Mixed Race Studies

“Wait . . . they had a white baby?!?!”

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-09-01

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

My niece recently had a baby, a beautiful boy. The proud grandmother showed the photo of the newborn to family members and everyone oohed and aahed. One of his cousins looked at the picture and said, “Oh he’s so cute!”  But suddenly a puzzled look came over him and he blurted out, “Wait . . . they had a white baby?!?!
 
When I heard this story I thought, Oh, it’s already started. People see colors and label according to what they see. The little cousin saw white and labeled the baby white. But mom is Japanese as well as Irish and Scottish. Dad is Irish as well as African American and American Indian. The baby is therefore all of these. But he is already being labeled by a single category, a race.
 
And he is already being looked at in relation to his family. The little cousin was intrigued  because to him mom is probably white and dad black, so put black and white together and what do you get? A white baby?…

Read the entire article here.

Tiger Mom’s Hapa Cubs

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-05-09

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

Are persons with one Asian parent and one non-Asian parent Asian or not Asian? Schools don’t seem to know where to place them, leaving them on their own to determine their identities. In the article, “Some Asians’ college strategy: Don’t check ‘Asian’,” some young Hapa reveal the ambivalence and flexibility surrounding their identities. Parents wondering if they should regard their kids as Asian might take a lesson from Tiger Mom Amy Chua, who raised two Hapa children.

Amy describes her two girls, Sophia and Lulu, as having “brown hair, brown eyes, and Asianesque features.” They both speak Chinese and Sophia eats “all kind of organs and organisms, duck webs, pig ears, and sea slugs, critical aspects of Chinese identity.” Yet, on their first trip to China, the girls are treated as spectacles, drawing curious crowds, even in cosmopolitan Shanghai, when people stared, giggled, and pointed at the “two little foreigners who speak Chinese.” At the zoo, when the girls were taking pictures of the baby pandas, the crowd was taking pictures of the girls…

Read the entire article here.

As the child of a native Japanese woman and an Irish American father, a salient feature of my life has been this ethnic heritage and the circumstances into which I was born in post—World War II Tokyo. My life, between Japan and the United States, has been marked heavily by my connections to these diverse roots. I have found meaning in my life through learning to accept and appreciate these roots, to balance their influences and blend them into a synergistic whole. While others may see me as “half,” I know that I am whole. This whole me is greater than the sum of its parts and connects me to something beyond my self, to communities of others and to a collective self.

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, When Half Is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), 2.

Hidden Hapa

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-04-06

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

“Hey, what are you doing over there with the Hapa?”

Kathy and I looked over and there were three of our Japanese American friends at another table smiling at us, one with a mischievous grin. Sandy had jokingly pointed out that I was a mixed blood amidst a group of full bloods. Kathy and I smiled back at them and returned to our conversation.
 
But Kathy suddenly surprised me by saying, “Actually, I’m kind of mixed too; my mother is from Okinawa; like an interracial marriage to Japanese.” I looked over at my friends and remembered that one of them had told me his father was Chinese. Hey, that makes three of us and only two of them!
 
I recalled this incident when I read yesterday in the New York Times that while Asian Americans still have one of the highest interracial marriage rates in the country, Asian Americans are marrying other Asian Americans more often than in recent years. The article reported that many of these couples are of different ethnicities, such as Chinese-Indian and Filipino-Vietnamese. This means that mixed Asian Americans will continue to increase, and that many of them will not be apparently ethnically mixed. Of course, these individuals exist now and the diversity among any ethnically defined subgroup of Asian Americans is far greater than assumed. Little is know about their experience, and I think they are generally not regarded as Hapa and may not consider themselves to be Hapa. But as for others, such as black Asians, who now feel excluded from Hapa circles, a space to express mixed ancestries may be appreciated. Developing these welcome spaces is a challenge facing Asian American communities…

Read the entire essay here.

When Half Is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities

Stanford University Press
September 2012
248 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780804775175
Paper ISBN: 9780804775182

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

“I listen and gather people’s stories. Then I write with the hope to communicate something to people, that they gain something of value by reading these stories. I tell myself that this is something that isn’t going to be done unless I do it, just because of who I am. It’s a way of making my mark, to leave something behind—not that I’m planning on going anywhere, right now.”

So begins Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu in this touching, introspective, and insightful exploration of mixed race Asian American experiences. The son of an Irish American father and Japanese mother, Murphy-Shigematsu has devoted his life to understanding himself as a product of his diverse roots. Across twelve chapters, his reflections are interspersed among profiles of others of biracial and mixed ethnicity and accounts of their journeys to answer a seemingly simple question: Who am I?

Here we meet Margo, the daughter of a Japanese woman and a black American serviceman, who found how others viewed and treated her, both in Japan and the United States, in conflict with her evolving understanding of herself. Born in Australia and raised in San Francisco, Wei Ming struggled with making sense of her Chinese and American heritage, which was further complicated when she began to realize she was bisexual. Rudy, the son of Mexican and Filipino parents, is a former gang member and hip hop artist who redirected his passion for performance into his current career as a professor of Asian Pacific American Studies. Other chapters address issues such as mixed race invisibility, being a transracial adoptee, hapa identity, beauty culture and authenticity testing, and more.

With its attention on people who have been regarded as “half” this or “half” that throughout their lives, these stories make vivid the process of becoming whole.

Contents

• Prologue
• 1. Flowers Amidst the Ashes
• 2. We Must Go On
• 3. For the Community
• 4. English, I Dont Know!
• 5. Bi Bi Girl
• 6. I Am Your Illusion, Your Reality Your Future
• 7. Grits and Sushi
• 8. I Cut across Borders as If They Have No Meaning
• 9. Victims No More
• 10. American Girl in Asia
• 11. Found in Translation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Recommended Readings
• About the Author

In Mixed Company: Multiracial academics, advocates and artists gather for Hapa Japan Conference

Nichi Bei: A mixed plate of Japanese American News & Culture
2011-05-26

Alec Yoshio MacDonald, Nichi Bei Weekly Contributor

As a graduate student in UCLA’s psychology department during the late 1970s, Christine Iijima Hall absorbed scathing criticism about her dissertation. Fellow academics dismissed her project as “a ridiculous piece of research,” she said, and newspapers declined to publicize her need for study participants based on the belief that she was covering a “stupid topic.” Few people, apparently, saw any worth in exploring the identity formation of individuals from mixed black and Japanese backgrounds.
 
Coming from such a background herself, Hall remained undeterred in pursuing the subject. In part, she was motivated to counteract existing literature that painted a disturbing portrait of those like her—in essence, that “we were insane, that there was something wrong with us, we never knew what we wanted, and we killed ourselves.” The studies that yielded these alarming conclusions were flawed, she explained, because they tended to focus on institutionalized patients instead of average folks. By delving into the everyday mixed race experience, she knew she could reveal a more compelling story deserving of attention.
 
In her effort to reframe an issue so widely ignored and narrowly interpreted, Hall ended up producing one of the pioneering works of an emerging discipline. At that time “‘multiracial’ was not a word yet,” she recalled, but thanks in no small measure to her perseverance, the field of multiracial studies exists today.

Scholars in the field recently had the chance to reflect on the past, present and future of their discipline when they came together April 8 and 9 for the Hapa Japan Conference. Held primarily on the campus of UC Berkeley and hosted by the university’s Center for Japanese Studies, it showcased a range of both foundational and current projects concerning multiraciality. As Hall pointed out while revisiting her dissertation for a session called “A Changing Japanese-American Community,” the conference also served as “a reunion for many of us who have done mixed race research.”…

Read the entire article here.

Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan

Social Science Japan Journal
Published Online: 2012-01-19
DOI: 10.1093/ssjj/jyr053

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan, by Laurel D. Kamada. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2009, 272 pp., (hardcover ISBN 978-1-84769-233-7), (paperback ISBN 978-1-84769-232-0)

I hated it when I was little … the school trip photo … only MY face was somehow different, so I hated that, and now … it’s like it’s good, I guess.

Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls captures the raw voices of teenage girls, revealing their intimate feelings about being ‘half ’ in Japan. Laurel Kamada gives us a rich account of adolescent development and identity construction, based on group interviews with six girls of mixed ancestry, presenting their actual voices in conversations with her and each other. Kamada takes up three central questions: (a) tensions and dilemmas of hybridity, (b) celebration of hybridity, and (c) the intersection of hybridity and gender. Her study is informed and inspired by her insider knowledge of the data collection site of Western Japan, and her long residences living, working, and raising her own mixed-ancestry child there. She is careful to position herself as a white, Western woman and acknowledges how she influences the research through reflexive commentary.

The girls are a population rarely heard from—public school students from intact families, with one Japanese parent and one non-Japanese (white-foreign) parent. They are from families who made a conscious decision to raise them by integrating them into Japanese society through education at regular local Japanese schools, rather than sending them to private international schools. Historically, this is a major dilemma for mixed-ancestry children, going back to Miki Sawada’s famous Saunders Home, where she raised and educated children after World War II, and continuing up to the recent Amerasian School in Okinawa. The controversy of whether mixed-ancestry children should be educated in public schools or in special schools has been not only an issue of race but also of class, with those whose families could afford it opting for the friendlier, more comfortable environment of international schools,…

Read or purchase the review here.

My Transnational, Hapa Identity in Question

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-02-19

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

I like to say that I have a transnational, multicultural, multiethnic identity. I am hapa, haafu, I am both/and, Japanese AND American. But I know that many others still see the world in dichotomies, as either/or, Japanese OR American.
 
I know what I look like. I’ve seen my face in the mirror before. But I forget that others might see me differently than I see myself. And I know who I am. But I am aware that others usually do not know me.
 
I was reminded of this while riding in a taxi with my 108 year-old grandmother in Matsuyama, a city on the island of Shikoku. Incredibly, she still likes shopping and chatted excitedly as we drove downtown to Mitsukoshi, her favorite department store. The taxi driver eyed me for a while in the rear view mirror before asking the inevitable question, “Where are you from?” I tried to dampen his curiosity. “Tokyo,” I answered curtly. But he was not easily discouraged, “I mean which country?” “Country?” I repeated, as if it was a dumb question. “I think Tokyo is in Japan, isn’t it?”
 
He looked at me strangely before laughing nervously. He was puzzled. He expected me to say America. Of course I could say America. My father was American and I lived there half my life. But I could also say Japan. I was born here, my mother, wife and children are Japanese and I have lived the other half of my life here. Then again, I could also say that I am multicultural, multilingual, multinational, transnational, international or a global citizen, not just a citizen of any one country…

Read the entire article here.

Hapa Japan Conference

Center for Japanese Studies
Institute of East Asian Studies
University of California, Berkeley
2011-04-08 through 2011-04-09

• Introduction
• Agenda
• Registration
• Tickets: New Vision Award Recipient Jero, A Conversation & Mini-Concert

Introduction

Hapa is a Hawaiian term that is now widely used to describe someone of mixed racial or ethnic heritage. A New York Times article cites that just within the United States, one in seven marriages are now between people from different racial/ethnic backgrounds.

The Center for Japanese Studies, along with the Hapa Japan Database Project and All Nippon Airways, will host the Hapa Japan Conference on April 8th and 9th, featuring specialists in the study of mixed-race Japanese history, identity, and representation. Topics range from the history of mixed-race Japanese in the 1500s, part-Japanese communities in Australia, to the exploration of identity and representation through story-telling, films, and a photo-exhibit. For more information, please reference the conference agenda or contact cjs-events@berkeley.edu.

Multiracial: Border Crosser: Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu navigates nations, cultures and academia

Nichi Bei: A mixed plate of Japanses American News & Culture
2010-05-20

Akemi Johnson

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu is looking again toward Japan.

A psychotherapist, writer and academic, Murphy-Shigematsu has lived in Palo Alto, Calif. the past eight years, teaching at Stanford University and running an independent multicultural consulting practice. Life in the Bay Area, he says, is easy for someone like him, the son of an Irish American man and Japanese woman. Conflict—tensions associated with being mixed race—is rare.

This wasn’t always the case. Early in his career, Murphy-Shigematsu, who was born in Tokyo in 1952 and raised in Massachusetts, faced questions about his legitimacy working in Asian American studies. In 1984 he began an internship at the National Asian American Psychology Training Center. One of the first people who welcomed him there said, “So, you’re interested in working with Asian Americans?”

“That really threw me,” Murphy-Shigematsu said. The other man saw him as an outsider to the workshop, whereas Murphy-Shigematsu viewed himself as an insider, a fellow Asian American.

Or there was the time in the late ’80s when Murphy-Shigematsu spoke to an Asian American studies class at San Francisco State University.

“Are you Asian?” the students asked.

“Why do you ask?” Murphy-Shigematsu replied.

“Because you don’t look Asian,” they said.

At academic conferences, Murphy-Shigematsu would stand out physically, and some people would regard him with an attitude of “Why are you here?”

An influential figure for Murphy-Shigematsu during that time was Lane Hirabayashi. Hirabayashi, a noted mixed-race Japanese American scholar, had advocated using the word “hapa,” and claiming the right to self-define, instead of being labeled by well-intentioned others. Impressed with this, Murphy-Shigematsu sought out Hirabayashi…

Read the entire article here.