Mixed Race Studies

Non-profit Tuesday: Why Give? What you might not expect in return

Laura Kina
2012-11-27

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Giving is hard. I’m not talking about birthday or Christmas gifts here. There is a social contract that you must give back to those who you love and who have loved and cared for you. That type of giving is easy. I’m talking about giving your time and money to non-profits. This is optional giving. After Black Friday and Cyber Monday, November 27, 2012 has been designated “Non-Profit Tuesday.” What do you believe in today? What do you want to take the time to stand behind and support?

I’ve spent most of my life being selfish, trying to build a career and family and take care of my own, but after the U.S. economy tanked in 2008 and my thin economic security was knocked out from under my feet, it coincided with a time when I have increasingly been asked to step up and give back. While this hasn’t always been easy, I want to share just a few things I got back in return that I really wasn’t expecting.

Make a list and check it (send $) twice today. Consider giving over the long haul. The best investments take time to mature.

Here are my top three non-religious non-profit suggestions for today:…

• MAVIN is based in Seattle and provides local programs/national and international research resources.
  • Mission: MAVIN builds healthier communities by providing educational resources about Mixed Heritage experiences.
  • What I gave: Time, expertise, and board dues – former working board member (2010-12) and current advisory board member.
  • What I was given in return that I didn’t expect: What started from a little magazine feature back in 2004 in MAVIN magazine on my art and sharing suggestions for the mixedheritagecenter.org and then meeting and working with folks like Eric Hamako and Louie Gong (see picture above) that has since led to a network of over 500+ activists, academics, artists, and friends interested in mixed-race issues. Today, I teach a class on “Mixed Race Art and Identity” at DePaul University in our Honors program and have been working with other colleagues, scholars and creatives on the Critical Mixed Race Studies conference, the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies and Wei Ming Dariotis and I have a forthcoming book and exhibition WarBaby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art….

Read the entire article here.

Diving into the Gene Pool

TIME Magazine
2006-08-20

Carolina A. Miranda

If they held a convention for racial purity, I would never make the guest list. Like most other Latin American families, mine is a multiethnic stew that has left me with the generic black-eyed and olive-skinned look typical of large swaths of the world’s population. My father’s family is from Peru, my mother’s from Chile. Their parents were born and reared in South America. Beyond that, I know nothing about my ancestors. That was fine by me—until the new and growing industry of personal DNA analysis created a need I never knew I had.

Today at least half a dozen companies will, for about $200 a pop, take your spittle, analyze the heck out of it and tell you who and what you are. The tests are popular among adoptees, armchair genealogists and high school seniors praying that a link to some underrepresented ethnic group will help get them into the Ivies. Already a card-carrying minority, I thought a test might help me figure out a thing or two about my forebears—and my mixed-up identity…

…Within a few weeks, I received my first results, from DNA Tribes. As I had guessed, the genetic indicators showed both European and American Indian roots. But No. 1 on the list of places I was supposed to be from was–to my great surprise—sub-Saharan Africa. What’s more, No. 1 on the list of the top 10 regional populations with which I was most likely to share a piece of genetic code was Belorussia, followed closely by southeast Poland and Mozambique.

That’s when I began to wonder whether there had been some kind of DNA mix-up. Fond as I am of stuffed cabbage, Poland and Belorussia are not places I had ever identified with. The sub-Saharan African connection was also puzzling. Any physical evidence of black Africa has apparently been diluted beyond recognition in my murky gene pool. And while heavy traces of African blood are not unusual in Latin America, they tend to be linked to West Africa, where much of the slave trade to the Americas originated. Clearly, my ancestors got around.

My mother, when I finally told her about all this, thought I was joking. My father asked me to ring back during halftime. And none of us even want to think about how my more persnickety aunts—the ones convinced they’re descendants of Spanish nobility—will react when they read about our Afro-Polish roots…

Read the entire article here.

The use of defamation law to reinforce privately held class-based animus traces back at least to the eighteenth century. In 1791, South Carolina’s court of last resort held that falsely describing an individual as a mulatto was actionable “because, if true, the [plaintiff] would be deprived of all civil rights.” False imputations that white persons were nonwhite or otherwise racially “impure” remained actionable in parts of the United States well into the twentieth century, particularly across the South. In 1957, South Carolina, for example, reaffirmed the precedent set in 1791. In Bowen v. Independent Publishing Co., the South Carolina Supreme Court held that allegations of racial impurity remained per se defamatory because, in light of the “social habits and customs deep-rooted in this State, such publication [alleging nonwhite lineage] is calculated to affect [one’s] standing in society and to injure [one] in the estimation of [one’s] friends and acquaintances.” Bowen and other decisions like it used the judicial arm of the state to reinforce Jim Crow under the guise of “neutrally applied” common law. By sanctioning these causes of action, the state reinforced notions of white supremacy and “affirmed the honor of whites by authoritatively denying status to blacks.”

Anthony Michael Kreis, “Lawrence Meets Libel: Squaring Constitutional Norms with Sexual-Orientation Defamation,” The Yale Law Journal Online, Volume 122, Issue 2 (November 2012):125-141. http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/lawrence-meets-libel-squaring-constitutional-norms-with-sexual-orientation-defamation.

Including Museums in Critical Mixed Race Studies

the incluseum: museums and social inclusion
2012-11-27

Chieko Phillips, Curatorial Assistant
Northwest African American Museum, Seattle, Washington

In 2009, when I first learned of a museum exhibit called IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas and two other exhibits that carried messages about multiraciality, I had mixed feelings (pun intended). How could any museum present messages about mixed identity; something that is so fluid and personal to me?  On a less emotional level, since the 2000 U.S. census, the first to allow people to mark more than one racial category, mixed race identity is officially recognized by the government and increasingly visible on a national scale.  Therefore, the representation of the history and experience of those who identify as mixed race has become more frequent in American pop culture.

While many scholars,students, and activists are still working to understand the implications of multiraciality for the racial structures of the United States, museums are already presenting narratives about mixed race and placing these narratives in the context of American citizenship. Are they doing it right? Is anyone doing it right? What is right? I have been exploring these questions for the past 3 years and believe the answers are currently indeterminate but full of potential…

Read the entire article here.

Sneak peek at next ‘Black in America’

Cable News Network
2012-11-27

What makes someone black in America? Skin color? History? Culture? Soledad O’Brien reports on Sunday, December 9 at 8pm ET/PT.

Disparate Impact

Georgetown Law Journal
Volume 98, Issue 4 (2010)
pages 1133-1163

Girardeau A. Spann, Professor of Law
Georgetown University Law Center

Introduction

There has been a lot of talk about post-racialism since the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first black President of the United States. Some have argued that the Obama election illustrates the evolution of the United States from its unfortunate racist past to a more admirable post-racial present in which the problem of invidious racial discrimination has largely been overcome. Others have argued that the Obama election illustrates only that an extraordinarily gifted, mixed-race, multiple Ivy League graduate. Harvard Law Review President was able to overcome the persistent discriminatory racial practices that continue to disadvantage the bulk of less fortunate racial minority group members in the United States.

However, both perspectives fail to engage the feature of race in the United States that I find most significant. Race is relentlessly relevant. Racial differences are so socially salient that racial considerations necessarily influence many of the decisions that we make. Even when racial considerations are tacit or unconscious, the influence of race is still exerted through the reflex habit of deferring to white interests in the belief that such deference is racially neutral. But it is not. The possibility of actual colorblind race neutrality is simply an option that does not exist.

Nevertheless, the culture remains committed to an abstract principle of racial equality, which would be offended by a frank recognition of the role that race inevitably plays in the allocation of societal benefits and burdens. Accordingly, the culture must find some way to mediate the tension that exists between its race-neutral rhetorical aspirations and its race-based operational behavior. The claim that United States culture has now achieved a post-racial status can best be understood as an effort to serve that function. By conceptualizing contemporary culture as post-racial, we can camouflage the role that race continues to play in the allocation of resources. However, masking the relevance of race does not serve to eliminate it. Rather, the post-racial claim ultimately serves to legitimate the practice of continued discrimination against racial minorities.

The Supreme Court has always been complicit in the practice of sacrificing racial minority interests for the benefit of the white majority. In its more infamous historical decisions, such as Dred Scott, Plessy, and Korematsu, the Court’s racial biases have been relatively transparent. More recently, however, the Court has invoked three tacit post-racial assumptions to justify the contemporary sacrifice of minority interests in the name of promoting equality for whites. First, current racial minorities are no longer the victims of significant discrimination. Second, as a result, race-conscious efforts to benefit racial minorities at the expense of whites constitute a form of reverse discrimination against whites that must be prevented in the name of racial equality. Third, because the post-racial playing field is now level, any disadvantages that racial minorities continue to suffer must be caused by their own shortcomings rather than by the lingering effects of now-dissipated past discrimination. I consider actions that are rooted in these assumptions, and that adversely affect the interests of racial minorities in order to advance the interests of whites, to constitute a form of contemporary discrimination that I refer to as “post-racial discrimination.”…

Read the entire article here.

Whiteness in the Age of Obama

The Huffington Post
2012-11-26

Jedediah Purdy, Professor of Law
Duke University

Recall the numbers: 59 percent of white voters supported Romney. More dramatically, 88 percent of his votes came from whites. One simple but plausible analysis suggested that Obama won a majority of white votes only in New England, New York, and Hawaii. His national share of the white vote fell by several points after four years in which Republicans, especially the Tea Party, worked relentlessly to be the party of whiteness.

As I’ve noted before (and so have lots of others), this was the barely-concealed meaning of Tea Party claims that Obama was not American, not constitutionally the president, somehow deeply alien. These ideas are so unmoored from reality that they have to be approached as symptoms, not positions. Race was also much of the meaning of tying Obama to food stamps, and of (barely less public) assertions that health care reform was a giveaway from white taxpayers to black dependents.

Those notorious maps showing the overlap between Romney states and the old Confederacy take on a grim extra plausibility when you consider that Obama seems to have taken less than 20 percent of the white vote in the core states of the Deep South—Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. I’m reminded of the friend in West Virginia who told me, back in 1988, that one reason to support Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary was that he could pick out his solitary vote when the local newspaper printed the results.

But consider: whiteness, like any other racial category, is a made-up thing. It is a matter of what people do, not what they are. (Social construction is the clunky academic name for this.) Like other made-up things, it changes. Obama’s share of the youth vote in swing states like Virginia, Florida, and Ohio was so high that clearly, somewhere around age 30, a majority of white people started supporting the president. Romney’s success with old people isn’t just a matter of the fact that America used to be much more white. It’s that white people used to be much more white—in the Mitt Romney sense of white. Whiteness, too, is changing. What might it become?…

…Race in the age of Obama

There are many ways to look at Barack Obama, a fact that has been both a strength and a weakness in his political career. One of those, one he invites and seems to believe, is that he is a man who made a pair of deliberate choices: to be black and to be American, to identify with both those traditions and to braid their hopes more tightly together. This is the conclusion of his memoir, Dreams from My Father, and it has rippled through a good deal of what he has done and said as President.

That American identity is open to this kind of choice is one of the best things about it. That Obama’s claim to stand at the center of American identity has inspired so much resistance is a sign of the value of that central place, of its being—sometimes tragically—worth fighting over.

All of us who live in Obama’s age are, more or less explicitly, engaged in the same problem: how to orient ourselves to an American identity that no longer has its old center. The change, the beginning of overcoming the America-is-whiteness myth, is overdue and entirely right.

Maybe that identity will be more comfortably hybrid. American civic myth has always involved the fantasy of purity. The Pilgrims were righteous, goes the myth. So were the Revolutionaries. The Founders were wise and beneficent. The Constitution is full of moral truth. Our wars are good wars.

There is a strange half-rhyme between that fantasy of purity and the fantasy of race, especially the bad old idea that whiteness contains something special, rare, and pure—an idea few will say in public anymore, but which still echoes in our racially divided politics. These myths had many victims, most obviously those whom they defined as not quite, or not at all, American. More subtly, they mutilated history itself. They cost everyone the chance at an honest start to understanding the present by appreciating the past…

Read the entire article here.

Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time

Heyday Books
March 2012
192 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59714-188-8

Carlos Cortés, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Riverside

A riveting memoir of cultural crossfire

“Dad was a Mexican Catholic. Mom was a Kansas City–born Jew with Eastern European immigrant parents. They fell in love in Berkeley, California, and got married in Kansas City, Missouri.

That alone would not have been a big deal. But it happened in 1933, when such marriages were rare. And my parents spent most of their lives in Kansas City, a place both racially segregated and religiously divided.

Mom and Dad chose to be way ahead of their time; I didn’t. But because of them, I had to be. My mixed background meant that, however unwillingly, I had to learn to live as an outsider.”

The son of a Mexican Catholic father with aristocratic roots and a mother of Eastern European Jewish descent, Carlos Cortés grew up wedged between cultures, living a childhood in “constant crossfire-straddling borders, balancing loves and loyalties, and trying to fit into a world that wasn’t quite ready.” In some ways, even his family wasn’t quite ready (for him). His request for a bar mitzvah sent his proud father into a cursing rage. He was terrified to bring home the Catholic girl he was dating, for fear of wounding his mother and grandparents. When he tried to join a high school fraternity, Christians wouldn’t take him because he was Jewish, and Jews looked sideways at him because his father was Mexican.

In his new memoir, Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time, Cortés lovingly chronicles his family’s tumultuous, decades-long spars over religion, class, and culture, from his early years in legally segregated Kansas City during the 1940s to his return to Berkeley (where his parents met) in the 1950s, and to his parents’ separation, reconciliation, deaths, and eventual burials at the Rose Hill Cemetery. Cortés elevates the theme of intermarriage to a new level of complexity in this closely observed and emotionally fraught memoir adapted from his nationally successful one-man play, A Conversation with Alana: One Boy’s Multicultural Rite of Passage.

Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances

University of Illinois Press
2002
240 pages
6 x 9 in.
14 black & white photographs, 7 line drawings
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-02721-5

Dominika Ferens, Professor of American Literature and Writing
University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland

Daughters of a British father and a Chinese mother, Edith and Winnifred Eaton pursued wildly different paths. While Edith wrote stories of downtrodden Chinese immigrants under the pen name Sui Sin Far, Winnifred presented herself as Japanese American and published Japanese romance novels in English under the name Onoto Watanna. In this invigorating reappraisal of the vision and accomplishments of the Eaton sisters, Dominika Ferens departs boldly from the dichotomy that has informed most commentary on them: Edith’s “authentic” representations of Chinese North Americans versus Winnifred’s “phony” portrayals of Japanese characters and settings.

Arguing that Edith as much as Winnifred constructed her persona along with her pen name, Ferens considers the fiction of both Eaton sisters as ethnography. Edith and Winnifred Eaton suggests that both authors wrote through the filter of contemporary ethnographic discourse on the Far East and also wrote for readers hungry for “authentic” insight into the morals, manners, and mentality of an exotic other.

Ferens traces two distinct discursive traditions–-missionary and travel writing–-that shaped the meanings of “China” and “Japan” in the nineteenth century. She shows how these traditions intersected with the unconventional literary careers of the Eaton sisters, informing the sober, moralistic tone of Edith’s stories as well as Winnifred’s exotic narrative style, plots, settings, and characterizations.

Bringing to the Eatons’ writings a contemporary understanding of the racial and textual politics of ethnographic writing, this important account shows how these two very different writers claimed ethnographic authority, how they used that authority to explore ideas of difference, race, class and gender, and how their depictions of nonwhites worked to disrupt the process of whites’ self-definition.

Finding Edith Eaton

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
Volume 29, Number 2, 2012
pages 263-269
DOI: 10.1353/leg.2012.0017

Mary Chapman, Associate Professor of English
University of British Columbia

Since her critical recovery in the early 1980s, Edith Maude Eaton has been celebrated as the first Asian North American writer and as an early, authentic Eurasian voice countering “yellow peril” discourse through sympathetic literary representations of diasporic Chinese subjects. Eaton, a half-Chinese, half-English writer who wrote under variants of the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, is best known for Mrs. Spring Fragrance, her 1912 collection of Chinatown stories, and for the stories and uncollected journalism reissued in the 1995 collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Recent discoveries of unknown works by Eaton made by Martha J. Cutter, Dominika Ferens, and June Howard have begun to complicate our scholarly understanding of both her biography and her oeuvre.
 
Late one night in 2006, I typed Edith Eaton’s name and her best-known pseudonyms (“Sui Sin Far” and “Sui Seen Fah”) into the search bar of Google Books. Instantly, a link came up (one that is, alas, no longer there) to a story signed “Edith Eaton” that appeared in the April 1909 issue of Bohemian Magazine. “The Alaska Widow” is not mentioned in Ferens’s detailed bibliography, in Annette White-Parks’s biography, or in the collection White-Parks co-edited with Amy Ling. It is also uncharacteristic of Eaton’s works. Unlike the stories collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, many of which are set in North American Chinatowns and/or feature Eurasian children, this story takes up the cultural dynamic produced by the Alaska gold rush and the Spanish-American War, and it features a child born to a Native American mother abandoned by a Caucasian adventurer father who later dies in the Philippines. “The Alaska Widow” is also unlike most of the works Eaton published after 1898 in that it is signed “Edith Eaton” without any parenthetical reference to her pen name. Because “The Alaska Widow” is so different from other works by Eaton, it made me wonder: How many other unknown stories by Eaton exist, and how might they challenge scholars’ understanding of the author?
 
In the years Eaton actively published (1888-1914), US print culture changed profoundly. The number of newspapers and periodicals quadrupled. While nascent mass newspapers cultivated advertising dollars by becoming politically neutral and purportedly objective, many periodicals marketed themselves to niche audiences organized by class, age, gender, aesthetics, vocation, and other categories. Together Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings have made available to scholars only about fifty (mostly Chinatown-themed) publications by Eaton. My archival research, combined with contributions from other scholars, including Cutter, Ferens, and Howard, has uncovered nearly two hundred additional texts of diverse genres, themes, styles, and politics published in more than forty different Canadian, United States, and Jamaican periodicals between 1888 and 1914.
 
In her early career, between 1888 and 1896, Eaton placed signed poetry and fiction in small-circulation Montreal publications such as the Dominion Illustrated and Metropolitan Magazine. She also filed regular, unsigned journalistic contributions (primarily about Montreal’s Chinatown) and sent impassioned letters to the editor (signing herself E. E.) about racist policies toward the Chinese in Canada to two local newspapers: the Montreal Daily Witness and Montreal Daily Star. In addition, she filed stories about smallpox outbreaks, fires, and murders from northern Ontario, where she worked as a stenographer from 1892 to 1893. Between 1896 and 1897 she wrote daily society and women’s page news for Jamaica’s Gall’s Daily Newsletter. But Eaton recognized early on that it would be almost impossible to earn a living publishing fiction in Canada. In 1896, therefore, she began to submit Chinatown stories, signed “Sui Seen Far,” to periodicals in the United States—the fin de siècle little magazines Fly Leaf and Lotus, as well as the regional emigration magazine Land of Sunshine and popular magazine Short Stories. On the basis of her success placing these stories, Eaton moved to the United States, relocating to California (San Francisco and Los Angeles), probably…