Mixed Race Studies

The Transpacific Shift in Mixed-Race Studies: Sawyer Seminar II

University of Southern California, Univeristy Park Campus
Doheny Memorial Library (DML)
East Asian Seminar Room (110C)
Friday, 2013-02-08, 10:00-16:00 PST (Local Time)

Presented by the Center for Japanese Religions and Culture’s “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars Series at the University of Southern California.

Conference Convenors:

Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion
University of Southern California

Brian C. Bernards, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Southern California

Velina Hasu Houston, Associate Dean for Faculty Recognition and Development, Director of Dramatic Writing and Professor
University of Southern California

PRESENTERS – MORNING SESSION (10:00 AM)

“Filipino-Mexican Relations, Mestizaje, and Identity in Colonial and Contemporary Mexico”
Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University

“Unruly Identities in the Hispanic Pacific”
Jason Chang, Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut

Respondent: Robert Chao Romero, Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

PRESENTERS – AFTERNOON SESSION (1:30 PM)

“Erasing Race and Sex: Adoption of Stateless GI babies in Early Cold War America”
Bongsoo Park, Independent scholar; Ph.D. U-Minnesota
University of Minnesota

“Seeing Race: Korean ‘GI Babies’ and Legacies of U.S. Neocolonial Care”
Susie Woo, ACLS New Faculty Fellow in American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

Respondent: Lily Anne Welty, IAC Postdoctoral Fellow, Asian American Studies Center
University of California, Los Angeles

For more information, click here.

Research Matters June 27, 2012

USC Dornsife Research Office Weekly Updates
University of Southern California
2012-06-27

Stephan Haas, Vice Dean of Research

Awards

This information is based upon official award data from the Contracts and Grants office. It is provided to make you aware of the interesting research that is being conducted by our colleagues and that is supported through extramural sources…

• Duncan Williams, Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, Critical Mixed Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation…

Read the entire update here.

Postdoctoral Scholar Fellowship Trainee [Critical Mixed-Race Studies]

University of Southern California
USC Laboratory and Research Jobs
2012-10-10

The University of Southern California (USC), founded in 1880, is located in the heart of downtown L.A. and is the largest private employer in the City of Los Angeles. As an employee of USC, you will be a part of a world-class research university and a member of the “Trojan Family,” which is comprised of the faculty, students and staff that make the university what it is.

The Center for Japanese Religions and Culture (CJRC) in the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California invites applications for a one-year Andrew Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars on the Comparative Study of Cultures Postdoctoral Fellowship, beginning Fall 2013. The fellowship has an annual salary of $45,000 with benefits. The field of specialization is Critical Mixed-Race Studies (area and period open). The Fellow will be given research space at CJRC, and will be expected to participate in the Mellon Foundation’s John E. Sawyer Seminar series, “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach,” organized by CJRC. The Fellow must have a Ph.D. in hand, and should be within 5 years of receiving the Ph.D., at the beginning of the appointment. To apply, please submit an application letter, a CV, a brief description of your research (including both the dissertation and current/future projects), and a dossier of three letters of recommendation to Kana Yoshida at: mailto:cjrc@dornsife.usc.edu.

In order to be considered for this position, applicants are also required to submit an electronic application through the USC Jobs Web site, https://jobs.usc.edu/.

Review of applications will begin on Jan. 1, 2013, though applications will be accepted until the position is filled.

USC strongly values diversity and is committed to equal opportunity in employment. Women and men, and members of all racial and ethnic groups, are encouraged to apply.

For more information, click here.

The arresting eye: Race and the detection of deception

University of Southern California
December 2005
282 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3220115
ISBN: 9780542713217

Jinny Huh

A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH)

With increasing rates of miscegenation and racially invisible bodies, how is race to be determined? This dissertation examines the dynamics and discourse of race detection through a comparative analysis of detective fiction and passing narratives, two genres that witnessed a simultaneous rise during the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that the detective fiction genre in many ways prospers and responds to the anxiety of racial indecipherability by creating a systematic method of detection. By examining narratives of detection and passing written by both white and ethnic authors ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle and Earl Derr Biggers to Pauline Hopkins and Winnifred Eaton, among others, this study demonstrates that the politics and mechanics of race detection is highly specific to the eye of the gazer attuned to distinguishing the signs of race. For example, while Dupin and Holmes may exhibit mystically and supernaturally intuitive powers, Pauline Hopkins (author of the first African American detective in Hagar’s Daughter) shows that intuition and race detection is a necessary component of the African American community. On the other hand, Winnifred Eaton (the first Asian American novelist) responds to the obsession with detection by promoting a rhetoric of undetection in the emergence of Asian American fiction. Finally, in response to Eaton’s celebration of undetection within the Asian American context, Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan series demonstrate the anxieties of promoting an Asian American detective hero during the height of Yellow Peril paranoia.

In addition to examining the politics of race detection in literature, this dissertation also explores how numerous disciplines formulate their own concepts of “racial knowledges” via a discourse of detection (such as film studies, visual studies, law, ethnography, and literary history). As such, through a comparative focus which encompasses multiple levels (19th/20th century, male/female, British/American, African American/Asian American, literature/film), my study also addresses the potential threat and implications of racial erasure to Ethnic Studies specifically and Civil Rights overall.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Whispers of Norbury: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Modernist Crisis of Racial (Un)Detection
• Chapter Two: Intuitive Faculties and Racial Clairvoyance: Pauline Hopkins and the Emergence of Multiethnic Detective Fiction
• Chapter Three: The Legacy of Winnifred Eaton: Ethnic Ambidexterity, Undetection as Guerilla Tactics, and the Emergence of Asian American Fiction
• Chapter Four: “The Jaundiced Eye”: Charlie Chan and the Mysterious Disappearance of a Detective Hero
• Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

Trans-American Modernisms: Racial Passing, Travel Writing, and Cultural Fantasies of Latin America

University of Southern California
August 2009
311 pages

Ruth Blandón

Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH)

In my historical examination of the literary works of Nella Larsen, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Carl Van Vechten, I investigate U.S. modernists’ interest in Latin America and their attempts to establish trans-American connections. As they engage with and write about countries such as Brazil, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Venezuela as utopian spaces, these writers often tend to relegate Latin America to the status of a useful trope, one that allows them to negotiate a variety of identitarian and sexual anxieties.

The domestic political landscape that informs the desire for migration to the Latin Americas—whether real or fantastical—in the early twentieth century leads to Johnson’s depiction of the savvy and ambitious titular character in his first and only novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, to Van Vechten’s, Larsen’s, and Fauset’s fantastical Brazil in their respective Nigger Heaven, Passing, and Plum Bun. Hughes’s translation of Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s poetry illustrates his straddling of national and color lines through the translation of language. These writers react to Jim Crow laws, one-drop rules, and color lines in their connections to and fantasies of the Latin Americas. What then of writers who make similar trans-American connections and constructions, but who write from a space of relative privilege, however resistant they are to that privilege? Consider William Carlos Williams, who negotiates the pressures of assimilation in the United States as he attempts to assert his Afro Puerto Rican and Anglo Dominican heritages. Although Williams is commonly recalled as an “all-American” poet, his works betray his constant attempts to harness three perpetually shifting and overlapping identities: that of a son of immigrants, of a first generation “American,” and of a son of the Americas.

The trans-American connections I reveal span the fantastical to the truly cross-cultural. In placing United States modernism and the Harlem Renaissance within a larger hemispheric context, I shift our sense of U.S. modernism in general, but also of the Harlem Renaissance’s place within U.S. modernism in particular.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One:
  • Reading, Misreading, and Language Passing in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Along This Way
  • Blackness under the law
  • James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way
  • The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Two:
  • Brazilian Schemes and Utopian Dreams in Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun, and Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven
  • Historical Context
  • From Liberia to Brazil—A Change of Venue
  • Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven
  • Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, “Home,” and Brazil
  • Larsen’s Passing and Brazil as Utopia/Dystopia
  • Conclusion: Utopia vs. Brazilian Reality
• Chapter Three:
  • All-American Me: William Carlos Williams’s Construction and Deconstruction of the Self
  • Cultural Context—Casta and Passing
  • Blurring Cultural Boundaries: “Only the whites of my eyes were affected.”
  • The Specter of Blackness: “I had visions of being lynched…”
  • In The American Grain: “I am—the brutal thing itself.”
  • Translation: “El que no a vista Sevilla, […] no a vista maravilla!”
  • Conclusion: “I’ll keep my way in spite of all.”
• Chapter Four:
  • “Look Homeward Angel Now”: Travel, Translation, and Langston Hughes’s Quest for Home
  • Langston Hughes in Mexico and Cuba—1907-1948: Mexico
  • Cuba
  • Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén in Spain
  • Translation, Analogy, and the “I”
  • Of Poetry, Jazz, Son, and Rumba
  • The Translations
  • Conclusion: Translating, Travel, and “Home”
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• Figure 1: James Weldon Johnson, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1932.
• Figure 2: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Pablo Picasso, 1907.
• Figure 3: “Noire et Blanche.” Man Ray, 1926.
• Figure 4: “Blues.” Archibald Motley, 1929.
• Figure 5: “An Idyll of the Deep South.” Aaron Douglas, 1934.
• Figure 6: Bessie Smith, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.
• Figure 7: Billie Holiday, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1949.
• Figure 8: The Williams Family
• Figure 9: “De Español y Mulata; Morisca.” [“From Spaniard and Mulatto, Morisca.”] Miguel Cabrera, 1763.
• Figure 10: “De Mestizo y d India; Coyote.”[“From Mestizo and Indian, Coyote.”] Miguel Cabrera, 1763.
• Figure 11: William Carlos Williams, circa 1903.
• Figure 12: Elena Hoheb Williams
• Figure 13: Langston Hughes
• Figure 14: Diego Rivera with Frida Kahlo, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932.
• Figure 15: Nicolás Guillén

Read the entire dissertation here.

Multiracial Politics or the Politics of being Multiracial?: Racial Theory, Civic Engagement, and Socio-political Participation in a Contemporary Society

University of Southern California
August 2010
376 pages

Jungmiwha Suk Bullock

A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

This dissertation examines the impacts of historical and contemporary racial theories, socio-political movements, and grassroots mobilization efforts of community-based organizations in transforming the politics to define multiracial identity and the “two or more races” population in the United States. Using an interdisciplinary and mixed methods research approach, I investigate the shifting and contested ways the multiracial population is defined in public and private discourses, paying particular attention to the complexities this community raises within and among monoracial identified communities. Examining the multiracial population in the U.S. has a significant and critical place in the larger trajectory of social scientific scholarship on race, gender, class, and other intersecting identities. This body of research counters the argument that multiple identity formation is inconsequential to theory, civic engagement, and socio-political participation in a contemporary society. This study urges scholars to (re)examine how race and ethnicity continues to be framed, analyzed, interrogated, and understood in ways that are restricted by historically racist/racialized moments that still linger today. These moments, I argue, are sharpened and more pronounced when centering the politics of what it means to claim a multiracial identity in America in the twenty-first century.

Three primary research questions examined in this study are: 1) How do we define the multiracial population in the United States and what do these definitions offer about racial and ethnic ideologies and the future for public policy post-Census 2000?; 2) What critical insights can centering the experiences of multiracial Americans and the efforts to define them on the local, state, and/or national levels (publicly and privately), offer for other groups in American society?; and 3) Under what conditions is it possible to politically mobilize around this shifting and contested category and what are the unmet needs of this emerging population?

The theoretical model for this study was Grounded Theory. Principle data collection methods were the “insider-outsider” and case study research approaches using extensive face-to-face audio and/or photographed interviews; participant and field observations of key local, state, and national events, including U.S. Census proceedings and California Senate Judiciary hearings; and content analysis of primary and secondary documents, including media coverage and organizational archives. Data was collected between 2004 and 2009 in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, New York, and Sacramento. These cities exhibited the most heightened multiracial activity across the country in this timeframe. I also investigated exclusive, never before documented, behind the scenes initiatives to recognize the unmet needs of this emerging population through an in-depth case study of the Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA)—one of the oldest leading national advocacy organizations for multiracial, multiethnic, and transracially adopted individuals, families, organizations, and allies.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Introduction/Chapter 1: Multiracial Politics or the Politics of Being Multiracial?: The Challenge of Racial Biology and Hegemonoracial Ideology in a Contemporary Society
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 2: The Multi-Whos?: Unpacking the Historical Discourseon Defining the Multiracial Population in the United States Census and in Social Science Research, 1850 to 2000
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 3: Simultaneous Identities: Comparative Interviews Among a Diverse Combination of Multiracial Experiences
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 4: From Manasseh to AMEA: A Case Study of Multiracial Community Building and Grassroots Activism through the Association of MultiEthnic Americans
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 5: Civically Engaging Identities: Keys to Effective Mobilization Toward Building a Collective Multiracial Community
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 6/Conclusion: Beyond the Politics of Being Multiracial: Toward a Revised Theoretical and Pragmatic Approach to Multiracial Presence in the U.S.
  • Endnotes
• Bibliography

List of Tables

1. Racial Designations to Classify Multiracial Identity on U.S. Census Enumeration Schedules (1850 to 2000)
2. Racial Designations to Classify Multiracial Identity on U.S. Census Enumeration Schedules (1850 to 2000) and a Historical Trajectory of Racial and Ethnic Theories in the United States
3. Participants Reported Self-Identification
4. Self-Reported Descriptions Given By Participants on Where Primarily Raised
5. Timeline of the Formation of Multiracial Organizations by Decade

List of Figures

1. Multiracial Births in California, 1997
2. Population Projection Excluding Multiracial Identity in California
3. Intersectionality Diagram
4. Intersectionality + Race/Ethnicity/Culture/Nationality Diagram
5. Multiracial Identity + Intersectionality Flowchart Diagram
6. Multi/Monoracial Identity + Intesectionality Venn Diagram
7. Flowchart of “Mulatto” Identity Formation as Depicted by Michael Davenport in “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics” (1911)
8. AMEA Organizational Structure
9. Multiracial Complexity Web of Identity/ies

Read the entire dissertation here.

Campus Colorlines: The Changing Boundaries of Race Within Institutions of Higher Education in the Post-Civil Rights Era

University of Southern California
August 2007
675 pages

Patricia Elizabeth Literte, Assistant Professor of Sociology
California State University, Fullerton

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School University of Southern California In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

The post-Civil Rights era has been characterized by numerous challenges to traditional understandings of race. The dismantling of legalized segregation and discrimination, ongoing immigration from Asia and Latin America, increasing acceptance of interracial contact and relationships, and relatively unceasing conflict between the Western and Arab world, are just some of the socio-political trends and events which have yielded an increasingly fluid, complex, and intricate racial terrain. Given the increasing fluidity of race in U.S. society, the overarching goal of this dissertation is to illuminate the nature and implications of changing racial identity boundaries in the post-Civil Rights era. In order to fulfill this goal, I examine (1) the experiences of university students who defy conventional racial identity categorizations, (2) the processes of organization/mobilization in which these students engage, and (3) the role universities play in shaping and responding to these students, whose racial identities and politics are often incongruent with the institutions’ views of race. The majority of research on college students’ racial identities and racialized political activity focuses on conventional understandings of racial identity, which rely on the assumption that there are five singular racial categories – black/African American, Latino/a, white, Asian American, and Native American. Less is known about racial identities and corollary political activity which falls outside these boundaries. My dissertation addresses this gap through a two-tieredanalysis. First, I comparatively examine how students come to organize/mobilize around two identities which challenge singular or “monoracial” conceptualizations of race: (1) biracial identity and (2) “people of color” identity. Second, I examine how monoracially oriented student services (i.e., black student service offices) respond to such organization/mobilization. Study of these processes within the particular domain of higher education can assist student service practitioners in the formulation and implementation of programming on increasingly diverse campuses and can provide insight into how students can more fully participate in their universities’ public life. My methods of data collection include interviews (N = 90) with students and administrators, student focus groups, observation, and archival research.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abstract
• Chapter 1: Introduction: The Changing Nature of Race in Post-Civil Rights Society
• Part 1: Institutional Histories: Understanding the Racial Dynamics of Three Universities
  • Chapter 2: Western University: The Long, Strange Path from Racial Leftism to Colorblindness
  • Chapter 3: California University: A Bastion of Conservatism Rethinks its Identity in the Post-Affirmative Action Era
  • Chapter 4: Bay University: A Majority-Minority School Struggles and Embraces Multiculturalism
• Part 2: The Construction and Mobilization of Biracial Identity: Disrupting the Monoracial Landscape of Universities
  • Chapter 5: Western University and California University: Biracial Students: Facing Double Consciousness, Otherness, and the Complexities of Organizing
  • Chapter 6: Bay University: The Force of Working Class Status, the One Drop Rule, and Mestizaje: The Absence of Biracial Students
• Part 3: “We all share the same struggle”: Coalition Building and the Formation of People of Color Identity among University Students
  • Chapter 7: Western University: The Power of Students of Color: A Tradition of Resistance Continues in the Wake of Proposition 209
  • Chapter 8: California University: Contesting Apathy and the Strength of Monoracialism: Students of Color Struggle to Engage New Racial Politics
  • Chapter 9: Bay University: Working Class Obligations, Segregation, and the Black-Brown Conflict: The Diminishment of Coalitions and People of Color Identity among Students
  • Chapter 10: Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Impurely Raced // Purely Erased: Toward a Rhetorical Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing

University of Southern California
May 2009
348 pages

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMMUNICATION)

This dissertation develops a theory about the interrelations between mixed race identification and passing as they pertain to the field of rhetoric and to United States slavery and segregation settings. I introduce the concept of (bi)racial passing to argue that passing is a form of rhetoric that identifies and represents passers intersectionally via synecdoche. In Chapter One I introduce the rhetorical, cultural, and conceptual significances of passing based on a review of the literature. I introduce the central argument of the project by proposing a theory of (bi)racial passing that considers the problems and possibilities of mixed race representation and mobility as a bridge between Platonic episteme and Sophistic doxa as well as between the material and symbolic components of biracial categorization. Chapter Two considers the historical narrative of Ellen Craft at the intersection of synecdoche and irony to highlight and transgress real and imagined borders that stretch beyond a simple consideration of race. Taking up the issue of appropriation through a detailed critique of the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, my third chapter considers passing as an antecedent form of identity theft and as a form of resistance. In contrast to the cases examined in these chapters, my fourth chapter explores Harper’s Iola Leroy, as a fictional account of passing that ties synecdoche to eloquence, articulating the tension between the threat of passing contained in the Plessy ruling and its relation to contemporary attempts at measuring discrimination at the intersection of race, class, and gender.

My fifth chapter takes a turn by exploring the literary and cinematic versions of The Human Stain, as contemporary narratives of passing based on tragedy and synecdoche in the context of minstrel performance and Jim and Jane Crow segregation. My last chapter fleshes out the theory introduced in the first, working toward a theory of (bi)racial passing that rethinks inadequate dichotomies of episteme vs. doxa as well as white vs. black. Then, blending the critical race theory of intersectionality with rhetorical personae I explain the significances of synecdoche, metonymy, irony, appropriation, eloquence, and tragedy in the various instances of passing explored. At a theoretical level, I rethink the inadequate dichotomies of episteme vs. doxa as well as white vs. black. I conclude with a rhetorical theory of passing based on the fourth persona and six original passwords that present opportunities for future research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• Chapter One: Running Along the Color Line: Racial Passing and the Problem of Mixed Race Identity
• Chapter One References
• Chapter Two: The “Craft” of Passing: Rhetorical Irony, Intersectionality and the Case of Ellen Craft
• Chapter Two References
• Chapter Three: “Membership Has Its Privileges:” Plessy’s Passing and the Threat of Identity Theft
• Chapter Three References
• Chapter Four: “She Was Above All Sincere:” (Bi)racial Passing and Rhetorical Eloquence in Iola Leroy
• Chapter Four References
• Chapter Five: “A Crow that Doesn’t Know How to Be a Crow:” Reading The Human Stain and Racial Passing from Text to Film
• Chapter Five References
• Chapter Six: Things Said in Passing: Toward a Rhetorical: Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing
• Chapter Six References
• Bibliography

LIST OF FIGURES

• Figure 1: Rev. Rafael Matos Sr
• Figure 2: “The New Eve”
• Figure 3: Dramatic Theater of Passing
• Figure 4: Ellen Craft in Plain Clothes
• Figure 5: Ellen Craft as Mr. Johnson
• Figure 6: D. F. Desdunes
• Figure 7: Homer A. Plessy
• Figure 8: Hopkins as Elder Silk
• Figure 9: Miller as Younger Silk
• Figure 10: Rhetorical Intersections of Passing
• Figure 11: Dramatic Theater of Passing as Rhetorical and Intersectional
• Figure 12: Layers of Meaning: The Dramatic and Tropological Roots of (Bi)racial Passing
• Figure 13: Neoclassical Elements of Passing
• Figure 14: The Truths of (Bi)racial Passing
• Figure 15: (Bi)racial Passing as Material and Symbolic

Read the entire dissertation here.

A Chat with Kat: Marissa Hui, President of HapaSC

Her Campus
2011-02-28

Katharine Goldman

I remember clearly the first time someone used the term “hapa”: I was a freshman, waiting for Campus Cruiser in front of New/North, when a random guy asked me if I was hapa.

Not knowing what it meant, I asked for a clarification. He told me that hapa is Hawaiian for half—it’s traditionally used as a term to refer to people who are half-Asian and half-Caucasian.

Marissa Hui, a senior communications major, knows the intricacies of this term well. She’s the president of HapaSC, an organization on-campus [University of Southen California] dedicated to exploring what it means to be of mixed race, and the exploration of identity that comes with the territory.

HC: Tell me about HapaSC.

Marissa: HapaSC has been around campus for about 10 years. It started originally as a club specifically for students that fit the traditional meaning of “hapa:” half-Asian and half-white. Since then, it’s become an all-encompassing club for students of multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural backgrounds.

Our mission is to create a diverse community where people can explore their identity. Specifically we deal with a lot of topics about being mixed raced and try to cater to that student population. Sometimes students who are mixed race don’t identify completely with [single-culture] groups, or want to be able to explore their backgrounds within one group and not have to sacrifice one group for another…

Read the entire article here.

“What is black, white and yellow all over?”: An analysis of the racial experiences of people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage

University of Southern California
May 2007
208 pages

Bruce Calvin Hoskins

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Southern California In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology)

It has been argued that the increase of people of multiracial heritage in our society represents the fulfillment of the assimilation process. People of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage have been singled out in multiple works as posing a direct challenge to how race is understood in the United States and that this group’s assertion of their multiracial identity will ultimately lead to a raceless society (Williams-Leon and Nakashima 2001; Root 1996; Hollinger 1995; Root 1992). Therefore, this research uses in-depth interviews of thirty-two (32) people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage and six (6) sets of interracial Asian and white and Asian and black parents to critically analyze to what degree their lived experiences are consistent with a society that has assimilated people of different racial categories.

In order to determine levels of assimilation for these groups, this research will use a racial formations framework to examine how racial categories are constructed through “racial logic” and how race is given meaning within the lives of multiracial people and through parents of multiracial children. This will be done by showing situations where society will ascribe a race onto a person of multiracial heritage, how the person of multiracial heritage will use their “biology” to support or refute these claims, and how that same multiracial person might develop a racial identity that may or may not be consistent with how they look or their actual racial heritage.

Demonstrating how race is socially constructed will reveal how being mixed with white is fundamentally different than being mixed with black. This will be shown by demonstrating that Asian/white people have more identity options than Asian/black people, how families socially enforce to their children which races are considered acceptable marriage partners, and how society uses a universal anti-black context to discriminate against people of Asian/black heritage.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Abstract
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2
  • Literature Review
  • Chapter Endnotes
• Chapter 3
  • Methodology
  • Chapter Endnotes
• Chapter 4: “What Are You?”
  • How Multiracial People Construct an Internal Racial Identity
  • Chapter Endnotes
• Chapter 5: “What are you?” Part II
  • The creation of external and expressed racial identity
• Chapter 6: “Can’t We All Just Get Along?”
  • The External Context of Racial Identity Formation
• Chapter 7: All in the Family
  • Learning Racial Hierarchy from the Ones You Love
  • Chapter Endnotes
• Chapter 8: Conclusions
  • From the Beginning to the End then Back to the Beginning
• Bibliography
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Questions for Multiracial Person
  • Appendix B: Questions for Interracial Parents

Read the entire dissertation here.