Mixed Race Studies

Who Gets To Be ‘Hapa’?

Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed
National Public Radio
2016-08-08

Akemi Johnson

Sunset in Waikiki: Tourists sipping mai tais crowded the beachside hotel bar. When the server spotted my friend and me, he seemed to relax. “Ah,” he said, smiling. “Two hapa girls.”

He asked if we were from Hawaii. We weren’t. We both have lived in Honolulu — my friend lives there now — but hail from California. It didn’t matter. In that moment, he recognized our mixed racial backgrounds and used “hapa” like a secret handshake, suggesting we were aligned with him: insiders and not tourists.

Like many multiracial Asian-Americans, I identify as hapa, a Hawaiian word for “part” that has spread beyond the islands to describe anyone who’s part Asian or Pacific Islander. When I first learned the term in college, wearing it felt thrilling in a tempered way, like trying on a beautiful gown I couldn’t afford. Hapa seemed like the identity of lucky mixed-race people far away, people who’d grown up in Hawaii as the norm, without “Chink” taunts, mangled name pronunciations, or questions about what they were…

Read the entire article here.

A Letter From Young Asian-Americans To Their Families About Black Lives Matter

Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed
National Public Radio
2016-07-27

Shereen Marisol Meraji, Reporter

Kat Chow, Digital Journalist

In the Facebook Live video streamed earlier this month by Diamond Reynolds after her fiance, Philando Castile, was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in a Minnesota suburb, Reynolds identified the man who shot Castile as “Chinese” as she narrated the scene.

It was later understood that Castile was shot by Jeronimo Yanez, who is Latino. In the meantime, Reynolds’ testimony gave Christina Xu, a 28-year-old Chinese-American ethnographer who lives in New York City, flashbacks to earlier this year, when many Asian-Americans around the country protested the prosecution and conviction of Peter Liang, the Chinese-American cop who shot and killed Akai Gurley in a dark stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project in 2014…

The protesters said Liang was being treated as a scapegoat at a time of heightened focus on police shootings of unarmed black people, pointing out that white law enforcement officials involved in several high-profile cases in recent years have not faced similar consequences.

For Xu, and other younger Asian-Americans who have shown support for the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-police brutality causes, this was disturbing. “To me, clearly justice is about getting justice for these black families,” Xu says. “Not about making sure that Asian people have the same privilege as white people.”…

Listen to the podcast here. Read the article here. Read the transcript here.

Babies Of Color Are Now The Majority, Census Says

National Public Radio
2016-07-01

Kendra Yoshinaga

Today’s generation of schoolchildren looks much different than one just a few decades ago. Nonwhites are expected to become the majority of the nation’s children by 2020, as our colleague Bill Chappell reported last year. This is now the reality among the very youngest Americans: babies.

Babies of color now outnumber non-Hispanic white babies (1 year or younger), according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The newest estimate shows that on July 1, 2015, the population of racial or ethnic minority babies was 50.2 percent…

…NPR could not reach any babies for comment.

Read the entire article here.

The Agonizing Collision Of Love And Slavery In ‘Thomas Jefferson’

Book Reviews
National Public Radio
2016-04-06

Jean Zimmerman

Did Thomas Jefferson dream of his enslaved concubine, Sally Hemings? No one knows. Jefferson himself never wrote a word about his constant companion of almost 40 years. But author Stephen O’Connor gives us a brave and wondrous dream of a novel that renders the fraught subject of their relationship a fascinating, complex and ultimately extremely addictive tale. At the core of O’Connor’s Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings lies a conundrum: How could the author of five words that shook the world — all men are created equal — keep his lover enslaved for decades?

Little is known of Hemings, while Jefferson is — after Lincoln — perhaps the most well documented of any figure in American history. She was the daughter of a slave and a Southern planter, the cousin of the two children whom she served at Monticello and who bore a spooky resemblance to their mother, Jefferson’s late wife. Begun when she was an adolescent, the affair lasted a lifetime, and despite the liberty-espousing statesman’s acute criticism of slavery, he never freed Sally Hemings. Together they produced four living children, who were also born into slavery, but freed upon Jefferson’s death — the only slave family so liberated by him…

Read the entire review here.

Filipino Americans: Blending Cultures, Redefining Race

Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed
National Public Radio
2016-05-24

Renee Montagne, Host

There are over 3 million people of Filipino heritage living in the U.S., and many say they relate better to Latino Americans than other Asian American groups. In part, that can be traced to the history of the Philippines, which was ruled by Spain for more than 300 years. That colonial relationship created a cultural bond that persists to this day.

It’s the topic of the book The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race. Author Anthony Ocampo spoke about the book with Morning Edition’s Renee Montagne.

Read the interview highlights here. Read the transcript here. Download the interview here.

Obama Gets All In His Blackness At Howard

Code Switch
National Public Radio
2016-05-10

Leah Donnella

“Be confident in your heritage. Be confident in your blackness,” President Barack Obama told graduates and their families at Howard University’s 2016 Commencement Ceremony. It was one of many moments in a speech that honored the achievements of black folks — many Howard alumni — and called on graduates to get and stay politically active. His speech was met with laughter, generous applause, and largely positive reviews. Paul Holston, editor-in-chief of Howard’s student newspaper The Hilltop, wrote that Obama’s address was “strong, eloquent, and inspirational,” and would “go down as one of the most significant moments in Howard University’s history.”

Howard students weren’t the only ones cheering over the speech. Janell Ross at The Washington Post lauded Obama’s call for “empathy and [an] expanded moral imagination” as one of the few surprising and thought-provoking messages that graduates will receive this season. On Twitter, Slate writer Jamelle Bouie called the speech “a great mediation on democracy AND a celebration of black life.” Mathew Rodriguez at Mic described Obama’s speech as “one of the best and blackest he’s given.”

Melissa Harris-Perry, editor-at-large of Elle, wrote that Obama’s speech was remarkable in its treatment of gender as well as race, and proved “that he is our most black, feminist president to date” by highlighting the genius of black women like Lorraine Hansberry, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer and Zora Neale Hurston:

“Once again, [Obama] put black women at the very center of the stories he told and the lessons he imparted. As he warmed up, he jokingly referred to ‘Shonda Rhimes owning Thursday night’ and ‘Beyonce running the world.’ They were casual references, not central themes of his talk, but even here he deployed two boss black women as representatives of black excellence and achievement.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Brain Likes Categories. Where Should It Put Mixed-Race People?

Shots: Health News from NPR
National Public Radio
2016-03-15

Katherine Du

Humans like to place things in categories and can struggle when things can’t easily be categorized. That also applies to people, a study finds, and the brain’s visual biases may play a role in perceptions of mixed-race people.

The study, published in Psychological Science on Monday, asked people to sort images of people as either white or black, but it included multiracial faces in the mix, too. There has been much less research into attitudes about mixed-race people, even though they are the fastest-growing racial group in the United States.

The 235 study participants, who all self-identified as white, signed up through the online survey site Mechanical Turk and provided their ZIP codes. The researchers then used U.S. Census data to determine their level of exposure to other racial groups…

…”Where you live influences how easily you process biracial faces which may, without your awareness, be affecting your attitudes toward them,” according to Diana Sanchez, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers and an author of the study…

Read the entire article here.

What Would It Mean To Have A ‘Hapa’ Bachelorette?

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2016-03-13

Akemi Johnson

On a recent episode of The Bachelor, the ABC dating reality show that ends its 20th season Monday night, contestant Caila Quinn brings Ben Higgins home to meet her interracial family.

“Have you ever met Filipinos before?” Quinn’s mother asks, leading Higgins into a dining room where the table is filled with traditional Filipino food.

“I don’t know,” he replies. “No. I don’t think so.”

As they sit around the adobo and pancit, Quinn’s father talks to Higgins, white man to white man. What comes with dating Quinn, the father says, “is a very special Philippine community.” Quinn grimaces.

“I had no idea what I was getting into when I married Caila’s mother,” the father says. But being married to a Filipina, he assures Higgins, has been “the most fun” and “magical.”

This scene can be read as an attempt by The Bachelor franchise to dispel criticisms (and the memory of a 2012 lawsuit) concerning its whitewashed casts. It shows how these attempts can be clunky at best, offensive and creepy at worst.

Quinn’s run also demonstrates how, as this rose-strewn, fantasy-fueled romance machine tries to include more people of color, diversification looks like biracial Asian-American — often known as “hapa” — women…

…Mixed-race Asian-white women become the perfect vehicles for diversity on this show because they are “white enough to present to the family,” as Morning said, while still being exotic enough to fill a quota. Morning suggested they also get a boost from the model minority myth and the recent idea that being multiracial is “cool.”…

…Myra Washington, assistant professor of communication at the University of New Mexico, predicted an increase in black contestants if Quinn becomes the bachelorette. “Not Wesley Snipes black, because this is still TV,” she said. She guessed there would be more mixed-race African-Americans, brown-skinned men, Latinos. But colonial legacies and systems of power die hard. “I think she’ll ultimately end up with a white dude,” she said.

Read the entire article here.

An Emerging Entry In America’s Multiracial Vocabulary: ‘Blaxican’

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2016-03-08

Adrian Florido

When Melissa Adams and her sister were growing up in Lynwood, near Compton, Calif., their black father and Mexican mother taught them to be proud of all aspects of their identity: They were black, and they were Mexican.

At home, that came easy. Publicly, it was harder. Consider the time Melissa was named valedictorian of her middle school when she was 13. It was the first time anyone could remember a black student winning that honor at her school.

“Everyone was excited,” she said over breakfast at her family’s house recently. “It was the first black valedictorian!” School administrators planned a special ceremony for her, and the dean called Adams into her office to congratulate her.

But when Adams walked in, the dean’s smile melted away…

…Like Adams and Tillman, many have struggled to explain their racial identity to the outside world, and sometimes even to understand it themselves.

Much of this has to do with the fact that biracial identity in the United States has often been understood in terms of black and white. And to the extent that labels are helpful for quickly self-identifying, they don’t always exist for the diversity of racial possibilities that mixed Americans increasingly want to see recognized. When it comes to mixed-race in America, Mexican-American author Richard Rodriguez has written, we rely on an “old vocabulary — black, white,” but, “we are no longer a black-white nation.”

This may be why in LA, many young people who are both black and Mexican are turning to a handy word to describe themselves: “Blaxican.”

It’s not a new term. Walter Thompson-Hernandez, a researcher at the University of Southern California who focuses on immigration and race, has traced references back to the 1980s. But it has gained new prominence in the past few years, since he launched a project called “Blaxicans of L.A.” It’s an Instagram account featuring photos of Blaxicans — with their varied hues, hair textures and facial profiles — accompanied by a quote from each person offering an insight on the Blaxican experience…

Read the entire article here.

Did Obama Inspire A Big Debate On Identity? You Weighed In

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2016-02-23

Leah Donnella

Laurie Avocado/Flickr Creative Commons

Last week, Code Switch raised the curtain on “The Obama Effect,” our quest to understand what the nation’s first black president has to do with the big national conversations on identity and inclusion swirling in full force right now.

That quest began with you. On Friday, we took to Twitter with the hashtag #NPRObamaEffect and asked you to weigh in: If somebody else had come into office on Jan. 20, 2009, do you think we’d be having all these conversations about identity? Has the way you identify yourself as a person of color — or as a white person — changed over the last eight years? Have your personal politics around race shifted post-Obama?

Some people said yes, but weren’t lining up to credit Obama:…

Read the entire article here.