Mixed Race Studies

Assimilating Hawai‘i: Racial Science in a Colonial “Laboratory,” 1919-1939

University of Minnesota
July 2012
322 pages

Christine Leah Manganaro

A DISSERTATION IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation demonstrates how American physical anthropologists and sociologists working in Hawai‘i framed the biological and cultural assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into Americanness as natural rather than ideological, thus naturalizing the islands’ incorporation into the United States as a story about integration rather than colonization. Scientists argued that mixing in this “racial laboratory” improved the quality of the majority non-white population, that migration and colonization were features of a natural historical trajectory of Americanization, and that race relations in the islands were the product of a human ecology that went hand in hand with capitalist development. All of these ideas became the racial common sense that traveled to the continental U.S. and perpetuated American amnesia about empire.

This project revisits the historiography of the supposed retreat of scientific racism and, by closely examining the methods, actual data, and conclusions of scientists whose work shaped their disciplines, demonstrates how racialist thinking persisted in work that has been characterized as either questioning the race concept, as politically progressive, or both. Taking cues from studies of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i and recent debate about the actuality of a retreat of scientific racism in the United States, this dissertation demonstrates how treating assimilation as a natural process that needed to be better understood, rather than a discursive project of colonial governance, legitimated American power in the islands.

During a period when scientists and politicians alike were interested in fitness, degeneracy, and the consequences of immigration and miscegenation as part of debates about national progress, scientists viewed Hawai‘i as a laboratory where they could conduct research on heredity and cultural change that was difficult or impossible to do in the continental United States. American social scientists working in Hawai‘i framed the processes they studied, particularly the assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into American culture and identity, as natural rather than ideological. American scientists with sometimes opposing political orientations such as Louis R. Sullivan and L.C. Dunn concluded that, unlike mixed race people generally and especially “mulattoes,” Chinese-Hawaiian “hybrids” were actually improvements on their supposedly pure parents (chapter 1).

Physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro, in his study of racial plasticity among migrants in a changed environment, developed few concrete findings, but helped establish Hawai‘i as a long-term human research site. Sociologist Romanzo Adams, who was trained at the University of Chicago, produced the history of Hawai‘i as a history of admixture that exaggerated the degree of interracial reproduction and suggested that the territorial population was well on its way to complete biological amalgamation (chapter 3).

Through a series of interviews with couples in interracial marriages and the collection of student papers about identity and racial prejudice, many of which contradicted Adams’ findings and predictions, graduate researcher Margaret M. Lam recorded the testimony of residents who both resisted certain types of racialization as they also participated in the construction and maintenance of racial boundaries and meanings (chapter 4).

Finally, sociologist Andrew Lind, framed social inequality and tense race relations in the territory as a product of competition for jobs and housing, a “natural” feature of “human ecology,” rather than a product of intentional labor control and government decisions (chapter 5). This advanced the idea that social conditions in Hawai‘i were a natural product of modernization rather colonization.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “Biologically Better” Studies and Hybrids: The Persistence of Racialism in Studies of Race Mixing in Territorial Hawai‘i, 1916-1932
• Chapter 2: A Racial Laboratory for the World: Establishing Studies of Race Mixing, Migration, and Environment in the 1930s
• Chapter 3: Turning a Colony into a Melting Pot: Romanzo Adams’ Interracial Marriage in Hawaii and the Natural History of Hawai‘i’s Americanization, 1919-1937
• Chapter 4: Narrating Colonial Racial Formation: Race Consciousness and Identity in the Vernacular, 1928-1936
• Chapter 5: Defining an “Island Community”: Race Relations as Ecological Succession, 1927-1939
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Poet to discuss biracialism during UHV/ABR Fall Reading Series

University of Houston-Victoria Newswire
Victoria, Texas
2012-09-20

Born to a Chinese mother and a Norwegian father, award-winning author Paisley Rekdal’s mixed heritage often influences her poetry and essay writing.

She will share her insights about biracialism on Sept. 27 as the second speaker in the University of Houston-Victoria/American Book Review Fall Reading Series. Rekdal also will give a reading of her poetry.

The event will begin at noon in the Alcorn Auditorium of UHV University West, 3007 N. Ben Wilson St. It is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

“Rekdal’s interesting mix of style and subject matter is a great addition to our reading series,” said Jeffrey Di Leo, ABR editor and publisher, and dean of the UHV School of Arts & Sciences. “As an Asian American, she gives a voice to a part of biracialism that is underrepresented and continues that theme to other subjects that are often overlooked.”

During the event, Rekdal plans on reading and sharing photographs from her latest book, “Intimate: An American Family Album.” The book is a hybrid photo-text memoir that combines poems, fiction and nonfiction with photography from Edward S. Curtis, a famous photographer of the American West and Native American people.

The book explores her father’s mixed-race marriage to her mother while paralleling it with stories about Curtis and his Indian guide, Alexander Upshaw. Rekdal found inspiration by looking at photographs from Curtis and imagined his life.

“It’s a memoir about my family, but it also talks about representation of mixed-race people or how they are not represented,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Intimate: An American Family Photo Album

Tupelo Press
April 2012
300 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-932195-96-5
Clothbound ISBN: 978-1-936797-08-0

Paisley Rekdal, Distinguished Professor of English
University of Utah

Intimate is a hybrid memoir and “photo album” that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, Intimate creates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal’s Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis’s murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race.

She [Susan Graham of Project RACE] cannot claim to be the voice of racial minorities without acknowledging the ways she (as a white person) benefits from the system that makes multiracial advocacy necessary in the first place. As a biracial person, it is completely unacceptable to me that someone who claims to be an advocate for the multiracial community would openly proclaim that she not only doesn’t believe that white privilege even exists but that it is not a necessary part of the conversation in multiracial advocacy. This is the comment this woman wrote back to me when I challenged her about her position:

We can easily have a discussion of multiracial advocacy without a conversation on white privilege if some academic and academic librarians would let it go.

This was part of my response:

The fact that you can deny white privilege is actually the most incriminating evidence of the fact that you have it. You may be able to dismiss it, but for racial minorities we live with the realities of white privilege every day.

Alyssa Bacon-Liu, “The Privilege of Denial,” All Things Beautiful, September 19, 2012. http://www.allthingsbeautifulblog.com/2012/09/the-privilege-of-denial.html

In the end, although Project RACE’s political advocacy facilitated other multiracial groups’ participation in the OMB discussions for the 2000 census, [Susan] Graham was eventually shut out of the process. Her position as a white woman campaigning for multiracial interests proved to be unappealing to too many, and her uncompromising stance distanced her from more flexible multiracial groups. The political alliances she made and her unwillingness to sympathize with monoracial civil rights groups’ concerns lost her the support both of monoracial people of color and multiracial activists. Graham’s passion and loyalty to the original racial designation voted upon by her constituents served her well in the public sphere, but her continual reliance on white privileged forms of advocacy and expression were her political undoing. Although Project RACE remains one of the more active inter- or multiracial organizations in the U.S. (many dissipated after the 2000 census victory), it also still remains connected to a white privileged perspective and racially unreflexive forms of advocacy.

Alicia Doo Castagno, “‘Founding Mothers’: White Mothers of Biracial Children in the Multiracial Movement (1979-2000),” (Undergraduate Honors Thesis, Wesleyan University, 2012), 98.