Mixed Race Studies

Mr. Spock, Mixed-Race Pioneer

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-03-01

Steve Haruch

At a time when the mere sight of Petula Clark touching Harry Belafonte’s arm held the potential to upset delicate sensibilities, the half-human, half-Vulcan character Mr. Spock embodied an identity rarely acknowledged, much less seen, on television: a mixed-race person.

Sure, the mixing of races was allegorical in Spock’s case, as was the brilliantly subversive mode for social commentary on Star Trek. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t resonate.

In 1968 — the year Clark made contact with Belafonte, and the same year the Star Trek episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” caused much consternation for network executives who feared backlash against the interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura — a young girl wrote a letter to Spock, care of FaVE magazine. In the letter, she makes the connection between Spock’s fictional identity and her own very real situation:

“I know that you are half Vulcan and half human and you have suffered because of this. My mother is Negro and my father is white and I am told this makes me a half-breed. In some ways I am persecuted even more than the Negro. The Negroes don’t like me because I don’t look like them. The white kids don’t like me because I don’t exactly look like one of them either.”

Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, wrote a long and thoughtful response that reads, in part:

“Spock learned he could save himself from letting prejudice get him down. He could do this by really understanding himself and knowing his own value as a person. He found he was equal to anyone who might try to put him down — equal in his own unique way.

You can do this too, if you realize the difference between popularity and true greatness.”

Spock certainly knew what “true greatness” was all about. You didn’t have to be mixed-race to feel this kind of connection to Spock, though…

Read the entire article here.

In Korea, Adoptees Fight To Change Culture That Sent Them Overseas

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2014-09-09

Steve Haruch

In the Gwanak-gu neighborhood of Seoul, there is a box.

Attached to the side of a building, the box resembles a book drop at a public library, only larger, and when nights are cold, the interior is heated. The Korean lettering on its front represents a phoneticized rendering of the English words “baby box.” It was installed by Pastor Lee Jon-rak to accept abandoned infants. When its door opens, an alarm sounds, alerting staff to the presence of a new orphan.

The box, and the anonymity it provides, has become a central symbol in a pitched debate over Korean adoption policy. Two years ago last month, South Korea’s Special Adoption Law was amended to add accountability and oversight to the adoption process. The new law requires mothers to wait seven days before relinquishing a child, to get approval from a family court, and to register the birth with the government. The SAL also officially enshrines a new attitude toward adoption: “The Government shall endeavor to reduce the number of Korean children adopted abroad,” the law states, “as part of its duties and responsibilities to protect children.”

In the years after the Korean War, more than 160,000 Korean children — the population of a midsize American city — were sent to adoptive homes in the West. What began as a way to quietly remove mixed-race children who had been fathered by American servicemen soon gained momentum as children crowded the country’s orphanages amid grinding postwar poverty. Between 1980 and 1989 alone, more than 65,000 Korean children were sent overseas.

For the first time in South Korean history, the country’s adoption law has been rewritten by some of the very people who have lived its consequences. A law alone can’t undo deeply held cultural beliefs, and even among adoptees, opinion is divided over how well the SAL’s effects match its aims. The question of how to reckon with this fraught legacy remains unsettled and raw…

Read the entire article here.