father sent me home before dark because, she said, “I don’t think they would dare start anything before nightfall.”Father told me as we made the rounds that ominous rumors of a race riot that night were sweeping the town. But I was too young that morning to understand the background of the riot. I became much older during the next thirty-six hours, under circumstances which I now recognize as the inevitable outcome of what had preceded.

…Late in the afternoon friends of my father’s came to warn of more trouble that night. They told us that plans had been perfected for a mob to form on Peachtree Street just after nightfall to march down Houston Street to what the white people called “Darktown,” three blocks or so below our house, to “clean out the niggers.” There had never been a firearm in our house before that day. Father was reluctant even in those circumstances to violate the law, but he at last gave in at Mother’s insistence…

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White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP

The New Press
Fall 2002
496 pages
Trim: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-56584-773-6

Kenneth R. Janken, Professor, African and Afro-American Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

A publishing landmark, the first biography of the man who brought the NAACP to national prominence

From his earliest years, Walter White was determined to transcend the rigid boundaries of segregation-era America. An African American of exceptionally light complexion, White went undercover as a young man to expose the depredations of Southern lynch mobs. As executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931 until his death in 1955, White was among the nation’s preeminent champions of civil rights, leading influential national campaigns against lynching, segregation in the military, and racism in Hollywood movies.

White is portrayed here for the first time in his full complexity, a man whose physical appearance enabled him to negotiate two very different worlds in segregated America, yet who saw himself above all as an organization man, “Mr. NAACP.” Deeply researched and richly documented, White’s biography provides a revealing vantage point from which to view the leading political and cultural figures of his time—including W.E.B. DuBois, Eleanor Roosevelt, and James Weldon Johnson—and an unrivaled glimpse into the contentious world of civil rights politics and activism in the pre–civil rights era.

Walter White and Passing

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 2, Issue 1 (2005)
pages 17-27
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X05050034

Kenneth R. Janken, Professor, African and Afro-American Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Walter White, the blond, blue-eyed Atlantan, was a voluntary Negro, that is, an African American who appears to be White but chooses to live in the Black world and identify with its experiences. He joined the NAACP national leadership in 1918 as assistant secretary and became secretary in 1931, serving at this post until his death in 1955. His tenure was marked by an effective public antilynching campaign and organizational stability and growth during the Depression years and by controversy over his leadership style. For him, posing as a Caucasian—and then telling all who would listen about his escapades—had three interrelated purposes. First, he developed inside information about mob psychology and mob violence, publicity of which was critical to the NAACP’s campaign against lynching. Second, White hoped to show Whites in particular the fallacy of racial stereotyping and racial categorization. Third, by emphasizing the dangers he courted—and even embellishing on them—he enhanced his racial bona fides at key times when his Black critics called into question his leadership.

The Awareness of Walter White

The Land Press
Okiecentric
2011-05-05

Adrian Margaret Brune

I grew up in Tulsa, but was raised knowing next to nothing about the Race Riot of 1921. Though I considered myself educated when I left for Northwestern University at the age of 18 in 1994, I had never taken a black history course, nor ventured over to Greenwood to hear jazz and blues. Four years later, while attending Columbia Journalism School in New York, I came home and learned about the journalist and civil rights activist Walter White. In May of 2002, just over 80 years after White investigated Tulsa—one of his last riots—I loaded up my car in Brooklyn and drove across America to trace his footsteps.

When Walter White, then 28 years old, came to Tulsa in late June of ’21, he had already experienced a lifetime of racial dilemmas, ensconced within the pigment of his skin.

“Walter White’s parents were enslaved; his parents were black. They maintained a presence in Atlanta’s black community, though they could have made a decision to pass up that hardship and pass as white,” said Kenneth Janken, author of White: The Biography of Walter F. White, Mr. NAACP. “He was not conflicted by their choice, or ultimately his. He formed a chapter of the NAACP and he chose a job investigating race riots when he could have done quite well as insurance salesman.”

The ascension of Walter Francis White from the inquisitive schoolboy who tailed his father during his afternoon postal routes, to the NAACP’s preeminent riot investigator seemed a natural one. That metamorphosis began on Sept. 22, 1906—the first day of the Atlanta Race Riot. That day was the first day White would understand that, despite his alabaster skin, he was black...

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Measuring Race and Ethnicity: Why and How?

The Journal of the American Medical Association
Volume 292, Number 13 (2004)
pages 1612-1614
DOI: 10.1001/jama.292.13.1612

Margaret A. Winker, MD, Deputy Editor and Online Editor
Journal of the American Medical Association

Race and enthnicity are constantly evolving concepts, deceptively easy to measure and used ubiquitously in the biomedical literature, yet slippery to pinpoint as definitive individual characteristics. A current dictionary definition of race is “a family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the same common stock, or a class or kind of people unified by shared interests, habits, or characteristics.” For 154 years, the US government has defined race for its census takers, and for many years census takers then defined it for US residents. The terms used reflect the nation’s changing demographics and increasing recognition of human diversity. The 1850 enumerators used a form that assumed a default race of white, with a checkmark indicating nonwhites as black or mulatto, with additional indications for free or slave. Indian was added as a category in 1860. Since 1960, individuals have been able to specify their own race and ethnicity, and by 2000 the census enumerated 126 racial and ethnic categories.

Medical definitions of race have lagged behind, although thankfully the former Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms such as Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australoid rarely appear in biomedical literature. Given that the connotations and definitions of race and ethnicity are constantly evolving, the use of the terms and concepts of race and ethnicity in the biomedical literature deserves examination…

…The use of race as a proxy for unmeasured confounders, such as cultural, social, and environmental influences, is commonplace, but race is a poor proxy for these measures. The life experience and cultural milieu of US immigrants may be completely different from those who grew up in the United States, despite being assigned to similar racial or ethnic categories. Socioeconomic status, not race, is likely the greater determinant of health and health-related qualities. Therefore, race is not a substitute for carefully assessed social and cultural characteristics.

On the other hand, race can be an important indicator of health disparities and health care delivery. An American College of Physicians position paper attests to “…ample evidence illustrating that minorities do not always receive the same quality of health care, do not have the same access to health care, are less represented in the health professions, and have poorer overall health status than nonminorities.” While race is just a departure point when evaluating such disparities, the article by Bradley et al in this issue of JAMA illustrates how race can be used along with specifically defined characteristics to begin to explore some of the reasons behind health disparities. In this retrospective, observational study of inpatients from the US-based National Registry of Myocardial Infarction, who were hospitalized during 1999 through 2002 with ST-segment elevation or myocardial infarction or left bundle-branch block and receiving acute reperfusion therapy, Bradley et al assessed time from hospital arrival to acute reperfusion therapy. As previous studies have shown, nonwhites had longer times from hospital entry to reperfusion therapy, as much as 7.3 minutes longer for blacks receiving thrombolytic therapy and 18.9 minutes longer for blacks receiving percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty…

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