Mixed Race Studies

…The Korean word for a bi or multiracial person, despite the composition of their mixture, is honhyeol (in), which literally translates into impure blood. There has been a “pride” instilled in Koreans for their “ethnic homogeneity” which has resulted in “fear and distrust of outsiders” (The Economist, 2006). The connotation for Korea, which bases its national identity upon the notion of Koreans descending from one common ancestor and speaking one language, is that these offspring of interracial relationships are not Korean, because they have more than Korean blood coursing through their veins. It makes sense then that the oppositional identity of these “pure blooded” Koreans came about as a sort of resistance to the first Chinese invasion, then Japanese imperialism, and then finally Western imperialism in the form of American occupation after the Korean War. Korean nationalism was wrapped up in the idea of “consanguinity” to link “ethnic homogeneity” to a “profound sense of cultural distinctiveness and superiority.” (Kim, 2007) As these countries made their presence known, Korea began to rely on internal colonialism, which economically exploited and political excluded groups different from the dominant group, becoming a reminder there can be “colonial subjects – on the national soil.” (Gordon, 2006; Blauner 1972, p. 52) For many then, international marriages were “associated with the invasion of Korea by other countries” and were subsequently seen as “betrayals of nationalism” where the children resulting from those unions became physical reminders of that betrayal (Lee). Kim Sok-soo believes that the coupling of nationalism with ethnic homogeneity ultimately has became a “useful tool for the South Korean government when the country was embroiled in ideological turmoil. It was used as an effective tool to make its people obedient and easy to govern” (Park, 2006). The way the bodies of these bi and multiracial Koreans are, in both social and political realms, recognized, regulated, and ultimately utilized through relationships maintained by various institutions of the state is essential to a particular form of governmentality…

Washington, Myra. “More than a Metaphor: Blood as Boundary for Korean Biracial Identity” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 95th Annual Convention, Chicago Hilton & Towers, Chicago, IL, Nov 11, 2009 Online <PDF>. 2010-08-09 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p368501_index.html>

More than a Metaphor: Blood as Boundary for Korean Biracial Identity

NCA 95th Annual Convention
Chicago Hilton & Towers
Chicago, Illinois
2009-11-11

Myra Washington
College of Media, Institute of Communications Research
University of Illinois

When Hines Ward was named MVP of Super Bowl XL, his Black and Korean biracial status became the touchstone for conversations about mixed-race people in Korea. His “homecoming” trip generated a frenzied discourse around the limits of Korean identity and the location of bi/multiracial individuals within it. Ward’s racial representation allows for the analysis of nationhood, citizenship, difference and race as imagined through blood metaphors.

Read the entire paper here.

Ward Helps Biracial Youths on Journey Toward Acceptance

The New York Times
2009-11-09

John Branch

PITTSBURGH — Steelers receiver Hines Ward surrounded himself with old friends at the dinner table on a recent Saturday night. The bond was as obvious as the look on everyone’s faces — half Korean, half something else. The shared experience was far more than skin deep.

There was a boy who was bullied into depression and tried to commit suicide. There was a girl ordered by a teacher to keep her hair pulled back tight, to straighten the natural curls she inherited from her black father. There was another too intimidated by her taunting classmates to board the bus, choosing instead the humiliating and lonely walk to school. There were the boys who were beaten regularly and teased mercilessly. There were college-age girls who broke into tears when telling their stories of growing up biracial in South Korea.

But when they looked around the table, they saw familiarity. And a future…

…“It was hard for me to find my identity,” Ward said. “The black kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I had a Korean mom. The white kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I was black. The Korean kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I was black. It was hard to find friends growing up. And then once I got involved in sports, color didn’t matter.”

But there is no such relief valve for most of the estimated 19,000 biracial children in South Korea. The fast-growing majority of them are Kosians, with a parent from a different Asian country.

The number of Amerasians — those generally with white or black American fathers, often from the military — is slowly shrinking. But their mere appearance leads to harsher discrimination, officials said.

“Korea is traditionally a single blood,” said Wondo Koh, a Korean who met up with the group in Pittsburgh while doing business. “We Koreans are not comfortable with this mixed-blood situation. We have become familiar now, but we did not know how to cope.”…

Read the entire article here.

The President, the Professor, and the Wide Receiver

When the biracial U.S. President Barack Obama visits South Korea tomorrow, he will be visiting a country grappling with its prejudices about race.

Foreign Policy
2009-11-17

James Card

This week, U.S. President Barack Obama, the son of a black father and white mother, is making his landmark visit to Asia, including a Wednesday stop in Seoul, where South Korea is in the midst of a racial reckoning. His visit could have positive repercussions for years to come. Race is a thorny issue in the country, and biracial persons especially so. Both North and South Koreans embrace pure bloodlines, untainted by non-Korean DNA. Biracial children are broadly considered unadoptable, and children and adults of mixed race endure ostracism and bullying. But in the past few years, a number of events and people have made South Koreans reconsider racism and persons of mixed race…

Read the entire article here.

The Amerasian Problem: Blood, Duty, and Race

International Relations
Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2007)
pages 86-102
DOI: 10.1177/0047117807073769

Sue-Je Lee Gage, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Ithaca University

The concept of ‘mixed blood’ is not a new one; however, it was not until 1982 that an unprecedented policy entitled ‘The Amerasian Act’ was created by the US government. Focusing on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and the US, this article will unpack the assumptions underlying the seemingly religious statement ‘the American thing to do’ in terms of US policy, where ostensibly scientific notions of ‘race’, blood and identity are employed.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Dance of Identities: Korean Adoptees and Their Racial Identity Journeys

University of Hawai’i Press
October 2010
224 pages
3 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-3371-8

John D. Palmer, Associate Professor of Educational Studies
Colgate University

Korean adoptees have a difficult time relating to any of the racial identity models because they are people of color who often grew up in white homes and communities. Biracial and nonadopted people of color typically have at least one parent whom they can racially identify with, which may also allow them access to certain racialized groups. When Korean adoptees attempt to immerse into the Korean community, they feel uncomfortable and unwelcome because they are unfamiliar with Korean customs and language. The Dance of Identities looks at how Korean adoptees “dance,” or engage, with their various identities (white, Korean, Korean adoptee, and those in between and beyond) and begin the journey toward self-discovery and empowerment.

Throughout the author draws closely on his own experiences and those of thirty-eight other Korean adoptees, mainly from the U.S. Chapters are organized according to major themes that emerged from interviews with adoptees. “Wanting to be like White” examines assimilation into a White middle-class identity during childhood. Although their White identity may be challenged at times, for the most part adoptees feel accepted as “honorary” Whites among their families and friends. “Opening Pandora’s Box” discusses the shattering of adoptees’ early views on race and racism and the problems of being raised colorblind in a race-conscious society. “Engaging and Reflecting” is filled with adoptee voices as they discover their racial and transracial identities as young adults. During this stage many engage in activities that they believe make more culturally Korean, such as joining Korean churches and Korean student associations in college. “Questioning What I Have Done” delves into the issues that arise when Korean adoptees explore their multiple identities and the possible effects on relationships with parents and spouses. In “Empowering Identities” the author explores how adoptees are able to take control of their racial and transracial identities by reaching out to parents, prospective parents, and adoption agencies and by educating Korean and Korean Americans about their lives. The final chapter, “Linking the Dance of Identities Theory to Life Experiences,” reiterates for adoptees, parents, adoption agencies, and social justice activists and educators the need for identity journeys and the empowered identities that can result.

The Dance of Identities is an honest look at the complex nature of race and how we can begin to address race and racism from a fresh perspective. It will be well received by not only members of the Korean adoption community and transracial parents, but also Asian American scholars, educators, and social workers.

Mixed Race Peoples in the Korean National Imaginary and Family

Korean Studies
Volume 32 (2008)
pages 56-85
DOI: 10.1353/ks.0.0010
E-ISSN: 1529-1529; Print ISSN: 0145-840X

Mary Lee, Director
Pacific Policy Research Center, Honolulu, Hawaii

This article discusses the production of “mixed-race” subjectivity in South Korea.  It asks: how can we understand the lived experiences and histories of mixed-race people as integral to the logic of national governance, both past and present?  Instead of regarding mixed-race people in Korea as an aberration or regrettable phenomenon, this article contends that their “otherness” is an outcome of the intensions, contradictions, and insecurities of national governance which coheres around discourse and legislation on the family.  The testimony of various mixed-race people living in Korea reveals the racial, gendered, and sexual discursive modalities through which they were rendered outside the scope and meaning of Koreanness.  Their testimony also corresponds with the discursive limits set forth by the government, particularly in the establishment of laws that govern desired familial relations within the climate of Cold War militarism, industrialization, and the post-democratization era of globalization and official multiculturalism.  The longstanding and still practiced abjection of mixed-race people from South Korean society cannot be understood without exploring the intersection between a racial politics of “blood purity” and a gendered politics of patriarchy that works in service of an imagined Korean homogeneity.

The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction

Oxford University Press
October 2009
216 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195377361; ISBN10: 0195377362

Caroline Rody, Associate Professor of English
University of Virginia

In the wake of all that is changing in local and global cultures–in patterns of migration, settlement, labor, and communications–a radical interaction has taken place that, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, has shifted our understanding of ethnicity away from ‘ethnic in itself’ to ‘ethnic amidst a hybrid collective’.  In light of this, Caroline Rody proposes a new paradigm for understanding the changing terrain of contemporary fiction. She claims that what we have long read as ethnic literature is in the process of becoming ‘interethnic’.  Examining an extensive range of Asian American fictions, The Interethnic Imagination offers sustained readings of three especially compelling examples: Chang-rae Lee‘s ambivalent evocations of blackness, whiteness, Koreanness, and the multicultural crowd in Native Speaker; Gish Jen‘s comic engagement with Jewishness in Mona in the Promised Land; and the transnational imagination of Karen Tei Yamashita‘s Tropic of Orange.  Two shorter “interchapters” and an epilogue extend the thematics of creative “in-betweenness” across the book’s structure, elaborating crossover topics including Asian American fiction’s complex engagement with African American culture; the cross-ethnic adoption of Jewishness by Asian American writers; and the history of mixed-race Asian American fictional characters.

Features

• Examines three major yet under-studied contemporary Asian American novelists: Chang-rae Lee, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Gish Jen.
• Considers major Asian American fiction alongside African American and Jewish American authors.
• In lucid writing, provides a valuable and innovative paradigm for interpreting the burgeoning field of ethnic literature in the U.S.