Mixed Race Studies

Crimes of Passion: The Regulation of Interracial Sex in Washington, 1855-1950

Gonzaga Law Review
Volume 47, Issue 2 (Symposium: Race and Criminal Justice in the West) April, 2012
pages 393-428

Jason A. Gillmer, Professor of Law
Gonzaga University School of Law

Race had not mattered to Harvey Creasman and Caroline Paul. The two had lived together as husband and wife for seven years, beginning in 1939.  Harvey was black and Caroline was white, but like other couples, they found that they shared things in common and enjoyed each other’s company.  They met in church in Seattle, Washington.  Soon after, they started living together at Harvey’s rental unit in the working-class town of Bremerton, across Puget Sound from Seattle, before scraping together enough money to buy a home.  They sold Harvey’s 1931 Plymouth automobile to make their down payment and put the title in Caroline’s name, as Harvey had suffered some discrimination at the hands of a realtor and was too put off to deal with the situation.  Friends said the house was more of a “shack,” but over the years a combination of frugality and hard work allowed them to fix the place up nicely.  Harvey did a lot of the work himself, and Caroline helped take care of it, using Harvey’s paychecks from the Naval Yard to purchase furniture and pay the mortgage.  Unfortunately for Harvey, however, Caroline’s death in 1946 brought more than a loss in companionship, because Caroline’s daughter by her previous marriage believed that most everything Harvey and Caroline had built over the years, including the house, belonged to her, not Harvey. And she was right: in an opinion teeming with racial implications, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that, because Harvey and Caroline had never formalized their marriage, all of the property purchased in Caroline’s name belonged to the white daughter rather than the black spouse.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• I. “SOONER OR LATER THE TIDE OF FEMALE EMIGRATION WILL SET IN”
• II. “WE DO NOT . . . FAVOR[] AMALGAMATION”
• III. “DISTINCTIONS BASED UPON COLOR”
• IV. “THEY LIVE[D] TOGETHER AS HUSBAND AND WIFE”
• V. “SWAN ANDERSON AND THIS INDIAN WOMAN WERE NEVER MARRIED”
• CONCLUSION

Race had not mattered to Harvey Creasman and Caroline Paul. The two had lived together as husband and wife for seven years, beginning in 1939.  Harvey was black and Caroline was white, but like other couples, they found that they shared things in common and enjoyed each other’s company.  They met in church in Seattle, Washington.  Soon after, they started living together at Harvey’s rental unit in the working-class town of Bremerton, across Puget Sound from Seattle, before scraping together enough money to buy a home.  They sold Harvey’s 1931 Plymouth automobile to make their down payment and put the title in Caroline’s name, as Harvey had suffered some discrimination at the hands of a realtor and was too put off to deal with the situation.  Friends said the house was more of a “shack,” but over the years a combination of frugality and hard work allowed them to fix the place up nicely.  Harvey did a lot of the work himself, and Caroline helped take care of it, using Harvey’s paychecks from the Naval Yard to purchase furniture and pay the mortgage.  Unfortunately for Harvey, however, Caroline’s death in 1946 brought more than a loss in companionship, because Caroline’s daughter by her previous marriage believed that most everything Harvey and Caroline had built over the years, including the house, belonged to her, not Harvey. And she was right: in an opinion teeming with racial implications, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that, because Harvey and Caroline had never formalized their marriage, all of the property purchased in Caroline’s name belonged to the white daughter rather than the black spouse.

Harvey and Caroline’s story, together with others like it, adds a crucial piece to our understanding of the regulation of interracial sex and marriage in this country’s past. Prior to Loving v. Virginia, virtually every state in the Union outlawed the practice at some point, with much of the South singling out whites and African Americans in their prohibitions, and the West adding other disfavored races to the list. Early scholarship picked up on the valuable insight these laws provided into whites’ ideologies, noting how they served the dual purpose of maintaining white racial purity while at the same time protecting white patriarchal privilege through lax enforcement. More recent scholarship has dug deeper, exploring the spaces where interracial fraternization took place and studying those involved to help better understand the significance of race and sex at various times and places. Out of the growing number, a handful have been especially good at looking beyond the rigid lines drawn in the statutes, as these laws were of a type destined to be broken.

Yet, as this impressive list of scholarship grows, the topic of interracial relationships in the State of Washington remains considerably understudied. The explanation is undoubtedly because, with the exception of the years between 1855 and 1868, there were no laws criminalizing interracial marriages. The state thus seems relatively unimportant precisely because it appeared more progressive. But such thinking is simplistic or, worse, dangerous. It mistakenly assumes that the topic was not controversial—it was—and, more importantly, it causes us to miss out on the nuances of race and race relations in the state and region.

This article strives to fill the gap in the literature by exploring the regulation of interracial sex and marriage in the State of Washington from its time as a territory through the first half of the twentieth century. In light of the area’s history and settlement patterns, the focus is not limited to blacks and whites, but instead takes into account relationships between whites and other racial groups. The article’s main thesis is that, although the criminal bans on the practice were short-lived, Washington elites and power-brokers used legal mechanisms to discourage and penalize interracial families in much the same way. The result of these efforts may not have been prison time; but, as Harvey Creasman’s case demonstrates, lawyers and judges regularly used the law to ensure that wealth and property remained in the hands of whites rather than racial minorities. In doing so, the legal system became an effective deterrent to interracial relationships, perpetuating existing notions of race that privileged whiteness over other racial groups.

Part I of this article introduces the narrative used to explore this thesis. The story involves Swan Anderson, and it begins by recreating the demographics and general environment Swan encountered when he arrived in the Washington Territory in the nineteenth century. This Part also introduces the relationship that Swan developed with Mary, a Native American woman. Part II follows up on this background by situating the passage of the area’s antimiscegenation laws within the larger desire of Euro-American settlers to create a white utopia. Part III then examines the repeal of these laws during the Reconstruction era, and contrasts these legal changes with the continuing desire to keep the races separate well into the twentieth century. Part IV refocuses the narrative back to Swan and Mary, exploring in detail the evidence and arguments raised in an inheritance dispute in which Swan and Mary’s daughter attempted to prove her parents were husband and wife. Finally, Part V examines the verdict and aftermath of the case, in which decision-makers ruled against the daughter and continued to privilege white ideals and discount the views of people of color. The article concludes by tying together Harvey Creasman’s case with this one, and notes that, far from being unique, these stories reflect strongly held assumptions that disadvantaged interracial couples and racial minorities in the state…

…The desire to maintain a white utopia similarly kept the Asian population in check. The Chinese began emigrating to the West in the 1840s during the California gold rush. In the ensuing decades, opportunities in mining, lumber, and the railroads brought them further north. Still, restrictive policies and discriminatory practices meant that their numbers were never very large. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was not limited to Washington; but it carried the unmistakable message that, like the laws banning free people of color forty years earlier, non-whites were not part of the community Washingtonians hoped to build. In 1880, the number of Chinese in Washington stood at a mere 3,260, or less than half a percent of the population, compared to 75,132 in California. The number of Japanese was even smaller. Despite growing numbers in the West, the census counted one Japanese person in Washington in 1880 and only 360 in 1890.

For those steeped in the ideologies of the time, even this was too many. While anti-Chinese sentiment was by no means limited to Washington, events indicate that it was just as strong there as elsewhere. “The civilization of the Pacific Coast cannot exist half Caucasian and half Mongolian,” warned the editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in September 1885. “The sooner the people of the United States realize this and take measures to make certain that the Caucasian civilization will prevail, the sooner discontent will be allayed and the outbreaks will cease.” The editorial was prescient. The day it appeared, twenty miles southeast of Seattle, a group of whites chased Chinese coal miners from their homes and burned their property…

…Two years later, in the next legislative session, Senator Earl Maxwell picked up the cause. Like Representative Todd, Senator Maxwell also said a local event prompted his actions, yet his justification played off the same deep-seated racial fears that prompted earlier efforts. What brought the matter to his attention, he said, was a “14-year-old Seattle girl marrying a 38-year-old negro . . . .” As with Jack Johnson, the message was clear: black men were dangerous, and white women—particularly someone as young and innocent as this one—needed the State’s protection.

This bill would eventually fail, as would the other two bills introduced by Senator Maxwell in the subsequent sessions of 1939 and 1941. Men like Lieutenant Governor Victor Meyers, a champion of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, helped muster the votes to defeat them. But credit also rests with racial progressives and civil rights activists. Horace Cayton, the African American editor of the Seattle Republican, was an early and strong voice of opposition. He regularly attacked whites pushing for anti-miscegenation laws as hypocritical, insisting in 1909 that “[i]f the white man desires to prevent race miscegenation let he himself put up the fence and then observe it.” The black community also organized against the 1935 bill, forming the Colored Citizens’ Committee in Opposition to the Anti-Intermarriage Bill. Churches and other organizations, including the NAACP, also spoke out against the efforts. An editorial published in the Northwest Enterprise, Seattle’s African American newspaper, perhaps summed it up best when it lambasted the 1937 law: “With love as old as the world, and marriage, love’s goal, a sacred institution upon which the nation is propagated, any law which denies legitimacy to childhood is demoralizing to the people of the State, and any law which is discriminatory in character, is dastardly and derogatory to true American principals [sic].”

It was messages like these that provided the necessary encouragements for couples of different races to remain together. Like elsewhere, getting a handle on the number who crossed the color line in Washington is a difficult task. George Bush, an early African American pioneer, had a white wife. They were a highly successful family, appearing in the 1860 census records together with five children and an estate worth over $8000. Ten years later, George and Elizabeth Oulst from King County appear in the census, together with Commons and Mary Nix from Pierce County, each one an interracial couple consisting of a white person and a person of African descent…

Read the entire article here.

For Asian-American Couples, a Tie That Binds

The New York Times
2012-03-30

Rachel L. Swarns

WHEN she was a philosophy student at Harvard College eight years ago, Liane Young never thought twice about all the interracial couples who flitted across campus, arm and arm, hand in hand. Most of her Asian friends had white boyfriends or girlfriends. In her social circles, it was simply the way of the world.

But today, the majority of Ms. Young’s Asian-American friends on Facebook have Asian-American husbands or wives. And Ms. Young, a Boston-born granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, is married to a Harvard medical student who loves skiing and the Pittsburgh Steelers and just happens to have been born in Fujian Province in China.

Ms. Young said she hadn’t been searching for a boyfriend with an Asian background. They met by chance at a nightclub in Boston, and she is delighted by how completely right it feels. They have taken lessons together in Cantonese (which she speaks) and Mandarin (which he speaks), and they hope to pass along those languages when they have children someday.

“We want Chinese culture to be a part of our lives and our kids’ lives,” said Ms. Young, 29, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College who married Xin Gao, 27, last year. “It’s another part of our marriage that we’re excited to tackle together.”

Interracial marriage rates are at an all-time high in the United States, with the percentage of couples exchanging vows across the color line more than doubling over the last 30 years. But Asian-Americans are bucking that trend, increasingly choosing their soul mates from among their own expanding community…

Read the entire article here.

Tale of a ‘Seditionist’–The Lawrence Dennis Story

AntiWar.com
2000-04-29

Justin Raimondo

War infects and weakens our republican form of government, spreads social and political diseases throughout the body politic—but is, as Randolph Bourne put it, “the health of the State.” The State, in wartime, is glorified and empowered: the militarization of society means that all resources are mobilized and placed at the disposal of government, and all dissent, however meek and mild, must be utterly discredited if not entirely snuffed out. In wartime the benevolent mask of the “democratic” state invariably slips, and the true face of repression is revealed in all its leering ugliness…

…WORLD WAR II AND THE HIGH ART OF DEMONIZATION

The infamous Moscow Trials of the 1930s, staged by Stalin to cement his hold on absolute power, were the model for the effort undertaken by the US government during the war years to not only discredit its opponents but also to jail them, if at all possible. The massive roundup of Japanese, German, and Italian-Americans was a corollary to the relentless propaganda campaign that singled them out as a “fifth column” coiled and ready to strike. This massive smear campaign was also directed at the large and combative antiwar movement of the time, the America First Committee, as well as its leading spokesmen: Charles A. Lindbergh, John T. Flynn, and “isolationists” in every walk of life were singled out by the War Party and viciously attacked—and this was true especially in the arts, from the actress Lillian Gish to the poet Robinson Jeffers, and in publishing, where the editorial staffs of the major American newspapers and magazines were purged of virtually all “isolationists.” When war finally came, the War Party took its terrible revenge on all who had held out the hope of peace—and none suffered more than Lawrence Dennis, who has yet to finally receive the honor that is his due.

THE OUTSIDER

Lawrence Dennis was an outsider in a movement of outsiders, a unique and largely solitary figure whose career as a writer and notorious “seditionist” embodies the tragedy and bravery of the Old Right, the pre-World War II “America First” generation of conservative intellectuals and activists. In many important ways, Dennis is the prototype of modern “paleo-conservatives.” His career as a controversialist and the leading American nationalist intellectual of his time charts the rise and fall of the Old Right – and, perhaps, holds a lesson for us today. Born in Atlanta in 1893, Dennis had what historian Justus Doenecke describes as “a varied career,” which included a stint as a “boy evangelist.” A recent article on Dennis in The Baffler—in which the author, transcending his own leftist politics, seems to appreciate if not fully understand his subject—informs us that he was born Lonnie Lawrence Dennis, adopted by a mulatto couple, and was undoubtedly of mixed race: his mother was black, but his father was in all probability white. To say that young Lonnie was a precocious kid is a definite understatement: by the age of five he was preaching before large audiences in Atlanta, and was soon bringing the Word to congregations around the country as “The Mulatto Boy Evangelist,” and taking his road show as far as England. He published his autobiography at the ripe old age of ten.

…THE BLACKEST IRONY

For Dennis to be anointed leader of a racist fifth column in America was just another irony in a life rich with them. For a supposed fellow-traveler of Hitler, Dennis hardly fit the Aryan mold. Charles A. Lindbergh, for whom Dennis is said to have written a few speeches, described him as having a “rugged,” dark-complexioned look that made him seem as if he would be more “at home at a frontier trading post.” Dennis’s archenemy, the notorious agent provocateur John Roy Carlson, noted that “Dennis’ hair is woolly, dark and kinky. The texture of his skin is unusually dark and the eyes of Hitler’s intellectual keynoter of ‘Aryanism’ are a rich deep brown, his lips fleshy.” This is the measure of what Lawrence had to endure: the man Life magazine called, in a picture caption, “America’s No. 1 intellectual Fascist . . . brain-truster for the forces of appeasement” and Hitler’s alleged pawn was almost certainly an African-American….

Read the entire article here.

The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars

Cambridge University Press
September 1993
396 pages
228 x 152 mm
ISBN: 9780521458757
DOI: 10.2277/0521458757

Elazar Barkan, Professor of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University

This fascinating study in the sociology of knowledge documents the refutation of scientific foundations for racism in Britain and the United States between the two world wars, when the definition of race as a biological concept was replaced by a cultural notion of race. Discussing the work of the leading biologists and anthropologists who wrote about race between the wars, Dr. Barkan argues that the impetus for the shift in ideologies of race came from the inclusion of outsiders—women, Jews, and leftists—into the mainstream of scientific discourse.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: ANTHROPOLOGY
  • 1. Constructing a British identity
    • Colors into races. A transition to modern British anthropology. The founding fathers. Mummies, bones and stones. The shift in British archaeology. A British glimpse at race relations.
  • 2. American diversity
    • Haunted sentinels. European skulls and the primitive mind. The Boasians. American physical anthropology. The politics of coexistence. Dionysia in the Pacific.
• PART II: BIOLOGY
  • 3. In search of a biology of race
    • NewGenics. The statistician’s fable. Race crossing in Jamaica. A Canadian in London: rigid Reginald Ruggles Gates.
  • 4. The limit of traditional reform
    • A racist liberal: Julian Huxley’s early years. Herbert Spencer Jennings and progressive eugenics. A conservative critique: Raymond Pearl. Bridging race formalism and population genetics.
  • 5. Mitigating racial differences
    • Lancelot Hogben. “Africa view” – Huxley’s changing perspectives. J. B. S. Haldane: a defiant aristocrat. Medicine and eugenics: expanding the environment. Eugenics reformed.
• PART III: POLITICS
  • 6. Confronting racism: scientists as politicians
    • 1933 – Early hesitations. Britain – Race and Culture Committee. We Europeans. The American scene. An international interlude. The Paris Congress. The population committee. Out of the closet.
• EPILOGUE
• Bibliography
• Index

Recasting Race after World War II: Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany

University Press of Colorado
2007
320
9 b&w photos
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-87081-869-1

Timothy L. Schroer, Associate Professor of History
University of West Georgia

Historian Timothy L. Schroer’s Recasting Race after World War II explores the renegotiation of race by Germans and African American GIs in post-World War II Germany. Schroer dissects the ways in which notions of blackness and whiteness became especially problematic in interactions between Germans and American soldiers serving as part of the victorious occupying army at the end of the war.

The segregation of U.S. Army forces fed a growing debate in America about whether a Jim Crow army could truly be a democratizing force in postwar Germany. Schroer follows the evolution of that debate and examines the ways in which postwar conditions necessitated reexamination of race relations. He reveals how anxiety about interracial relationships between African American men and German women united white American soldiers and the German populace. He also traces the importation and influence of African American jazz music in Germany, illuminating the subtle ways in which occupied Germany represented a crucible in which to recast the meaning of race in a post-Holocaust world.

Recasting Race after World War II will appeal to historians and scholars of American, African American, and German studies.

The Other Loving: Uncovering The Federal Government’s Racial Regulation of Marriage

New York University Law Review
Volume 86, Number 5 (November 2011)
pages 1361-1443

Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis

This Article seeks to fill a gap in legal history. The traditional narrative of the history of the American racial regulation of marriage typically focuses on state laws as the only sources of marriage inequality. Overlooked in the narrative are the ways in which federal laws also restricted racially mixed marriages in the decades before 1967 (when the Supreme Court invalidated antimiscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia). Specifically, during the American occupation of Japan after World War II, a combination of immigration, citizenship, and military laws and regulations led to restrictions on marriages along racial lines. These laws also converged to prevent married couples, many of whom were White American soldiers and local Japanese women, from living in the United States together. Accordingly, this Article claims that the confluence of immigration, citizenship, and military laws functioned as a collective counterpart to state antimiscegenation laws.

By unearthing this neglected history, this Article seeks to deepen the conventional account of the public regulation of mixed marriages. As the Article reveals, racial barriers to marriage were far more pervasive than previously acknowledged. Contrary to the familiar chronicle, racial restrictions on marriage occurred through federal laws, were enforced by federal officials, took place beyond state borders, and effected distinct harms on interracial couples whose experiences have largely escaped legal and scholarly inquiry. Recovering this lost history thus provides a more complete story of antimiscegenation regulation. Moreover, it draws attention to the largely undertheorized role that immigration law played in preventing interracial marriages and provides insight into contemporary debates on federal involvement in marriage regulation.

• INTRODUCTION
• I. FEDERAL EXCLUSION OF RACIALLY INADMISSIBLE WIVES
  • A. The Conventional Narrative of Antimiscegenation History
  • B. The Story of John and Helene Bouiss
  • C. Bonham v. Bouiss: Between Wife and Country
• II. DISENTANGLING THE FEDERAL ANTIMISCEGENATION REGULATORY SCHEME
  • A. Citizenship Law and Race
  • B. Immigration Law, Racial Inadmissibility, and Construction of a White Nation
  • C. Military Marriage Regulations
• III. THE CONVERGENCE OF FEDERAL LAWS FACILITATED BARRIERS TO INTERRACIAL MARRIAGES ABROAD
  • A. The War Brides Act
  • B. Immigration Inadmissibility as a Basis for Denying Marriages to Japanese Spouses
  • C. Immigration Law’s Bar Against Racially Inadmissible Wives
• IV. BOUISS AS THE OTHER LOVING
  • A. Bouiss and the Amendments to the War Brides Act
  • B. Congressional Recognition and Remedy of Obstacles to Interracial Marriages
• V. THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE FEDERAL ANTIMISCEGENATION REGULATORY SCHEME
  • A. Immigration Law’s Promotion of White Supremacy Through Marriage Restrictions
  • B. Extraterritorial Antimiscegenation Regulation
  • C. Country and Citizenship Versus Wives and Children
  • D. Mixed-Race Children and Lack of Citizenship
• VI. CONTEMPORARY IMPLICATIONS
• CONCLUSION

“Except under very unusual circumstances, United States military personnel, and civilians employed by the War Department, will not be granted permission to marry nationals who are ineligible to citizenship in the United States.”

—U.S. Army, Circular No. 6

INTRODUCTION

On May 9, 1946, Helene Emilie Bouiss, a half-Japanese, half-German woman, and her husband, John Bouiss, a White American soldier, arrived in Seattle, Washington, aboard a military ship. The two were newlyweds, married by the captain of the ship just days before landing in Seattle. Their decision to marry prior to coming to the United States was significant. This is because six months earlier, Congress had passed the War Brides Act of 1945 (War Brides Act), which conferred on persons who were serving or who had served in the U.S. military the right to sponsor the expedited admission of their spouses to the United States. Thus, Helene‘s marriage to John, an honorably discharged soldier, provided the basis for her entry into the country. Or so they thought…

…D. Mixed-Race Children and Lack of Citizenship

One of the most compelling and troubling aspects about the deployment of immigration and citizenship law in the restriction of overseas marriage was the effect that the inability to marry in Japan had on the children of American soldiers. Children of American-Japanese couples, like their counterparts in the United States, faced discrimination in Japan and were considered inferior because of their mixed racial background. As the Supreme Court noted in Loving, bans against interracial marriage were rationalized as helping to prevent “obliteration of racial pride” and a “mongrel breed of citizens.” Mixed children evidenced the “corruption of blood” that would have destroyed the “quality of . . . [Virginia’s] citizenship.” Indeed, such fear compelled a judge in Louisiana to refuse to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple as recently as October 2009. According to the judge, “[t]here is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage.” Ample scholarship has been devoted to the various social and legal problems that confronted mixed-race children. These problems included the illegitimate status of children whose parents were legally prohibited from marrying.

The federal regulation of interracial marriage similarly led to a generation of out-of-wedlock children in Japan, who were referred to as “GI babies,” “Occupation babies,” or “half-half babies.” As already explained, many American soldiers were prohibited from marrying their Japanese girlfriends. Other couples chose to marry without the military’s approval. In both situations, the relationships lacked the official recognition of a valid marriage. As a result, children of these American-Japanese couples were considered illegitimate. To be sure, the precise numbers of illegitimate Occupation babies whose parents either unsuccessfully sought to marry or married without the official approval of the military are unknown. Indeed, one scholar noted that the U.S. military prohibited both military and Japanese officials from conducting a census of Occupation children…

Read the entire article here.

Pacific children of US servicemen for study

Otago Daily Times
University of Otago, New Zealand
2010-01-05

Allison Rudd

World War 2 brought two million United States servicemen to New Zealand and many Pacific Islands. Inevitably, many formed liaisons with local women and fathered possibly several thousand children. What happened to those babies, and, more than 60 years later, where are they now? Allison Rudd talks to University of Otago historian Prof Judith Bennett, who has won funding to try and trace the all-but forgotten offspring.

Judith Bennett was doing some research when she got sidetracked.

She was compiling information for a book on the environmental effect of the war on Pacific Island countries when she came across references to the mixed-race children of local women and United States servicemen.

Her interest was piqued.

“I was very curious because I could find very little on this topic.

“So it seemed to me there were questions that needed to be answered: How were these children accepted?

“Did their parentage affect their land rights?

“Did it affect their marriage prospects?

“How were their mothers characterised in their own societies?

“How did the US Government view marriage?

“How did the indigenous people view these relationships?

“Were they profitable, were they shameful, or were they a mixture?

“What have been the long-term effects of mixed parentage?

“These children would have looked different – their fathers were white or African American.

“What impact did that have on them as they were growing up and when they were adults?”

Now Prof Bennett hopes to satisfy her curiosity, having secured a $917,000 Marsden grant to embark on a three-year research project…

Read the entire article here.

Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space

Cultural Anthropology
Volume 13, Issue 3 (August 1998)
pages 291–325
DOI: 10.1525/can.1998.13.3.291

Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hunter College of the City University of New York

The terms black Liverpool and black America, no less than the African diaspora, refer to racialized geographies of the imagination. The mapping of racial signifiers onto geographical ones lends such terms the illusion of referring to physical rather than social locations. That there is no actual space that one could call “the African diaspora,” despite how commonly it is mapped onto particular locales, points attention to the ways that social spaces are constructed in tandem with processes of racial formation…

Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s first book, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987), I set out in 1991 to study the meanings and practices surrounding “race” andnation in Liverpool, England. Set in a city with one of the longest-settled black populations in the United Kingdom, my research investigated why and how black identity is constituted as the mutual opposite of English and British identities. Yet in pursuing these themes, I became increasingly amazed at how frequently my informants would make discursive forays into “black America.” Nested at key moments in their narratives were references to the formative influence that black America—in many forms—has had on racial identity and politics in their city. The experiences they narrated were varied, and the narratives themselves were rich, poignant, and deeply gendered. Black Liverpudlians told of their relations with the black American servicemen (or “GIs”) who were stationed outside their city for some 25 years following World War II. Men and women also spoke about the travels of their own African, Afro-Caribbean, and native black Liverpudlian fathers who were employed as seamen by Liverpool shipping companies. The global wanderings of the city’s black men often brought them to black Atlantic ports of call-many in the United States. Narratives of black Liverpudlians’ diasporic encounters also referred to the emigration of local women to the mythical place called “black America.” Finally, and crucially, men and women told of how and why they have accessed the many black American cultural productions that have, for decades, circulated around the social space of black Liverpool.

Setting Sail: The Birth of Liverpool’s Black Community

When black Liverpudlians narrate their history, three themes often emerge. The first concerns the participation of black men in the city’s shipping industry; the second concerns the birth of the black population-a process narrated with special reference to the prevalence of interracial  marriage in Liverpool; and the third concerns the transformation of their racial identity from “half-caste” to “black.” These related processes, to be examined briefly below, have given rise to the contemporary form of black Liverpudlians’ local and racial identities…

African seamen, as has been suggested, are heralded in Liverpool for essentially giving birth to the black community. Yet they are also noted for setting another phenomenon into motion: the institution of interracial marriage. The prevalence of interracial marriage is a crucial theme in narratives on local history. During their careers at sea, African men commonly docked in Liverpool’s port, formed romantic relationships with local women, mostly white, and later married them, had children, retired from seafaring, and settled in the city—so the dominant narrative goes, both in social scientific and local discourse. Diane Frost’s recent explanation is exemplary of the former. She writes,

Transient work patterns that derive from the nature of seafaring… led to short-term relationships with local women. Permanent and long-standing relationships with local women through marriage (formal or common-law) usually occurred when these seamen became permanently domiciled in Liverpool or in some cases this became a reason for gaining domicile. [1995-96:51]

Several black Liverpudlians told me of a much earlier study of this phenomenon. Published in 1930, it was written by an anthropologist named Muriel Fletcher and given the revealing title Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports (Fletcher 1930). Mark Christian marks the publication of “the Fletcher Report” as the dawn of philanthropic racism in Liverpool because it expressed “concern” both for the “morally degenerate” white women who consorted with African seamen, and for their haplessly pathological “half-caste” children (1995-96). The sexualized interpretation of seafaring lends specificity to the racialization not only of interracial unions, but also of the children born of them.

Major and minor publications on blacks in Liverpool always condemn the Fletcher Report for essentially developing a non-category (“neither black nor white”) to speak of blacks of mixed racial parentage. Their struggles to overcome that inscription is an absolutely central theme in black Liverpudlian accounts of the way they became black. While some blacks of mixed parentage specifically cite black American influences on the rise of a black identity in Liverpool, the blacks I knew with two black parents tended to boast that “we were always ‘black’ in our family”—speaking somewhat disparagingly, perhaps, of those who took longer to claim that identity. Yet the narratives of black Liverpudlians of mixed parentage reveal the difficulty of that process, for these Liverpudlians indicated rather painfully that their African fathers, whom they said they looked to for racial identity, often perceived their children as racially different than themselves. Blacks of mixed parentage in Liverpool commonly reported that their African fathers referred to them as “half-caste.” While this is not the place to historicize the term, we must grant the obvious possibility that West African societies colonized by the British were heavily influenced by Victorian constructions of “race” that were characterized by a concern for “purity” (Lorimer 1978). African informants in Liverpool reported that they, too, grew up with the term, and never recognized it as derogatory. A relatively recent immigrant to England explained, “Growing up in Nigeria, it was acceptable to call people of mixed race ‘half-caste’ because to a lot of Nigerians it was not an abusive term. It was purely a biological description of somebody who comes from a mixed race.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Marginalization of Afro-Asians in East Asia: Globalization and the Creation of Subculture and Hybrid Identity

Global Tides: Pepperdine Journal of International Studies
Volume 5 (2011)
15 pages
Pepperdine University, Malibu, California

Sierra Reicheneker

This article explores the topic of children born of biracial couplings in East Asia. The offspring of such unique unions face severe discrimination and marginalization. The status and future of this minority is especially salient in primarily homogenous states, such as Korea, Japan, and China, where racism varies from social stigma to institutionalized policies. The article will show that they have yet to create a cohesive group identity; they remain vulnerable to negative self-image and socially imposed isolation. In such nations, progress in equality for Afro-Asians will require key Afro-Asian leaders and public figures taking a stand against prejudices, as well as international pressure, and an increase in the number of biracial people due to globalization, in addition to the growing interconnectedness through New Media. Through these actions a hybrid identity and group mentality will form for the Afro-Asians of East Asia.

“All things are possible until they are proved impossible – and even the impossible may only be so as of now.” – Pearl S. Buck

The growing presence of an Afro-Asian population in Asia, particularly in Korea, Japan and China, has recently come to light in the global media. The homogenous nature of these countries exposes its biracial citizens to psychological marginalization. Despite the frequent trend within marginalized groups to create solidarity through a viable counter-culture, the Afro-Asian populations have not done so. However, with the increase in globalization, leading to larger numbers of biracial people born in these states, as well as their ability to connect through the Internet, this small minority will begin to form a group identity. This is furthered by icon-status Afro-Asians leading the way and acting as beacons of aspiration for all Afro-Asians. In addition, with the help of the international community in applying pressure on governments to change racist policies, an Afro-Asian subculture and hybrid identity is likely to emerge.

A Brief History

The first Afro-Asians were the product of American G.I.s during World War II. Starting in 1946, with the occupation of Okinawa and later mainland Japan, as well as the temporary military government of South Korea, Amerasian—including Afro-Asian—children became a visible reality in East Asia. The products of both prostitution and legally binding marriages, these children were largely regarded as illegitimate. When the military presence returned to America, the distinction between the two was, for all practical purposes, null. As the American military departed, any previous preferential treatment for biracial people ended, and was replaced with a backlash due to the return of ethnically-based national pride.

Korea has the largest Afro-Asian population in the Far East, due to increased interracial relationships during the Korean War (1950-1953). Once again, children were the product of both legitimate marriages and prostitution. After the war, the United States Congress passed acts to allow for immigration of biracial children, including the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987. The Korean government strongly supported the emigration of Amerasian children to the United States, considering it a “cost-effective way of dealing with social welfare problems,” as they viewed the children, particularly those from Black fathers, as “institutional burdens.”However, American military men looking to bring their Asian families to the states were heavily discouraged from doing so by their superiors; Marines in particular were threatened with court martial. Despite overwhelming support and willing adoptee families in the United States, the majority of Amerasian children remained in Korea. A staggering amount of mothers abandoned their babies, especially Afro-Asian offspring, either to be raised by distant, maternal relatives or to be sent to orphanages—though this is not the case for all of the Amerasian Koreans.

In China, the Afro-Asian people group is a newer phenomenon. They first began to appear beginning with African-American and African students coming to study in China, first in the city of Beijing and later in other larges cities, such as Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. Prominent Afro-Chinese have recently been featured in international news, helping to bring to light the growing Afro-Asian population in China and in East Asia, as a whole…

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The Rulers and the Ruled: the Singapore Eurasian Community Under the British and the Japanese

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
1999
DS610.25.E87 Con

John Gregory Conceicao

Mixed-race populations provide a challenging and fascinating subject for historical enquiry as they blend multiple cultures and, in the process, give rise to unique social and political forces. This thesis focuses on the Eurasians of Singapore, a distinct and disparate social group which arose from Singapore’s strategic location as an entreport that attracted Europeans from diverse backgrounds. As an ethnic group, the Eurasians were perhaps one of the earliest among the domiciled communities to look upon Singapore as their home and to develop a stake in the Colony, which had essentially been a place for travellers, transients and sojourners. This study focuses on the Eurasians and the complex relationships they forged with their two colonial overlords, the British and the Japanese, in the period prior to 1946.

Under the British the Eurasians played a ‘middleman’ role vis-a-vis other Asiatic communities and, by doing so, obtained unique privileges. However, in the 1870s a point was reached when owing to changing circumstances and attitudes, the British began to adopt a less than favourable stance towards the Eurasians. While the British needed their support for political and economic reasons in order to run the administration of the Colony, they adopted a policy that vacillated between patronage and prejudice. This left the Eurasians in a difficult position as they were staunchly pro-British yet, confused at the disinterest displayed by their patrons. Without much success, the Eurasians tried to redefine privilege to mean rights, and to have a voice in running the affairs of a place they regarded as their home.

The onset of the Japanese Occupation during the Second World War deepened the Eurasian predicament. They were singled out by the Japanese authorities for political indoctrination and subjected to measures which combined chastisement and encouragement. The Japanese forced the Eurasians to re-examine and re-orientate their ethnic identity. Without doubt, they were now encouraged to see themselves as ‘Asiatics’.

In retrospect, the Eurasians were subjected by their British and Japanese overlords to inconsistent policies which often left them confused and helpless. As a consequence, their self-definitions of identity underwent marked changes over time. Post-war developments in Singapore brought about a torrent of political changes that particularly affected the Eurasians. They emerged as a people who sometimes felt displaced and marginalised. The strengths and unique traits which the community once possessed—domicility, education and social privilege—were no longer their preserve in a nation that aimed to make egalitarianism and merit the cornerstones of its polity. This thesis argues that circumstantialism has been a dominant force in powerfully shaping the Eurasian identity. This identity was not given in a primordialist sense but was constructed from historical configurations and social circumstances, in which the relationship between the ‘Rulers’ and the ‘Ruled’ played an extraordinarily potent part.

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