Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Being Amerasian in South Korea: Purebloodness, Multiculturalism, and Living Alongside the U.S. Military Empire

    Being Amerasian in South Korea: Purebloodness, Multiculturalism, and Living Alongside the U.S. Military Empire

    The Ohio State University
    June 2012
    96 pages

    Yuri W. Doolan

    Honors Research Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors Research Distinction in History in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University

    This thesis focuses on the history of U.S. neo-colonialism in South Korea through the lens of mixed race Amerasians—a population generally regarded and understood to have been produced through the liaisons between South Korean camptown women and American military personnel. In this project, I discuss the historical and contemporary status and identity of mixed race individuals in South Korea as the country’s national ideology evolved from an embrace of purebloodedness to multiculturalism. My analysis is chronologically framed around intercountry adoption policies in the years immediately following the Korean War (formed to excise the presence of mixed race GI babies from South Korea) and state-sponsored multicultural policy initiatives beginning in 2005. I research the production of Amerasian subjectivity and identity in South Korea over the past six decades through an analysis of pureblooded constructions of Koreanness, U.S. militarism and camptowns, androcentric Nationality and Family Laws, contemporary multicultural policy formations, and the popular culture and lived experiences of Amerasians in South Korea.

    I also offer a comparative analysis of a new mixed race group in South Korea called Kosian (Korean/Asian). I critique multiculturalism in South Korea, which targets this emerging Kosian demographic, arguing that multicultural policy is primarily one of assimilation rather than a recognition of cultural and racial differences. I suggest that the marginal status of mixed race Amerasians has not changed much since the Korean War and is linked to South Korea’s persistent status as a neo-colony of the United States—a history of national shame and subjugation that Amerasians have come to symbolize. Primary sources for this study include legal and government documents, popular media representations, interviews with pureblooded Koreans, as well as oral histories of Amerasians that I conducted in South Korea during the summer of 2011.

    Table of Contents

    • Preface
    • Introduction
    • A Note on Terminology
    • Chapter One
      • Introduction
      • Pureblooded Constructions of Race
      • The G.I. Baby and Camptowns
      • Intercountry Adoption
      • Gendered Citizenship and Korean Family Law
      • Conclusion
    • Chapter Two
      • Introduction
      • A “Multicultural” Era
      • White Privilege in Contemporary South Korean Society
      • Conclusion
    • Conclusion
    • Bibliography

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Aliens Admitted Here!

    Aliens Admitted Here!

    Evening Post
    Wellington, New Zealand
    Volume LVI, Issue 96
    1898-10-20
    Page 4
    Source: Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

    The House cannot be congratulated on the treatment it meted out last night to the Immigration Restriction Bill, and the Premier showed a lamentable lack of power or of sincerity in allowing the debate to be shelved in the way it was. Doubtless some of the obstruction the measure experienced was prompted by the Premier’s arbitrary efforts to force Estimates through at the previous sitting. Such despotic procedure always has a bad effect upon members, and almost invariably leads to the delay of public business. Admitting this, however, we are still unable to understand the position taken up by the Opposition. It was so nearly one of factious disputation that it was calculated to play into the hand of an astute manoeuvrer like the present head of the Government. The whole point of the Bill was lost by the members who attacked it last night. In ignorance or of malice prepense they ignored for the most part the real nature of the measure, and devoted all their energies to the castigation of a more or less bogus side-issue. From the speeches of the Leader of the Opposition and some of hie followers it might have been supposed that the object of the Bill was to limit the immigration of Europeans who could not read or write. This view is an obvious distortion of the clause containing the so-called “educational test.” The history of the measure sufficiently disproves the erroneous assumption. Since the House has, as we believe, with quite inadequate reason blocked the passage of the Bill, it will be as well to give a short sketch of the events that led up to its introduction into our Parliament.

    Considerable popular feeling has been displayed against the importation of Asiatics and other undesirable immigrants into the colony, and, however much one may honour the humanity of those who feel a distaste for the arbitrary exclusion of any particular race, it is undeniable that the evil effects of racial, mixing have again and again been exhibited in various parts of the world. The colour question in the United States is one of the most serious problems the American Republic has to face. South Africa is doubly troubled by native questions and Indian coolie difficulties, while, nearer home, Queensland has its Kanaka embarrassment, and in common with other parts of Northern Australia feels the danger of an influx of Japanese and Chinese. In matters of this kind the natural impulse of the generous minded is to give free access to the stranger, and to let him prove his right to settlement by his obedience to the local laws. But the hard facts of history and experience are against the sentiment. If we wish to make the future nation of New Zealand fit to hold its own in the world, we must preserve the integrity of our race. An influx of Asiatics might also at any time disorganise the labour market and throw back for years the good work done by trade combinations…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Fathers of Conscience with Bernie D. Jones

    Fathers of Conscience with Bernie D. Jones

    Research at the National Archives & Beyond
    Blogtalk Radio
    2012-11-08, 21:00 EST (2012-11-09, 02:00Z)

    Bernice Bennett, Co-Host

    Natonne Elaine Kemp, Co-Host

    Bernie D. Jones, Associate Professor of Law
    Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts

    Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South

    Bernice Bennett and Natonne Elaine Kemp welcome author Bernie D. Jones for an engaging discussion about her book—Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South. Jones is Associate Professor, Suffolk University Law School.  She is a graduate of the New York University Law School and the University of Virginia Department of History.

    Fathers of Conscience examines high-court decisions in the antebellum South that involved wills in which white male planters bequeathed property, freedom, or both to women of color and their mixed-race children. These men, whose wills were contested by their white relatives, had used trusts and estates law to give their slave partners and children official recognition and thus circumvent the law of slavery. The will contests that followed determined whether that elevated status would be approved or denied by courts of law.

    For more information, click here.

  • Figuring Abjection: The Slave Mother in the Early Creole Novel

    Figuring Abjection: The Slave Mother in the Early Creole Novel

    French Studies
    Volume 67, Issue 1, January 2013
    pages 61-75
    DOI: 10.1093/fs/kns232

    Maeve McCusker
    School of Modern Languages
    Queen’s University Belfast

    While twentieth-century Caribbean literature in French has generated a substantial body of criticism, earlier writings have largely been neglected. This article begins by contextualizing the Creole novel of the 1830s in cultural and historical terms, then proceeds to analyse two novels published by Martinican authors in 1835: Outre-mer by Louis de Maynard de Queilhe and Les Créoles by Jules Levilloux. The few studies that exist of these texts tend to contrast their portrayal of the (male) mulatto; Levilloux has generally been considered the more progressive writer in this regard. However, both writers are in striking harmony in their depiction of the black mother, a figure (in both senses, as her physiognomy is central in her portrayal) who has until now been overlooked. In Outre-mer, as in Les Créoles, the elderly black mother is an abject and wretched creature, a source of phobic disgust. She has necessarily to be shown to be repulsive, filthy, and morally hideous in old age in order to counteract the fascination she provokes, and to embody a phantasized repellent to the desires of the white male.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Regular screening mammography before the diagnosis of breast cancer reduces black:white breast cancer differences and modifies negative biological prognostic factors

    Regular screening mammography before the diagnosis of breast cancer reduces black:white breast cancer differences and modifies negative biological prognostic factors

    Breast Cancer Research and Treatment
    Volume 135, Number 2 (2012)
    pages 549-553
    DOI: 10.1007/s10549-012-2193-3

    Paula Grabler
    Feinberg College of Medicine
    Northwestern University

    Danielle Dupuy
    Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Taskforce, Chicago, Illinois

    Jennifer Rai
    University of Michigan College of Medicine

    Sean Bernstein
    Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois

    David Ansell
    Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois

    Black women present with later stage breast cancers compared to white women, and their cancers are more likely to be larger, receptor negative, and undifferentiated. This study evaluated black:white differences in the stage and biology of breast cancer among women who had a screening mammogram at one of two Chicago academic medical centers within two years of the breast cancer diagnosis (regularly screened) and compared them to the black:white differences in the stage and biology of breast cancer in women who had not received mammographic screening within two years of a breast cancer diagnosis (irregularly screened.) There were no significant black:white differences in the proportion of early breast cancers (black = 74 %; white = 69 %, p = NS) in the regularly screened population or in the irregularly screened group (black = 60 %; white = 68 %, p = NS.) The regularly screened population received significantly more mammograms (58 % ≥4 mammograms) compared to the irregularly screened population (41 % ≥4 mammograms.) Black women in the regularly screened population were less likely than irregularly screened black women to have estrogen negative breast cancers (26 vs. 36 %, p < .05), progesterone negative breast cancers (35 vs. 46 %, p < .05), and poorly differentiated breast cancers (39 vs. 53 %, p < .05.) White women in the irregularly screened population also had worse prognostic factors than white women in the regularly screened population, though these were not statistically significant. Regular mammographic screening can contribute to the narrowing of black:white differences in presentation of breast cancer.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Michele Elam: The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium [Johnson Review]

    Michele Elam: The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium [Johnson Review]

    New Books in African American Studies: Discussions with Scholars of African Americans about Their New Books
    2012-10-31

    Sherry Johnson, Assistant Professor of English
    Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan

    “What are you?” The question can often comes out of nowhere One can be going about her quotidian activities, or she might have just finished a meeting at work. “What are you?” The question is disorienting for most, but for others who are racially ambiguous it is commonplace. The ostensibly benign question suggests that it is about the person being asked. However, one might argue that it is more about the one who does the asking. In The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millenium (Stanford University Press, 2011), Michele Elam critically discusses the rise of the Mixed Race Studies. To demonstrate the new sub-genre of cultural studies in both art and academia Elam shows elements of what mixed-racedness looks like in the classroom, as well as in the public sphere here at the turn of the 21st century…

    Read the entire review here. Listen to the interview (00:59:00) here.

  • Gender and the Neighborhood Location of Mixed-Race Couples

    Gender and the Neighborhood Location of Mixed-Race Couples

    Demography
    DOI: 10.1007/s13524-012-0158-0
    Published Online: 2012-10-17

    Richard Wright, Professor of Geography
    Dartmouth College

    Steven R. Holloway, Professor of Geography
    University of Georgia

    Mark Ellis, Professor of Geography
    University of Washington

    Gender asymmetry in mixed-race heterosexual partnerships and marriages is common. For instance, black men marry or partner with white women at a far higher rate than white men marry or partner with black women. This article asks if such gender asymmetries relate to the racial character of the neighborhoods in which households headed by mixed-race couples live. Gendered power imbalances within households generally play into decisions about where to live or where to move (i.e., men typically benefit more than women), and we find the same in mixed-race couple arrangements and residential attainment. Gender interacts with race to produce a measurable race-by-gender effect. Specifically, we report a positive relationship between the percentage white in a neighborhood and the presence of households headed by mixed-race couples with a white male partner. The opposite holds for households headed by white-blacks and white-Latinos if the female partner is white; they are drawn to predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. The results have implications for investigations of residential location attainment, neighborhood segregation analysis, and mixed-race studies.

    Read the article in HTML or PDF format.

  • Request for Participants in a Study About Multiracial Identity and Conceptions of Self

    Request for Participants in a Study About Multiracial Identity and Conceptions of Self

    2012-11-01

    We are currently seeking interested, eligible individuals to participate in a study about multiracial identity and conceptions of self conducted by Evelina Lou and Dr. Richard Lalonde at York University, Toronto, Canada.

    Participants will be asked to complete an online questionnaire that will take approximately 30 minutes of their time. All responses are entirely anonymous and confidential. As a thank you for contributing to this research, participants may enter a draw for a $25 Amazon gift card (1 in 30 chances to win).

    You must meet all of the following eligibility requirements in order to participate:

    • Your biological parents are of different racial backgrounds
    • One of your parents is White
    • You are at least 18 years old

    Multiraciality is an ever-increasing lived experience for many individuals that goes well beyond “Black and White.” Unfortunately, most of the psychological research in this area so far has focused on mixed-race individuals from specific backgrounds (e.g., Black/White), despite statistics showing that only a subset of the multiracial population in the U.S. and Canada are limited to these groups. Our aim is to better understand the unique experiences of mixed-race individuals from a wide range of backgrounds. We are particularly interested in how biracial individuals perceive their own racial identity and how this identity is related to past and present social experiences, attitudes, and feelings.

    To participate, go to the following website: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/multiracialonlinestudy

    And please feel free to pass this along to any eligible friends or family members who might be interested in participating!

    Thank you!

    Evelina Lou, M.A. (elou@yorku.ca)
    Dr. Richard Lalonde (lalonde@yorku.ca)
    Department of Psychology
    York University
    4700 Keele Street
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  • “Tense and Tender Ties”: a review of Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (2011)

    “Tense and Tender Ties”: a review of Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (2011)

    Transition
    Number 108 (2012)
    pages 129-140

    Kimberly DaCosta, Associate Professor of Sociology; Associate Dean of Students
    New York University, Gallatin

    Psychologically conflicted, confused, traitorous, tragic, and deracinated: the public vocabulary used to describe multiracial people has hardly changed since the days when state laws banned marriage between black and white. Zeroing in on interracial kinship, Kimberly DaCosta close reads Janny Scott’s biography of Barack Obama’s mother.

    My father’s white, I tell them, and rural.
    You don’t hate the South? they ask. You don’t hate it?
    —Natasha Trethewey, “Pastoral”

    “I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” said Cornel West in an interview published on the political blog, TruthDig in May 2011. “It’s understandable,” he continues, “As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening … Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.”

    West claims to understand quite a lot about Obama, intuited from the most general facts of his upbringing in an interracial and international family context. According to West, this upbringing has directly shaped (or perhaps “distorted” is the better description from West’s point of view) his political formation, alienating him from his people (“deracination”) and thus making him ideally suited to become what West calls “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

    “It is a tried and true ritual of American politics to interpret interracial intimacy and mixed race subjectivity as a sign of suspect political loyalty.”

    When he made these statements, West was participating in a tried and true ritual of American politics—the one in which interracial intimacy and mixed-race subjectivity are interpreted as sign of, or explanation for, suspect or insufficient political loyalty. George W. Bush performed the ritual in 2000, successfully smearing John McCain in the South Carolina Republican primary with a whisper campaign that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock. Most recently, in a widely read and discussed New York Times opinion piece published just a few months after the West interview, Drew Westen, psychologist and self-described “scientist and strategic consultant,” explained Obama’s perceived political betrayal as a consequence of his insufficiently integrated identity. In Obama, Westen writes, we have “a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his reelection. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in Dreams from My Father appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there—the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in” (emphasis added).

    These statements rely on familiar stereotypes of mixed race people—psychologically conflicted, confused, race traitors—for their impact, and evidence no more than a cursory knowledge of the details of Obama’s family life. Not that more detail about those relationships matters much to those making these kinds of political speculations. Ideologies, as Barbara Fields reminds us in the New Left Review, “are real, but it does not follow that they [need to be] scientifically accurate” in order to do their work. They work because they reflect the daily rituals that people engage in to make them seem plausible—rituals like the ones West and Westen are performing—that assert, while claiming to merely describe, the political impact of mixed-race subjectivity.

    Janny Scott’s biography emerges in this moment in which the political utility of interracialism reveals itself yet again. If statements about the significance of Obama’s upbringing in his political decision-making proceed largely on the basis of supposition and innuendo,A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, published by Riverhead Press, provides some much needed context. Scott did not get to comment on this most recent controversy since the volume went to press before it occurred. Yet, her book can be read as a long (nearly 400-page) retort to those who would so blithely use interracial kinship and mixed-race subjectivity in this way…

    Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

  • 2012 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

    2012 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

    DePaul University
    Student Center
    2250 North Shefield Avenue
    Chicago, Illinois
    2012-11-01 through 2012-11-04

    “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?,” the biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University in Chicago on November 1-4, 2012.

    The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have fostered different approaches to the field, the 2012 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”
     
    Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

    For more information, click here. View the final schedule here.

    I will deliver my paper, “Barack, Blackness, Borders and Beyond: Exploring Obama’s Racial Identity Today as a Means of Transcending Race Tomorrow,” during the Session Three panel titled, “Assessing Mixed—Race Iconography: Barack Obama and Tiger Woods” from 14:15-15:45 CDT (Local Time) in Room 313.  The abstract of my paper is below:

    The racial identity of President Barack Obama has been the topic of considerable discussion and debate. Despite the fact that Obama has always identified unambiguously as black—most significantly in March, 2010 after filling out his census form—commentary continues to the point of unilaterally referring to him as “biracial” within some camps.
     
    Using three separate frameworks, I explain why Obama is indeed black.  Firstly, I show that Obama is black within the framework of self-identification as crafted by the multiracial identity movement. Secondly, I show via an ethnological framework that Obama’s heterogeneous ancestry reinforces rather than weakens his cultural connection with black Americans.  Lastly, and most importantly, I show within a sociological framework, that Obama is black because we perceive him as such.

    Furthermore, I show how the multiracial movement reifies rather than blurs racialized boundaries; and that Obama’s blackness creates one of the greatest challenges to this movement.  Rather than concluding with a seemingly triumphalist Afro-centric focus, I will instead explain how Obama’s “blackness” from “white/black” parentage can be used to exemplify the social construction of race and can provide us a means to create meaningful discourses that may lead us beyond the illogical nature of racialization.